When you think of high-end luxury commodities, you might imagine yachts, private jets, or even whole islands. But in the last few years, another commodity has started to receive a lot of attention from the world’s wealthiest people: citizenship.

With enough money, people can buy their way into becoming a citizen of a growing list of countries around the world. While this trend has garnered lots of attention in the last few years, as our guest on this episode explains, there’s so much more to the story than meets the eye.

Kristin Surak is a sociologist and author of the new book “The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires.” In it, she pulls back the curtain on this rarified luxury market — who’s buying, who’s selling, and the complex web of middlemen that make it all work.

On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Surak about what might be called the “citizenship industrial complex”’ and what it says about our global economy.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy citizenship abroad