Face it, Kim Kardashian makes boatloads of money for arguing with her siblings on television while all you get is a nagging phone call from your mother. Infuriating, isn’t it?

Whether it’s whining on-air or hawking a fragrance, being a celebrity is an industry all its own. In “Celebrity, Inc.” Jo Piazza demystifies how celebrities make their cash. A former gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, Piazza has unprecedented access to Hollywood, which she uses to breeze by the velvet rope and bring readers the truth about the business behind celebrity.

You say there’s a connection between Bush-era economics and the rise of Kim Kardashian. Consider us stumped.

[Kim] Kardashian rose to fame amid the worst recession America had experienced in seventy years, and her tremendous success as a substitute good is in many ways a product of that recession mentality. [Paris] Hilton represented all the excess of Bush-era wealth and conspicuous consumption, whereas Kardashian, despite her upper-class income, displayed a work ethic worthy of the middle class. Ask any one of the Kardashians about their success and they will pepper their answer with work, work, work.

“There was just a desire to work hard and do good work; the goal was to produce things,” Kris [Jenner] told me. “When we realized there was an audience and people were excited about watching the show, it made me so happy to know that what we were working hard at was paying off.”

Independent of her mother, Kim added to me later, “You know it’s just a lot of work that goes into this whole thing that might not be so visible to the public eye. I think hard work pays off, and I think having a strong work ethic. No matter what, we have to stay focused.”

What’s the most ridiculous thing a celebrity has been paid for?

I think [Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Enrique Iglesias, Lionel Richie, Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Timbaland and Usher allegedly] performing for the Libyan regime for [millions] is the most ridiculous thing a celebrity could be paid to do. My personal favorite that I talk about in the book is Snooki being paid $32k to speak for a half hour at Rutgers which trumped the pay day for Maya Angelou.

Pop culture is more of an obsession than ever, is it our fault we’re all so interested in celebrity or are we just victims to marketing?

I can’t come away from writing this book without being a little grossed out (OK—a lot grossed out) by celebrities egregious salaries, but at the same time it really is a triumph of capitalism. The American public demanded more and more celebrity news and it created more celebrities out of dark matter and nothingness (and peroxide). Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton exist because the news hole for celebrity content gaped wide during the mid 2000s and as the consumer demanded it, the media supplied and brands have been smart to insert themselves into the system to piggy back off these people’s distribution systems.

So why do we love reality television so much?

Television has always been about escapism but I think reality television is more than that. Reality television and its stars are about building America’s collective self esteem. It’s schadenfreude. No matter how bad your life is you’ll never be as big an asshole as the kids on “Jersey Shore.’ We love them because we hate them.

So how can we tell between an actual moment and one that’s been made for TV?

I think it has become near impossible to distinguish what is real in a celebrity’s life and what they are getting paid for. In the past three years it has become so seamless, the product placements, the secret endorsements, the planting of their own photographs in weekly magazines that I think it is safe to assume a celebrity isn’t doing anything without getting paid for it.