Opinion
What
the Rich Won’t Tell You
“There’s nobody who knows how much we spend. You’re
the only person I ever said those numbers to out loud.”
By Rachel Sherman
Sept. 8, 2017
Over
lunch in a downtown restaurant, Beatrice, a New Yorker in her late 30s, told me
about two decisions she and her husband were considering. They were thinking
about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private
school. Then she made a confession: She took the price tags off her clothes so
that her nanny would not see them. “I take the label off our six-dollar bread,”
she said.
She
did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the inequality
between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a household income
of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars. Relative to the
nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is
obscene.”
An
interior designer I spoke with told me his wealthy clients also hid prices,
saying that expensive furniture and other items arrive at their houses “with
big price tags on them” that “have to be removed, or Sharpied over,
so the housekeepers and staff don’t see them.”
Sharpie: a type of permanent markers.
These
people agreed to meet with me as part of research I conducted on affluent and
wealthy people’s consumption. I interviewed 50 parents with children at home,
including 18 stay-at-home mothers. Highly educated, they worked or had worked
in finance and related industries, or had inherited assets in the millions of
dollars. Nearly all were in the top 1 percent or 2 percent in terms of income
or wealth or both. They came from a variety of economic backgrounds, and about
80 percent were white. Reflecting their concern with anonymity and my research
protocol, I am using pseudonyms throughout this article.
We
often imagine that the wealthy are unconflicted about their advantages and in
fact eager to display them. Since Thorstein Veblen
coined the term “conspicuous consumption” more than a century ago, the rich
have typically been represented as competing for status by showing off their
wealth. Our current president is the conspicuous consumer in chief, the epitome
of the rich person who displays his wealth in the glitziest
way possible.
Eager: excited
Glitziest: extravagant
Yet
we believe that wealthy people seek visibility
because those we see are, by definition, visible. In contrast, the people I
spoke with expressed a deep ambivalence about identifying as affluent. Rather than brag about their
money or show it off, they kept quiet about their advantages. They described
themselves as “normal” people who worked hard and spent prudently, distancing
themselves from common stereotypes of the wealthy as ostentatious, selfish,
snobby and entitled. Ultimately, their accounts illuminate a moral stigma of
privilege.
Seek: search for
Affluent: rich people
Brag: boast, if you brag, you say in
a very proud way that you have something or have done something.
The
ways these wealthy New Yorkers identify and avoid stigma matter not because we
should feel sorry for uncomfortable rich people, but because they tell us
something about how economic inequality is hidden, justified and maintained in
American life.
Keeping
silent about social class, a norm that goes far beyond the affluent, can make
Americans feel that class doesn’t, or shouldn’t, matter. And judging wealthy
people on the basis of their individual behaviors — do they work hard enough,
do they consume reasonably enough, do they give back enough — distracts us from
other kinds of questions about the morality of vastly unequal distributions of
wealth.
To
hide the price tags is not to hide the privilege; the nanny is no doubt aware
of the class gap whether or not she knows the price of her employer’s bread.
Instead, such moves help wealthy people manage their discomfort with
inequality, which in turn makes that inequality impossible to talk honestly
about — or to change.
The
stigma of wealth showed up in my interviews first in literal silences about
money. When I asked one very wealthy stay-at-home mother what her family’s
assets were, she was taken aback. “No one’s ever asked me that, honestly,” she
said. “No one asks that question. It’s up there with, like, ‘Do you
masturbate?’ ”
Another
woman, speaking of her wealth of over $50 million, which she and her husband
generated through work in finance, and her home value of over $10 million, told
me: “There’s nobody who knows how much we spend. You’re the only person I ever said those numbers to out loud.” She was
so uncomfortable with having shared this information that she contacted me
later the same day to confirm exactly how I was going to maintain her
anonymity. Several women I talked with mentioned that they would not tell their
husbands that they had spoken to me at all, saying, “He would kill me,” or
“He’s more private.”
Say to out loud: to say in loud voice
These
conflicts often extended to a deep discomfort with displaying wealth. Scott,
who had inherited wealth of more than $50 million, told me he and his wife were
ambivalent about the Manhattan apartment they had recently bought for over $4
million. Asked why, he responded: “Do we want to live in such a fancy place? Do
we want to deal with the person coming in and being like, ‘Wow!’ That wears on
you. We’re just not the type of people who wear it on our sleeve. We don’t want
that ‘Wow.’ ” His wife, whom I interviewed separately, was so uneasy with the
fact that they lived in a penthouse that she had asked the post office to
change their mailing address so that it would include the floor number instead
of “PH,” a term she found “elite and snobby.”
Wear on the
sleeve: if you wear
your heart on your sleeve, you openly show your feelings or emotions rather
than keeping them hidden.
My
interviewees never talked about themselves as “rich” or “upper class,” often
preferring terms like “comfortable” or “fortunate.” Some even identified as
“middle class” or “in the middle,” typically comparing themselves with the
super-wealthy, who are especially prominent in New York City, rather than to
those with less.
When
I used the word “affluent” in an email to a stay-at-home mom with a $2.5
million household income, a house in the Hamptons and a child in private
school, she almost canceled the interview, she told me later. Real affluence,
she said, belonged to her friends who traveled on a private plane.
Others
said that affluence meant never having to worry about money, which many of
them, especially those in single-earner families dependent on work in finance,
said they did, because earnings fluctuate and jobs are impermanent.
American
culture has long been marked by questions about the moral caliber
of wealthy people. Capitalist entrepreneurs are often celebrated, but they are
also represented as greedy and ruthless. Inheritors of fortunes, especially women, are
portrayed as glamorous, but also as self-indulgent.
Caliber: degree of worth or value of a
person or thing; quality or ability
Greedy: materialistic
Ruthless: brutal, cruel
The
negative side of this portrayal may be more
prominent in times of high inequality (think of the robber barons of the Gilded Age or the Gordon
Gekko figures of the 1980s). In recent years, the Great Recession and
Occupy Wall Street, which were in the background when I conducted these
interviews, brought extreme income inequality onto the national stage again.
The top 10 percent of earners now garner over 50
percent of income nationally, and the top 1 percent over 20 percent.
Portrayal: description
Gilded Age: a period of U.S. history in the
1870s noted for political corruption, financial speculation, and the opulent
lives of wealthy industrialists and financiers, from the novel The Gilded Age
(1873) by Twain & C. D. Warne
Gordon Gekko: Gordon Gekko is a fictional
character in the 1987 film Wall Street, Gekko was portrayed by actor Michael
Douglas, whose performance in the first film won him an Oscar for Best Actor.
Garner: gather, collect
It
is not surprising, then, that the people I talked with wanted to distance
themselves from the increasingly vilified category of the 1 percent. But their unease with acknowledging their privilege also grows out of
a decades-long shift in the composition of the wealthy. During most of the 20th
century, the upper class was a homogeneous community. Nearly all white and
Protestant, the top families belonged to the same exclusive clubs, were listed
in the Social Register, educated their children at the same elite institutions.
Unease: discomfort, nervousness
This
class has diversified, thanks largely to the opening of elite education to
people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds starting after World War
II, and to the more recent rise of astronomical compensation in finance. At the
same time, the rise of finance and related fields means that many of the
wealthiest are the “working rich,” not the “leisure class” Veblen described.
The quasi-aristocracy of the WASP upper class has been replaced by a
“meritocracy” of a more varied elite. Wealthy people must appear to be worthy
of their privilege for that privilege to be seen as legitimate.
Being
worthy means working hard, as we might expect. But being worthy also means
spending money wisely. In both these ways, my interviewees strove to be
“normal.”
Talia
was a stay-at-home mom whose husband worked in finance and earned about
$500,000 per year. They were combining two apartments in a renovation, and they
rented a country home. “We have a pretty normal existence,” she told me. When I
asked what that meant, she responded: “I don’t know. Like, dinners at home with
the family. The kids eat, we give them their bath, we read stories.” It wasn’t
as if she was dining out at four-star restaurants every night, she said. “We
walk to school every morning. And, you know, it’s fun. It’s a real neighborhood
existence.”
Scott
and his wife had spent $600,000 in the year before our conversation. “We just
can’t understand how we spent that much money,” he told me. “That’s kind of a
little spousal joke. You know, like: ‘Hey. Do you feel like this is the
$600,000 lifestyle? Whooo!’ ” Rather than living the high life that he imagined
would carry such a price tag, he described himself as “frenetic,” asserting,
“I’m running around, I’m making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” Having
money does not mean, in his view, that he is not ordinary.
The
people I talked with never bragged about the price of something because it was
high; instead, they enthusiastically recounted snagging
bargains on baby strollers, buying clothes at Target and driving old cars. They critiqued other wealthy
people’s expenditures, especially ostentatious ones such as giant McMansions or pricey resort vacations where workers, in one
man’s sarcastic words, “massage your toes.”
Snagging: catching, hooking
Bargains: good deals
Target: on line shop
McMansion: In suburban communities,
McMansion is a pejorative term for a large "mass-produced" dwelling,
constructed with low-quality materials and craftsmanship, using a mishmash of
architectural symbols to invoke connotations of wealth or taste, executed via
poorly thought-out exterior and interior design
They
worried about how to raise children who would themselves be “good people”
rather than entitled brats. The context of
New York City, especially its private schools, heightened
their fear that their kids would never encounter the “real world,” or have
“fluency outside the bubble,” in the words of one inheritor. Another woman told
me about a child she knew of whose father had taken the family on a $10,000
vacation; afterward the child had said, “It was great, but next time we fly private like everyone
else.”
Brats: little monsters
Heightened: sensitive
To
be sure, these are New Yorkers with elite educations, and most are socially
liberal. Wealthy people in other places or with other histories may feel more
comfortable talking about their money and spending it in more obvious ways. And
even the people I spoke with may be less reticent among their wealthy peers
than they are in a formal interview.
Nonetheless,
their ambivalence about recognizing privilege suggests a deep tension at the
heart of the idea of American dream. While pursuing wealth is unequivocally
desirable, having wealth is not simple and straightforward. Our
ideas about egalitarianism make even the beneficiaries of inequality
uncomfortable with it. And it is hard to know what they, as individuals, can do
to change things.
Straightforward:
easy
In
response to these tensions, silence allows for a kind of “see no evil, hear
no evil” stance. By not mentioning money, my interviewees follow a
seemingly neutral social norm that frowns on such talk.
But this norm is one of the ways in which privileged people can obscure both
their advantages and their conflicts about these advantages.
See no evil,
hear no evil: See No Evil,
Hear No Evil is a 1989 American comedy film. The film stars Richard Pryor as a
blind man and Gene Wilder as a deaf man who work together to thwart a trio of
murderous thieves.
Frown: When someone frowns, their
eyebrows become drawn together, because they are annoyed, worried, or puzzled,
or because they are concentrating.
And,
as they try to be “normal,” these wealthy and affluent people deflect the
stigma of wealth. If they can see themselves as hard workers and reasonable
consumers, they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American
“middle,” while remaining materially at the top.
These
efforts respond to widespread judgments
of the individual behaviors of wealthy people as morally meritorious or not.
Yet what’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any
possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral
worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea
that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such
judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is
acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.
Widespread: common, well-known
Calls
from liberal and left social critics for advantaged people to recognize their
privilege also underscore this emphasis on individual identities. For
individual people to admit that they are privileged is not necessarily going to
change an unequal system of accumulation and distribution of resources.
Instead,
we should talk not about the moral worth of individuals but about the moral
worth of particular social arrangements. Is the society we want one in which it
is acceptable for some people to have tens of millions or billions of dollars
as long as they are hardworking, generous, not materialistic and down to earth?
Or should there be some other moral rubric, that would strive for a society in which such high levels of inequality
were morally unacceptable, regardless of how nice or moderate its beneficiaries
are?
Rubric: A rubric is a set of rules or
instructions, for example the rules at the beginning of an examination paper
Strive: struggle, fight
Rachel Sherman is an associate professor of sociology
at the New School and the author of “Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of
Affluence,” from which this essay is adapted.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept.
10, 2017, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rich People’s
Secrets.
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