Uneasy Street
Page 1
UNEASY STREET
RACHEL SHERMAN
UNEASY
STREET
THE ANXIETIES OF
AFFLUENCE
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2017 by Rachel Sherman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sherman, Rachel, 1970–author.
Title: Uneasy street : the anxieties of affluence / Rachel Sherman.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press,
[2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017010629 | ISBN 9780691165509 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Wealth—United States. | Rich people—United States. | Social
stratification—United States. | Social class—United States.
Classification: LCC HC110.W4 S54 2017 | DDC 305.5/2340973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010629
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Laura
The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he “deserves” it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others. … Good fortune thus wants to be “legitimate fortune.”
—MAX WEBER, “THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
OF THE WORLD RELIGIONS”
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xi
INTRODUCTION
1
1
ORIENTATIONS TO OTHERS
Aspiring to the Middle or Recognizing Privilege
28
2
WORKING HARD OR HARDLY WORKING?
Productivity and Moral Worth
58
3
“A VERY EXPENSIVE ORDINARY LIFE”
Conflicted Consumption
92
4
“GIVING BACK,” AWARENESS,
AND IDENTITY
122
5
LABOR, SPENDING, AND
ENTITLEMENT IN COUPLES
155
6
PARENTING PRIVILEGE
Constraint, Exposure, and Entitlement
197
CONCLUSION
230
METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX
Money Talks
239
NOTES
259
REFERENCES
279
INDEX
297
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I am enormously grateful to all the people I interviewed for this book. They shared with me not only their time but also their thoughts, experiences, and emotions, which are not always easy to talk about. Their generosity made this project possible. I also want to thank the friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who helped me find the interviewees. For reasons of confidentiality I prefer not to name them here, but they were essential to this research.
Generous institutional and individual support made this project possible. The New School offered research funds and research assistance. Eric Klinenberg and the staff of NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge offered me the physical and mental space to begin writing this book in 2013–14, and a faculty fellowship at the New School’s Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought (GIDEST) allowed me to continue writing the following year. Lisa Keister generously responded to an out-of-the-blue request for data. Anna Matthiesen and Jussara Raxlen carefully and insightfully coded many interviews. Guillermina Altomonte and Tania Aparicio reviewed much of the secondary research, and Guillermina combed through late drafts and proofs to identify both intellectual and grammatical inconsistencies.
As I discuss in the appendix, working on this project has been intellectually and emotionally challenging. I could not have completed it without the support of a wide range of friends and colleagues. My greatest debt on this front is to Laura Liu and Miriam Ticktin, who have been both devoted friends and central intellectual interlocutors throughout the entire project. They offered astute and often transformative comments on many, many versions of papers and chapters and provided equally indispensable moral support on more occasions than I can count. I am also deeply grateful to Karen Strassler, with whom I have been discussing the core issues of this project for more than half our lives. Her interventions throughout, especially her uniquely perceptive reading of a full draft of the book, have been essential. Juliet Schor, Teresa Sharpe, and one anonymous Princeton reviewer offered incisive and useful comments on the entire manuscript, for which I am thankful.
Many people have read parts of this work at various stages, and the book has been enormously improved by their contributions. Jeff Alexander, Angèle Christin, Cindi Katz, Annette Lareau, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici offered insightful feedback at crucial moments. I am also indebted for comments and ideas to Leslie Bell, David Brody, Sébastien Chauvin, Bruno Cousin, Priscilla Ferguson, Melissa Fisher, Teresa Gowan, Rachel Heiman, Shamus Khan, Leslie McCall, Ashley Mears, Tey Meadow, Julia Ott, Devah Pager, Hugh Raffles, Lisa Servon, Lissa Soep, Millie Thayer, Florencia Torche, and Caitlin Zaloom. Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis, and Stephanie Luce helped me hone my analysis in the early stages of writing. I am grateful to participants in the Craft of Ethnography workshop at Columbia, to members of the New School’s GIDEST seminar, and to students and colleagues at my department’s Brown Bag series, who read and commented on this work, as well as to the many audiences who have listened to me present on this project during the long course of its development. For their continued interest, encouragement, and help in a range of ways, I thank Michael Burawoy, Oliver Burkeman, Jeff Golick, David Herbstman, Dara Levendosky, Ruth Milkman, Debra Minkoff, Deirdre Mullane, Tim Murphy, Andy Perrin, Allison Pugh, Raka Ray, Juliet Schor, Steve Shohl, Sandy Silverman, Kim Voss, Paul VanDeCarr, and Viviana Zelizer. I also thank the Mentos, who always made me laugh, and my longtime crew of Neskowinners, who helped come up with the title.
I am fortunate to have worked with the whole team at Princeton University Press. Eric Schwartz was delightfully enthusiastic in the initial stages of the process. As I wrote the chapters, Meagan Levinson was an attentive and engaged editor, cheerfully reading multiple drafts with her eye on the prize of general accessibility. Marilyn Martin’s careful and perceptive copy editing much improved the book, and Blythe Woolston’s indexing made it searchable. Samantha Nader, Mark Bellis, and Al Bertrand kept everything going smoothly behind the scenes. Finally, I want to recognize everyone who worked on the fantastic jacket design and the publicity, as well as all those whose labor was invisible to me but contributed in essential ways to making this book.
I feel very lucky to have a family that finds the work I do worthwhile and interesting. My mother, Dorothy Louise, engaged enthusiastically with this project from the first interview to the last punctuation mark. Tom Sherman and Nancy Middlebrook, my father and ste
pmother, were always eager to talk about the work and offer ideas and comments. Doug Sherman and Jeanne Henry encouraged me many years ago to think about some of the issues I explore here, and I have been fortunate to continue talking with them during the course of this project. Margaret Hunt provided unconditional love and plenty of Peruvian chicken. Last but never least, Laura Amelio contributed in more ways than I can possibly name here. I dedicate this book to her.
UNEASY STREET
INTRODUCTION
Scott and Olivia, both 39, live with their three children in a large prewar apartment in Manhattan. They spend weekends and vacations at their second home in the Connecticut countryside. Their children attend a prestigious private school. They employ a part-time personal assistant as well as a nanny-housekeeper and occasionally a personal chef. On airplanes they usually travel in business class, though when the children were small the family often flew on private planes. Fueling this lifestyle is Scott’s inherited wealth, generated by a business his grandfather founded. After earning Ivy League BA and MBA degrees, Scott worked in finance for several years before deciding that the benefits of this employment did not compensate for the time he had to spend on it. He now focuses on a small technology business he started that supports nonprofits, as well as playing an active role on the board of his children’s school. Olivia is also Ivy League educated, although she comes from a working-class family. She has an MA in social work but works for pay only occasionally, spending most of her time taking care of the children and maintaining the household.
Scott told me he had been self-conscious about his wealth since he was a child. He recalled feeling sensitive to comments classmates and others would make about the size of his family’s house. He said, “I just felt like, ‘Yeah, this is kind of different. And, it’s something to hide.’” In college he became a leftist and obscured his background as much as possible, but classmates ultimately found out that he was a “secret rich guy” and taunted him about the family’s company, which was associated with abuses of workers’ rights. When I talked with Olivia, she described feeling uncomfortable having married into wealth. Although she felt that it was easy to spend money helping other people or creating a home for her children, she had trouble spending only on herself, particularly because it was money she hadn’t earned. Quite liberal politically, she and Scott were both especially aware of those who had less. They also worried about their children and how to instill in them the desire to work.
Scott and Olivia’s internal conflicts about their wealth cropped up especially in their feelings about their living space. When I interviewed Scott in 2009, he was overseeing renovation of an Upper West Side apartment worth $4.5 million, which they had bought primarily because they believed that each of their children should have his or her own room. But they felt conflicted about living there. When I asked why, Scott said, “Do we want to live in such a fancy place? Do we want to deal with the person coming in and being like, ‘Wow!’ You know, like, that wears on you. … We’re just not the type of people who wear it on our sleeve. We don’t want that ‘Wow.’”
When I talked with Olivia a few years later, the family was living in their new home. But the transition had not been easy for her. In fact, she had initially been so uncomfortable with the apartment that they had considered not moving into it. The previous owner had done a significant renovation, which she found unbearably ostentatious. The apartment was “dripping marble” and had other aesthetic features Olivia hated. She said, “I mean, we’re doing our best, with our clutter and junk, to, like, take the majesty and grandeur out of it. But, when I come [home], I feel like, ‘This isn’t me.’ You know. This doesn’t reflect who I feel like I am in the world, and who I want to be in the world.”
In the renovation Olivia had planned to change the aesthetic elements that bothered her. But expensive unexpected structural problems ate up the money they had allocated, and Scott had balked at shelling out another million or so. Olivia told me, “We could have spent it. He just didn’t—psychologically, he didn’t want to. And I didn’t either. But I also really didn’t want to live with it the way it was.” The conflict that ensued was, as Olivia described it, “traumatizing,” destabilizing their marriage, and it resulted in their not doing anything to their new home for over two years. Olivia said that the renovation conflict “was a fight about a lot of things. But at root, I think it was about money. And what is okay to spend or not spend.”
Their struggle was also partly about the visibility of their wealth, as their discomfort with the aesthetics of the apartment shows. As Scott noted, standing out had been a sore spot for him since his childhood. Olivia elaborated on this issue in talking about the opulence of her home vis-à-vis those of their peers and friends, whom she described as “normal.” She said, “I always feel a certain level of awkwardness about having people over. Especially people—I mean, we don’t hang out in society circles. In society circles, I don’t think our apartment would be that exciting. We hang out with more normal people. And so, even having kids’ friends over, there’s always this, like, inner hurdle that I have to get over.” She was still so uneasy with the fact that they lived in a penthouse that she had asked the post office to change their mailing address so it would include the floor number instead of PH, a term she found “elite and snobby.”1 Not surprisingly, neither invited me to their home; I talked with Scott in his office and with Olivia in mine.
But their discomfort was not just about how their consumption choices would look to others. It was also about how to set a limit on spending when there was, essentially, no objective ceiling, and what that limit meant about what kind of people they were. Scott said it had taken them nearly two years to buy an air conditioner when they first moved to New York. He said that kind of decision “typifies us.” He continued, “We have to feel like we’re doing it the hard way. I mean, the way we shop, the way we do our sort of like [family] stuff. And, you know, the way life works is, we do normal-Joe everyday stuff. We ride the trains. You know, for some reason it’s important to us to feel that way.” Olivia described creating these discomforts as “the mental trick I have to play, in a way, to be okay with having so much. And coming from so little.”
Yet Scott and Olivia seemed to be growing more comfortable with their lifestyle over time. Olivia told me their annual spending had reached $800,000, up from $600,000 a few years before. She had a new attitude about the apartment, saying, “If we’re going to live there, like, let’s really live there. Let’s really kind of embrace it, and not try to pretend like we don’t live there, in a funny sort of way, by not getting the door fixed. You know, we had a broken closet door for the whole time we lived in our old apartment. So there’s some, like, little mental game, again, about keeping it just a little bit uncomfortable. You know, we’re here, but we’re not really here, kind of thing. So that’s finally starting to wear off. I’m kind of getting really tired of doing that.” She was even planning to embark on another renovation.
Scott and Olivia are two of the fifty affluent and wealthy New York parents I interviewed for this book, who ranged from Wall Street financiers and corporate lawyers to professors and artists with inherited wealth. In talking with these people, I initially wanted to know how privileged New Yorkers made choices about consumption and lifestyle—that is, how people who had economic freedom decided what was worth spending money on. How did they make decisions about buying and renovating a home, placing children in school, hiring domestic workers, and using their leisure time? What counted as “real” needs versus “luxuries”? These questions mattered because they were related to a broader issue: how people who were benefitting from rising economic inequality experienced their own social advantages. Did they think of themselves as having more than others? If so, did this self-conception affect the life choices they made? What might these decisions and discourses have to do with their personal histories; their networks of friends, family, and colleagues; or their political views?
What
stood out from the beginning of these conversations was how much my interviewees, like Scott and Olivia, had struggled over these decisions. I first noticed conflicts about how much money it was acceptable to spend, and on what. Was it okay to spend a thousand dollars on a dress? Two thousand on a purse? Half a million on a home renovation? Sometimes these were questions about how much they could afford, given their resources. But more often they were about what kind of people they would be if they made these choices. When a stay-at-home mother paid for a lot of babysitting, for example, was she “a snob”? If she sent back a light fixture she thought was too big for the kitchen, was she a “princess”? Did a couple with tens of millions in assets have to live with a sofa they hated because it felt “wasteful” to change it? These questions were loaded with moral judgment and language; my interviewees criticized excess and self-indulgence while praising prudence and reasonable consumption.
I therefore shifted the focus of the interviews to explore these issues more fully and started hearing about other kinds of dilemmas related to money and identity. How could these affluent parents give their children high-quality (usually private) education and other advantages without spoiling them? How should they resolve disagreements about spending priorities with their partners? How could those who did not earn money be recognized for contributing to their households? How should they talk with others, including me, about these decisions? Interior designers, financial planners, and other service providers I interviewed confirmed that their clients often had trouble talking about money and were conflicted about spending it.
Ultimately, I realized that these were conflicts about how to be both wealthy and morally worthy, especially at a historical moment of extreme and increasingly salient economic inequality. This book is about how these affluent New York parents grapple with this question.