CLASS INEQUALITIES AND IMAGINARIES
IN THE UNITED STATES
In the United States, social class is a “touchy subject,”2 which is “vast, amorphous, politically charged, [and] largely unacknowledged.”3 Free of the aristocratic and monarchical histories and social distinctions of Europe, the United States imagines itself as egalitarian.4 The “American Dream” narrative tells us that anyone can “make it” with hard work and intelligence.5 This commitment to equality of opportunity has long gone hand in hand with a taboo on explicit conversations about class and money, both among individuals and in public discourse. For centuries Americans have avoided terms such as master and servant, which explicitly recognize economic and status differences, in favor of euphemisms such as help.6 Politicians rarely use the language of social class—though it has cropped up more in recent years, as I discuss later.
We do talk often about one class, of course: the “middle class.” But, as Benjamin DeMott has shown, the “imperial middle”—the idea of the middle as all-inclusive—has actually fostered the idea of classlessness, because it portrays nearly all Americans as in the same boat.7 In the period following World War II, this image was increasingly (though not entirely) accurate as the middle class grew both in real numbers and in symbolic power. Economic expansion, state policy established during and after the New Deal, and labor union strength allowed incomes and home ownership to rise enormously, especially for white people, and permitted many more people to attend college. Radical movements were decimated by anticommunist ideology and legislation during the Cold War, and poverty largely became invisible, allowing for the ascendance of the “middle class” as the central category of political discourse. Pundits believed that the future would simply entail managing affluence.
Yet this state of affairs was not to last. Beginning in the 1960s and gaining steam in the 1970s, international competition, outsourcing and deindustrialization, employer attacks on unions, and political realignments spelled the end of the broad prosperity of the postwar period. Single incomes no longer sufficed to support families. Since the Reagan era of the 1980s, these trends, plus neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, technological innovation, and the continued decline of both manufacturing jobs and union strength, have given rise to an economy based primarily on knowledge and services. Employers are less committed to workers than they were in the past, and vice versa. Concomitant with these economic changes, the welfare state has lost power and the social safety net has weakened. Tax policy has increasingly favored the wealthy. Most recently, the “gig” economy, based on short-term or freelance work, has emerged. Although some analysts laud such arrangements for their flexibility, these shifts have generated greater economic and occupational insecurity for many people.8
One of the most significant consequences of these transformations has been a dramatic increase in economic inequality in the United States since the 1970s, giving rise to what some have called “The New Gilded Age.”9 The benefits of economic growth have gone to the richest Americans—the top .01 percent, or the top 1 percent of the 1 percent—as CEO compensation and financial returns have skyrocketed.10 Americans without college degrees have seen their incomes stagnate since the 1970s. The level of upward mobility is lower than most people believe, and inequality is higher.11 Although the precise effects of rising inequality are debated, they may include increasing consumer debt, educational disparities, unequal health outcomes, and family problems, and in general high levels of inequality are thought to be socially detrimental.12
As the level of inequality has grown, the middle class has shrunk. The decline holds whether we define the middle class—a notoriously fuzzy concept—according to position in the income distribution, type of job, or lifestyle. The share of adults living in middle-income households in metropolitan areas is decreasing as more people are living in higher-income or lower-income households.13 The number of middle-wage jobs, such as those of bus drivers and retail clerks, has stagnated relative to others as job growth has occurred mostly at the top and the bottom of the wage scale.14 And even people in traditionally middle-class occupations (including teaching, social work, office work, and government employment) can no longer afford the traditional trappings of a middle-class lifestyle, such as owning a house and a car and paying for kids to go to college.15
Thus the middle class has become a kind of ghost category, existing more in the popular imagination than in reality. The symbolic power of the middle class persists, however, even as the referent disintegrates; this image remains ideologically critical in American cultural and political life.16 Politicians still eternally refer to the “middle class” as the backbone of America, consisting of deserving, hard-working, family-oriented Americans. The morally worthy middle class is also symbolically attached to the “Protestant ethic,” the idea that hard work and prudent consumption form the moral bedrock of American society.17 The use of the term working families to connote this same moral worth (and the implied counterpart of nonworking families) is an even clearer allusion to the importance of “hard work” in achieving the American Dream.
Although we rarely talk openly about class as a social category, popular culture and politics are both rife with images of wealthy and poor people. In contrast to the worthy middle, both the rich and the poor are often represented as lacking the basic values of hard work and prudence. Poor people have often been portrayed as lazy spendthrifts, typically in racially coded images such as that of the “welfare queen” of the 1980s, and therefore as “undeserving.”18 Wealthy people have likewise been cast as both lazy and profligate, at least since 1899, when critical economist Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, the book that introduced the concept of “conspicuous consumption.” In Veblen’s theory, highly visible consumption primarily functions as a mechanism of status competition among men. Veblen also paints the wealthy as uninterested in work—indeed, one of the functions of conspicuous consumption (and the complementary concept of “conspicuous leisure”) is to demonstrate publicly the wealthy man’s distance from productive labor.19
The theme of wealthy people as conspicuous consumers remains a mainstay of American culture, especially in moments of greater inequality. Such consumption marks the wealthy as both exotic objects of fascination and aspiration and as morally suspect in their materialism. Perhaps the most canonical American novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, portrays the American Dream gone awry in the character of arriviste Gatsby and the hedonistic, morally empty moment of the Roaring Twenties. In the 1980s, as the level of inequality rose again, Robin Leach took television viewers into the “lifestyles of the rich and famous.” Now “reality” TV has made a cottage industry of representing wealthy lifestyles, spotlighting everyone from the Kardashians to the “real” housewives to the buyers and sellers of million-dollar real estate. Tabloid magazines trumpet the details of celebrities’ astronomically expensive destination weddings and vacations, complete with full-page photo spreads. The mainstream media also portray wealthy people in this way. In 2016, for example, both the New York Times and the New Yorker ran feature articles on the community of wealthy Chinese young people in Vancouver who, to judge from this reporting, are prone to drive Lamborghinis and buy gold-plated Apple watches for their dogs.20
The wealthy are often represented not only as status-seeking and lazy but also as morally deficient in terms of personality and behavior. They are snobby, greedy, rude, braggy, and self-absorbed. Social psychological research based on experiments and widely reported in the press indicates that rich people are more unethical, more narcissistic, less generous, more isolated, and generally less “pro-social” than other people.21 The word entitled is the catch-all critical term for this kind of selfhood. It is nearly always used as a dirty word, describing people with an illegitimate belief that they should get whatever they want because of who they are and/or that they can treat other people badly because they have money.22
Finally, representation
s of both lifestyle choices and personalities cast the rich and famous as completely other, echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that “the rich are different from you and me.” By the same token, rich people are often represented as exotic, as if they live in another country or on another planet from “regular” people. Even relatively serious nonfiction books such as Richistan and Plutocrats reinforce this idea, even in their titles.23
Positive images of wealthy people do exist—especially of male entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs. Yet these positive representations make the same point as negative ones: they reiterate the moral importance of hard work and the moral transgressiveness of elitism and excessive consumption (which has become, a century after Veblen, increasingly associated with wealthy women). Represented as hard workers who used their smarts to get ahead, good rich people are also often seen as minimalist consumers. Buffett, despite his billions, has famously lived since the 1950s in the same modest house in Omaha. Silicon Valley billionaires are known for their understated self-presentation (think of Jobs’s black mock turtleneck or Mark Zuckerberg’s gray sweatshirt).24 Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, and others are also lauded for their significant philanthropic enterprises across the country and the globe. Possessing a down-to-earth affect is another plus; in 2004 George W. Bush, despite his own extraordinary wealth and exclusive upbringing, managed to paint his opponent for the presidency, John Kerry, as an elite snob, while representing himself as the guy voters could imagine themselves having a beer with.
So being wealthy is not always good. Even words such as well-off, wealthy, rich, affluent, privileged, and upper-class have negative connotations and are rarely used by wealthy people to describe themselves. More frequently, we hear euphemisms such as “comfortable,” “fortunate,” and the hefty but neutral-sounding phrase “high net worth individual” (abbreviated HNWI).25 In 2014 former first lady and secretary of state Hillary Clinton caused a minor scandal when she claimed that she and her husband were “dead broke” when they left the White House. She also contrasted herself with the “truly well-off,” who, she said, don’t pay “ordinary income taxes” and have not become wealthy “through dint of hard work.” These verbal missteps reveal a deep discomfort with the idea of being wealthy in America. Clinton’s comments, contrary to what we might assume, actually indicate that she would rather be perceived as “dead broke” than “truly well-off.” And to be truly well-off, in her formulation, is to be a nonworking tax evader. Thus “real” rich people are morally compromised. Because Clinton pays taxes and works hard—despite her income of well over $100 million over the previous several years—she is not “really” rich. Whether one is wealthy in this connotative way is defined by how much moral integrity one has—not how much money.
In the past ten years, rich people have faced another symbolic challenge as economic inequality has emerged as a dominant issue on the national stage.26 The 2008 housing market collapse and the subsequent “Great Recession” brought economic struggles front and center. In 2011 the Occupy movement’s critique of “the 1 percent” dominated even the mainstream media. In 2014 French economist Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book on inequality became a bestseller in the United States. Strikes by fast-food workers and prominent debates about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour also put the spotlight on low-wage workers in this period. The 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, despite their differences, kept outrage about economic disparities in the public eye. The language of class, especially the “working class,” appeared in political discourse often in the period both before and after Trump’s election. Public opinion critical of inequality has increased since 2000 as perceptions of the possibility of upward mobility have grown gloomier.27
INVESTIGATING AFFLUENCE
Given these contradictory ideas about wealthy people, how do the beneficiaries of growing inequality feel about and manage their privilege? Although images of the wealthy proliferate in the media, we know very little about what it is like to be wealthy in the current historical moment. Contemporary scholarly accounts of elite experience are in short supply, due largely to the difficulty of gaining access to wealthy people. The few studies of elite consumption that do exist focus on its explicitly or implicitly competitive dimensions, whether they embody Veblenian conspicuous consumption or other forms of social distinction.28 Other research on elite lifestyles looks at how privileged people maintain and reproduce their privilege through social closure in elite clubs and elsewhere.29 Researchers are skeptical of allusions to hard work, interpreting them mainly as shallow justifications.30 Although scholars in recent years have stressed the importance of morality in the study of social class, they have theorized moral values primarily as another basis for exclusion.31
Research on class that foregrounds the lived experience of participants themselves, what Diane Reay has called “the psychic landscape of social class,” has focused mainly on poor or working-class people or on the middle class.32 Comparative studies of aspects of daily life such as parenting tend not to look at classes higher than the broad “middle” or occasionally the “professional middle.”33 Perhaps the only study analogous to mine is Susan Ostrander’s 1984 book Women of the Upper Class. Ostrander interviewed thirty-six women in an unnamed city who met one or more of the classic criteria of upper-class membership: being listed in the Social Register,34 belonging to exclusive clubs, or having attended elite prep schools. She talked with them about their lives as wives, mothers, and volunteers and argued that despite their gender subordination, these women played a key role in the reproduction of an upper-class lifestyle and community.35
However, the composition of U.S. elites has changed significantly since Ostrander conducted her research nearly four decades ago. In that period, as in most of the twentieth century, the upper class was exclusive and homogenous, dominated by old-money families such as the Rockefellers and Astors, the WASP elite chronicled (and so named) by sociologist E. Digby Baltzell.36 Elite college and professional education were typically closed to all but white men; wealthy women rarely worked for pay. Social status was largely inherited, and the old elite looked down on newcomers. In the past few decades, in contrast, elites in the United States have become more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and class of origin.37 The Social Register has fallen into obscurity. The postwar opening of higher education, especially in elite institutions, to people besides elite WASP men was a major catalyst for this shift.38 Globalization has also both helped create a more diverse upper class and generated a need for upper-class people to be able to navigate diverse cultures.39 Importantly, not only the composition but the outlook of elites in the United States has changed, from a view that accepted inherited status as legitimate to one that stresses meritocratic achievement through hard work and cultural openness to a diverse world.40
Given the rise of this belief in meritocracy as well as increased and increasingly visible economic inequality in the context of contradictory discourses about wealth, I wanted to know how elite people would talk about questions of privilege and lifestyle. I wasn’t seeking their opinions or attitudes about social class or inequality, like those we might find on a survey, but rather investigating what it felt like to be wealthy in this historical moment. As noted earlier, I thought looking at consumer decisions would be one avenue into this experience.
New York is an ideal place to explore these issues. It is a “global city” in which finance and related industries are concentrated. Indeed, astronomical compensation in these industries, the low-wage service jobs they generate,41 and city development strategies favoring the rich have made New York the most unequal large city in the United States,42 creating a situation Mayor Bill De Blasio has labeled an “inequality crisis.”43 In 2014 the gap between the poorest and the wealthiest in Manhattan was the largest in the country, as the average earnings of the top 5 percent were more than eighty-eight times those of the bottom 20 percent.44 New York’
s levels of residential segregation by income as well as race are also among the highest in the nation.45 As more wealthy professionals have stayed in the city rather than move to the suburbs, real estate prices have shot up. Many neighborhoods, especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn, have gentrified rapidly, pushing nonwealthy people farther into the outer boroughs. Issues of wealth and inequality are also extremely visible in the city. It is where the Occupy movement first appeared in the United States in 2011. Activists took over Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the financial district, thrusting these issues into the public spotlight. Finally, Manhattan is the backdrop for many of the most dominant images of the morally suspect wealthy, from the “Primates of Park Avenue”46 to the “wolves of Wall Street.”47
But who counts as “elite”?48 As I discuss further in the appendix, defining elites is complicated. It is tempting to think of wealthy people as only the ones we see talked about in the media. But these representations tend to feature the super-wealthy, those in the top .1 percent or above. We might, instead, choose the top 1 percent, a definition often used in scholarly analysis and popularized by Occupy. The political focus on this category, through the slogan “We are the 99%,” brought attention to inequality in a powerful way. But it also homogenized the 99 percent rather than acknowledging differences between, say, the top 2 percent and the bottom 50 percent.49 Noting some of these issues, Lauren Rivera has advocated defining elites as the top 20 percent because of this group’s educational advantages.50
I chose to start my study by seeking participants with annual household incomes of $250,000, which is in the top 5 percent in New York City.51 I also decided to look for people in their thirties and forties who had children, as I believed that such people would be especially likely to be making important lifestyle decisions such as buying homes and choosing schools. I wanted to talk with both inheritors and earners of wealth. And I wanted to make sure to include people of color as well as gays and lesbians to investigate their underrepresented perspectives on these questions. In general, I was seeking a range of perspectives rather than a representative sample, as I discuss in the appendix. I found participants primarily through my own social networks, using snowball sampling; I located a few through nonprofit organizations oriented toward progressives with wealth.52 After interviewing ten or fifteen participants recruited on the basis of different lifestyle decisions, I narrowed the focus to those engaged in home renovation, which combined aesthetic, familial, and financial elements and seemed like a clear place to start.
Uneasy Street Page 2