Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  I ultimately interviewed fifty parents in forty-two households (including both members of eight couples).53 Most families had two or three children, usually under 10 years old. Annual incomes across the group ranged from $250,000 to over $10 million; the range of assets was $80,000 to over $50 million. Most households (thirty-six, or 86 percent) had incomes of over $500,000 per year, assets of over $3 million, or both. About half earned over $1 million annually and/or had assets of over $8 million. The median household income of the sample was about $625,000, which is twelve times the New York City median of about $52,000.54 The estimated median net worth was $3.25 million compared to $77,000 in the United States as a whole in 2010 and $126,000 in 2007.55 About half had earned their primary assets; 25 percent had inherited the majority of their wealth (from $3 million to over $50 million); the remaining 25 percent both earned income of at least $400,000 per year and had inherited significant assets. Most were what Shamus Khan calls “new elite” in that they believe in diversity, openness, and meritocracy rather than status based on birth.56 Even most of the inheritors of wealth were not from old-money families, having gained their wealth in the previous generation or two.

  Those I interviewed lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or the nearby suburbs (all those in the suburbs had lived in the city before having children). About three-fourths were women. About 80 percent were white; the rest were South Asian, Asian American, African American, or mixed-race. About one-fifth identified as gay or lesbian. Fifteen interviewees had grown up at least partly in New York City or in the surrounding suburbs; the remainder hailed from all over the country except for a few who had been born outside the United States. All were college-educated, nearly exclusively in elite institutions. Two-thirds had earned advanced degrees, most often MBAs but also JDs, MAs in various fields, and PhDs.57 They worked or had worked in finance, corporate law, real estate, advertising, academia, nonprofits, the arts, and fashion. Eighteen had left their full-time jobs to take care of children.58

  These well-educated New Yorkers tended to share three characteristics. First, they had high levels of cultural capital. They were worldly and culturally curious. They enjoyed the arts and liked to travel; most said they valued experience more than material goods. Second, like most New Yorkers, they were politically liberal relative to their class.59 (My sampling strategy also likely generated especially liberal and progressive respondents.) Most identified as Democrats, although a few located themselves to the left of the Democratic Party. Yet several voted Republican or independent or were married to Republicans, and many were economically conservative even if they voted Democratic. Finally, most were not especially religious. Slightly over half the people I talked with had been raised Catholic or Protestant; about one-third had been raised Jewish; the remainder practiced some other religion or combined Jewish and Christian traditions. Only about ten families, however, were seriously observant or regularly attended religious services.

  In the course of this research I visited all kinds of homes: suburban houses, spacious urban apartments (often renovated to combine two or three original units), Manhattan townhouses, Brooklyn brownstones, and second homes in the Hamptons and Connecticut. Some were traditionally decorated, with antique furniture and spaces for formal entertaining; others were modern, marked by sleek lines and stark angles; still others were comfortable country homes surrounded by outdoor space. A few featured furniture designed by famous makers or valuable contemporary art. I conducted interviews in open kitchens, often outfitted with white Carrara marble or handmade tiles; at handcrafted dining tables; or on back decks in city gardens. I poked into bathrooms with soaking tubs or steam showers, living rooms decorated in palettes of gold or white, bedrooms with expansive views of the city or the river, and brightly decorated children’s playrooms.

  It was striking to me how customized these homes were and how deeply these homebuyers and renovators had thought about their lifestyles and their families as they considered what they needed and wanted in their living spaces. They talked about having to decide whether to have a separate dining room, whether their kids needed their own rooms or bathrooms, whether a stay-at-home mother needed an office. Where they lived was connected to a whole host of larger questions, including where they worked, where their children would go to school, and where they spent time on the weekends. They wanted to customize their homes aesthetically, too, seeking to express their individual styles through their choice of sofas, dining tables, wallpaper, faucets, paint colors, flooring, cabinets, appliances, countertops, and so on.

  But despite these differences, most of the people I talked with described relatively similar lifestyles and consumption patterns. Nearly all had purchased at least one home, usually their primary residence; several had bought their homes outright or carried very small mortgages.60 About a third of these families owned or were actively shopping for second homes (or third homes, in a few cases). These parents had slightly older children, suggesting that the purchase of additional homes occurs at least a little later in the parents’ lives. Several of those with younger children rented summer or weekend houses or used those of family members, and they seemed likely to buy additional homes in the future. As we might expect, given the focus on renovation in my recruitment, about 90 percent had done significant renovation on an apartment or house or had built a primary or second residence from the ground up. Most children attended private schools, especially after sixth grade. Although their lifestyle choices varied according to whether they had incomes of $500,000 or $5 million, only the five or so families in the sample with the most limited resources (relative to the rest) had lifestyles significantly different from this one. I focus less on these families in this book.61

  Maintaining these lifestyles requires a considerable amount of work. Among the heterosexual couples I studied, women usually had primary responsibility for the households, even when both partners worked for pay. As I will show in chapter 2, this “labor of lifestyle” involved extensive “consumption work,”62 including planning and buying most of what was needed for the household, from food to furniture; carrying out renovations; maintaining second homes; overseeing children’s care and education; and supervising and communicating with paid workers. Every household except one employed a housecleaner; all but one hired nannies or babysitters on a regular basis or had done so when their children were young. Some had also employed baby nurses, professional chefs, and personal assistants in their homes.

  All my respondents had hired other expert service providers, including, for example, financial advisors, architects, interior designers, real estate brokers, personal chefs, and personal assistants. I conducted thirty interviews with people in these and related occupations (such as personal concierges and art advisors). I was interested in talking with such “cultural intermediaries”63 because they facilitate their clients’ consumption choices; in fact, their labor makes these lifestyles possible. They also have extensive and intimate knowledge of their clients’ experiences of spending, accumulating, and giving away money, and their accounts therefore complement those of the wealthy consumers.64

  TALKING (OR NOT) ABOUT MONEY

  Perhaps not surprisingly, given the American cultural taboo against discussing money and class, most of my respondents were uncomfortable talking about their incomes and assets.65 My first indicator of this reticence was an unusual difficulty finding people willing to participate in the project. As I describe in more detail in the appendix, this challenge seemed connected to the centrality of the topic of spending to the project.

  In the interviews, most people described themselves as reluctant to talk about money in any detail with anyone except their partners and sometimes other close family members. They described money as deeply private—“more private than sex,” in the words of one psychotherapist I interviewed. When I questioned one very wealthy woman about her assets, she said “No one’s ever asked me that, honestly. … No one asks that question. So it’s up there with, like, ‘Do you masturbate?�
�� That’s just not something that people say.” When we talked outside, they kept their voices down so their neighbors wouldn’t hear; inside, some closed the door when the nanny was in the next room. Although most were ultimately fairly open with me, a few refused to answer certain kinds of questions, especially about specific amounts.66 Several women 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.”67 Linda, an academic whose husband had inherited wealth, believed there was too much stigma in “our culture” about discussing money. But she also refused to tell me her family’s net worth, saying “I don’t think I can really answer that, I’m sorry. I just feel like that’s too much and it’s too private for [her husband]. … I think he would hit the roof.”

  I also got the strong sense from many people that they were underreporting their income and/or assets, whereas I never suspected that they were exaggerating how much they had. Ursula, a stay-at-home mother whose husband was a technology executive, was uncomfortable telling me her husband’s income. She asked, “Do we really have to get into that?” I offered, “You can give me a range.” She said, “A million plus.” Later in the interview, she corrected herself to say that her second home had cost $250,000 more than she had originally told me. Suspecting that she had underreported the income as well, I asked, half-joking, “So when you said ‘one-plus’ on the income, was it one plus … ten?” She laughed, and I asked, “One plus more than one?” She nodded. I said, “So, two plus?,” and she nodded again—signaling affirmation while literally maintaining silence. Public records of home sales confirmed that others had quoted lower amounts to me than they had actually paid, while no one had inflated the purchase prices of their homes.

  A few participants became extremely anxious about having shared financial information. One woman told me, speaking of her assets and home value, “I don’t think that anybody knows our pocketbook. Like, there’s nobody who knows how much we spend. I mean, you’re the only person I ever said those numbers to out loud. … I don’t say numbers to anybody, not my parents, nobody knows anything about anything. We try to be as discreet about it as possible.” After the interview she emailed me and asked me to call her; when I did, she voiced concern about confidentiality, asking me not to talk about where she lived or how much she and her husband had paid for their home because they could conceivably be identified using public data on home purchases in a particular neighborhood. (These concerns about confidentiality were so extreme that I have taken significant pains to avoid making it possible for anyone to identify my respondents, particularly the people who introduced them to me, as I describe in the appendix.)

  Despite this discomfort, many of the people I interviewed also acknowledged that they thought about money and lifestyle issues constantly and discussed them often with their spouses. Beatrice, who worked in a nonprofit but had inherited wealth, said she and her husband talked about these subjects “every minute of every day that we’re not at work.” Some described sharing their money conflicts with their therapists. Others admitted speculating about what their friends and neighbors earned and sometimes judging friends and family members for certain kinds of spending. By the same token, some said they enjoyed the interview because it allowed them to speak about these issues. It was “cathartic,” said Alice, a stay-at-home mother, “to talk about things that you are always thinking about.” Beatrice reflected at the end of the interview: “I’ve now told you everything that I even feel like is vaguely private about our lives.” She told me she’d have been more comfortable talking about her sex life. “But,” she added, “it’s a bit of a relief. It does feel a little bit like an unburdening. It’s, like, making all this stuff that you normally keep to yourself or between you and your intimate partner kind of tightly controlled, kind of letting it out and seeing it does not cause shock or horror.” As it turned out, these silences about money were closely connected to ambivalence about being wealthy.

  THE ANXIETIES OF AFFLUENCE

  The wealthy women Susan Ostrander studied around 1980, who had been born mainly from 1900 to 1940, appeared comfortable with their class privilege. For the most part raised in a homogenous wealthy community, they saw themselves as pillars of that community, publicly carrying out charitable works and preparing their children to follow in their upper-class footsteps by organizing their prep school educations and debutante parties. Ostrander sees this community participation as an attempt to justify their privilege, but she does not describe any significant conflict about their class advantages (although some felt constrained by their gender roles). In fact, these women saw themselves as “being better than other people,” expressing “a sense of moral, as well as social, superiority.”68 They seem never to have mentioned any desire for diversity in their communities. Indeed, some were doubtful about or openly hostile to admitting nonwhite, non-Protestant people to their clubs.69

  The New Yorkers I spoke with, in contrast, were much less complacent about their social advantages. As I have noted, I was surprised at how many conflicts they expressed about spending. Over time, I came to see that these were often moral conflicts about having privilege in general. Some, like Scott and Olivia, talked about these struggles quite openly with me, while others were more indirect. As I discuss in detail in chapter 1, some of those I interviewed tended not even to think of themselves as socially advantaged because they were focused on others around them who had the same resources or more than they did. I call these people “upward-oriented,” while “downward-oriented” people, including Scott and Olivia, were more likely to see themselves as privileged. Downward-oriented people tended to have more economically diverse social networks and thus to compare their own lifestyles to a broader range of other possibilities. Either way, the vast majority implicitly or explicitly indicated that they had some kind of moral concern about having wealth.

  One way they addressed these conflicted feelings was to try to minimize the importance of privilege, or the privilege itself, by obscuring it. Whether they were oriented upward or downward, nearly all my interviewees also observed the cultural norm of not talking about money with people besides their partners. Like Scott and Olivia, who were ambivalent about having visitors, they also sometimes wanted to avoid showing their wealth to those with less. They asserted that money didn’t influence how they thought about other people. And they believed that referring explicitly to their advantages might make those with less feel bad. But they also acknowledged that talking about their privilege made them feel vulnerable to negative judgments from others.70

  Monica, who worked in real estate and had a household income of about $400,000, used this strategy of silence. She refused to tell me what her monthly expenses were, saying, “That’s not for you to know.” When I asked her to explain why she felt that way, she responded (slipping into the more distant second-person “you”), “I don’t think people need to know what you’re willing to spend, what you’re willing to do. I mean, some people think it’s crazy that we send our kids to private school. I don’t need to have to argue that.” She continued, “I do think people assume, or make assumptions, and create personalities of who you may or may not be, and what your choices are. And I think it is based on—a lot of it is financial.” She also said her spending “is not a value. It’s not a value about who I am, or what I am.” Monica, like many others, also said she treated all people with respect, regardless of their economic status.

  For the people I talked with, these general norms of civility—not talking about money, not “showing off,” treating others as one wants to be treated—were also mechanisms for silencing and obscuring their own privilege, to others and sometimes to themselves. Following the culturally prominent idea of classlessness, they opted for a kind of “blindness” to class difference analogous to the widespread (though problematic) ideal of race-blindness.71 These themes of silence and visibility run through their accounts, as the rest of the book will show.

  A
t the same time, however, my interviewees did recognize that they were privileged. So, although they were silent with others, they struggled with themselves over the question of how to be worthy of this privilege in a moral sense. In order to feel that they deserved their advantages, they tried to interpret themselves as “good people.” My reading of these efforts constitutes the core of this book.

  My respondents’ narratives delineated three characteristics of “good people.” First, as I show in chapter 2, good people work hard. Across the board, these affluent parents described themselves as hard workers, drawing on general associations in American Dream ideology between work and worth.72 They valued self-sufficiency and productivity and rejected self-indulgence and dependence. Those who had earned their wealth wore their paid employment proudly, although they often felt anxious about the risk of losing their jobs. Those who had inherited wealth or did not currently work for pay resisted stereotypes of laziness or dilettantism and offered alternate narratives of themselves as productive workers.