Second, good people are prudent consumers. The consumption aspect of the Protestant ethic has become less prominent in contemporary discourses of meritocracy, which focus on work,73 but it surfaced strongly in these accounts. It may be counterintuitive to associate wealthy New Yorkers with Puritans, whom we imagine as self-denying ascetics, when they have large homes full of material goods, travel widely, raise their children in comfort, and for the most part are not very religious. Yet, as I show in chapter 3, they described their desires and needs as basic and their spending as disciplined and family-oriented. They asserted that they “could live without” their advantages if they had to, denying that they were dependent on their comfortable lifestyles. They distanced themselves from the negative images of consumption often associated with the wealthy, such as ostentation, materialism, and excess—all markers of moral unworthiness. These interpretations allowed them to believe that they deserved what they had and at the same time to cast themselves as “normal” people rather than “rich” ones.
In these ways, good people are ordinary people, belonging symbolically to the broad middle. The third requirement for being a good person—the obligation to “give back”—more explicitly recognizes privilege. But, as I discuss in chapter 4, this imperative meant different things to different people, which entailed publicly acknowledging privilege to varying degrees. Often to “give back” meant to “be aware” of and “appreciate” their advantages rather than to take them for granted—an essentially private state of feeling. Many gave away money, and time as well, in charitable enterprises of various kinds. But these practices were marked by ambivalence over what it meant to identify and be visible as a wealthy person. Those who faced upward, who moved in relatively class-homogenous communities, were more likely to take for granted that they would play this kind of role. Those who were more “downward-oriented” were often more ambivalent.
As we will see throughout, for my respondents to be a “good person” was not to be “entitled.”74 Betsy, for example, was a management consultant turned stay-at-home mother with a household income of about $1 million. She said of her lifestyle, “I don’t think we feel entitled to it.” When I asked what she meant by “entitlement,” she said, “Feeling that you deserve it because you were born into it or had the right education, and [that] it should be this way.” Monica, who worked with people much wealthier than she, said she would not want to “have the money they have, and be the ass that they are. … They’re just not nice people. And part of it is that they feel that they’re owed things because they either have money or they’re famous.”
Notably, being morally worthy and avoiding entitlement involve both behaving and feeling in particular ways. Practices of working hard, consuming prudently, and giving back are matched by affects of independence, modest desire, and appreciation rather than a feeling of being “owed things,” in Monica’s words. Yet it is not easy to adhere to all of these imperatives of merit or to interpret oneself as adhering to them, and the people I interviewed often struggled to do so. In chapter 5 I show how these struggles play out in couples. Partners look to each other for recognition of themselves as worthy workers and consumers, but they do not always find this recognition. They clash over what kinds of needs are legitimate, as Scott and Olivia did over their renovation. And they experience gendered conflicts over whether unpaid labor “counts” symbolically as a contribution to the family’s lifestyle.75
Finally, the parents I talked with want to pass these behaviors, feelings, and values on to their children. As I show in chapter 6, anxieties about children’s entitlement were especially prominent throughout my interviews. Parents want to raise nonmaterialistic, hard-working, nice people rather than, in Scott’s words, “lazy jerks.” Of course this desire is widespread among parents regardless of class. But for these affluent people the concern about entitlement harbors a deep contradiction. They want their children to see themselves as “normal” (and therefore just like everyone else) but also to appreciate their advantages (which make them different from others). In the end, they instill and reproduce ideas about how to occupy privilege legitimately without giving it up—how to be a “good person” with wealth.
This book challenges two common ideas about the wealthy: one, that they are always engaged in a competitive struggle for status or distinction, and two, that they are complacent about their privilege. I also highlight their desire to be moral actors. My goal is not, however, simply to understand the experiences and perspectives of affluent people or to “humanize” them in the face of sensationalistic media representations. Instead, these ideas about what it means to be a good person with wealth matter, I argue, because they draw on and thus illuminate broadly held notions of what it means to be legitimately privileged. Illegitimate privilege means excess, ostentation, and entitlement. In contrast, legitimate privilege means being ordinary, down-to-earth, hard-working, and prudent.
These ideas are not unique to my respondents. Much the opposite, in fact; these ways of thinking about legitimacy and moral worth resonate, I contend, precisely because they constitute “common sense.”76 The fact that some people have much more than others comes to be taken for granted as long as those who benefit inhabit their privilege appropriately. It’s about what individual people do, how they feel, and who they are, not what they have. Even negative judgments of individual behavior are legitimations of wealth in general. That is, judging “bad” wealthy people means “good” wealthy people can also exist. In the end, ironically, inhabiting privilege in an “unentitled,” morally worthy way actually legitimates entitlement.
As a result, it becomes hard to articulate a distributional critique rather than a behavioral one: that some people should not have so much while others have so little, regardless of how nice or hardworking or charitable they are. Furthermore, the focus on individual behavior and affect also draws attention away from social processes that foster the unequal distribution of resources, including the decline of public education and social welfare programs, employers’ assault on trade unions, and tax policy that favors the rich.77
VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE
Although all the people I interviewed wanted to be morally worthy, they described their emotions, conflicts, and choices in different ways. These variations seemed linked especially to class background and upward mobility, the source of wealth (inherited or earned), occupation, and political stance. High earners, for example, were especially likely to talk about valuing self-sufficiency and to feel economically at risk, regardless of gender. Inheritors talked more about experiencing discomfort or guilt about their wealth—unless they were also earners. The microcultures of work and consumption in which respondents were embedded also mattered. Earners who lived in uptown Manhattan and in the suburbs, for example, tended to have less diverse social circles than those who lived downtown or in Brooklyn. I attend to these differences in various ways throughout the book, beginning with chapter 1, and return to them in the conclusion. But it is impossible in this small and unrepresentative sample to see exactly how these many factors, which often work together, may “cause” certain kinds of orientations.78 More important than parsing the causes of differences, I believe, is to trace the common discourses about legitimate privilege that emerged in these conversations.
I did not see major, patterned differences among my interviewees on the basis of race and ethnicity. I believe this is not because such differences do not exist but because my sample of people of color was too small and too crosscut with other factors to reveal such tendencies. A more systematic comparison by race with a larger number of interviewees of color might reveal patterned differences.79 I do discuss questions of race and ethnicity where they seem especially salient. Because of concerns about confidentiality, described in the appendix, I have chosen not to identify named respondents by race; where I discuss race and ethnicity I use separate pseudonyms or I do not name the interviewees. Readers should not assume that quoted respondents are white.
&
nbsp; A NOTE ON JUDGMENT
As I have suggested, accounts of wealthy people’s consumption are often treated with voyeurism, skepticism, and moral judgment. It is easy to be fascinated by the details of my interviewees’ lifestyles, especially by the seemingly astronomical amounts they possess and spend. And it is easy to feel suspicious of their accounts. Are they “really” working hard? Is their spending “actually” reasonable? Do they “truly” avoid display? Many of my respondents live in houses and apartments worth millions, own second homes, shop in expensive stores, travel widely, fly first class, and/or pay for a wide variety of household and other services. Their children, for the most part, lack nothing material. They go to the best schools and receive historically unprecedented amounts of adult attention from parents, tutors, therapists, coaches, and others.
I have seen such skepticism and judgment among people who have read parts of this work or heard me talk about it, and I have experienced them myself. Indeed, I sometimes find it tricky just to describe my subjects’ lifestyles and some of their comments without sounding disparaging, because we almost automatically attach value judgments to these choices. These reactions, I believe, come from the exact assumption I am trying to challenge: that rich people are unpleasant, greedy, competitive consumers. And to ask such questions about my interviewees, from my perspective, is to miss the point. The issue is that they want to be hard workers and prudent consumers. Whether they actually are is, for one, impossible to adjudicate, because definitions of hard work, excess, display, and so on are always relative. More important, attempting to determine the “truth” about wealthy people’s actions and feelings ensnares us in precisely the normative distinctions I am questioning. These classifications ultimately legitimate privilege by representing some rich people as “good” while others are “bad” rather than critiquing systems of distribution that produce inequality. My goal is to avoid this kind of orientation in favor of illuminating larger cultural processes of legitimation that are, in the main, taken for granted in the United States.
So I ask readers of this book to be aware of their evaluations of wealthy individuals as deserving or not and to consider how these assessments may in fact obscure critiques of resource distribution. If we did not see wealthy people as exotic or evaluate them as morally worthy or unworthy, how might we see them? And how might we then think about what it means to be deserving of privilege?
1
ORIENTATIONS
TO OTHERS
ASPIRING TO THE MIDDLE OR
RECOGNIZING PRIVILEGE
I interviewed Ursula in her spacious apartment on the Upper West Side, in a living room with a view of the Hudson River. Ursula is in her mid-forties, with two children and a husband who earns “two million plus” per year in his job as a high-level executive at a technology company. She has an MBA and a long work history in business. But several years ago she left paid employment, with some ambivalence, when she could not find a meaningful part-time job. She now primarily takes care of her home and children, as well as volunteering at their private school. She and her husband employ a nanny/housekeeper/cook who works about forty hours each week. Their apartment, which they have renovated significantly, is worth approximately $4 million. They spend weekends at their house in the Hamptons, valued at over $1.5 million.
Despite these advantages, which place her well into the top 1 percent, Ursula tends to situate herself primarily in relation to those who have more than she does. During the interview, Ursula characterized her upbringing as “middle-class.” When I followed up by asking if she would describe herself now the same way, she said, “Yeah. You know, New York City, I feel like, no matter what you have, somebody has about a hundred times that.” She does not feel that she lacks for anything; when I ask what she would do if her household income suddenly doubled, she can only think of “marginal” items such as improvements to the house in the Hamptons. And she does not express envy of people wealthier than she. Yet she is primarily oriented to people with as much as or more than she has, and she rarely talks about herself as privileged or explicitly expresses conflicts about it. Asked if she ever felt guilty about having more than other people, she responded, “No. Maybe there are more people that I know that have more, so, no.”
Contrast Ursula to Keith and Karen, a couple also in their forties, also with two kids, who, like Ursula’s, are around ten years old. Both Keith and Karen work, though Keith’s job as an academic brings in most of their $300,000 household income. Both have advanced degrees. They own a house worth over $1.2 million in a desirable neighborhood in Brooklyn. They were able to buy the house when they sold their first apartment, which they had bought with funds lent by Keith’s parents. They have assets of about $500,000 in retirement and college savings, but they dipped into their “emergency savings” and took out a loan to pay for a recent renovation. They do not own a second home, and their children go to public school. They often worry about money.
Because Karen and Keith have significantly less income and fewer assets than Ursula and her husband, live in a more modest home, and send their kids to public school, we might expect that they would see themselves as less advantaged than she does. In fact, however, they were much more likely to talk about feeling privileged, both relative to others in their social worlds and in general. Keith called the loan from his parents for their down payment “the ultimate white-person advantage.” Karen said, of the renovation, “We’re both horrified by how much money we make and that we even have to have these decisions. I mean, it’s ridiculous.” She worried that people they knew would see their renovation as “profligate.” Keith said, “My feeling is it’s a bottomless pit, renovation and home improvement. And I think that six Chinese people are camping out in some one-bedroom hovel in Beijing right now. So, like, the notion that you ‘need’ something is all BS.” He characterized his kids as “living like kings two hundred years ago.” Made without prompting from me, these comparisons invoked people with less rather than those with more.
As we have seen, the people I interviewed are objectively advantaged in terms of income and wealth. But like Ursula and Keith and Karen, they varied in terms of whether they talked about themselves as privileged and what kinds of feelings they expressed about it.1 Because privilege is always relative, their orientations had a lot to do with which kinds of other people they compared themselves to. People like Ursula, whom I call “upward-oriented,” downplayed their advantages by comparing themselves to others in a similar position or to those who had more. In fact, they were likely to locate themselves, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, “in the middle.” They tended to recognize privilege only indirectly, using euphemisms such as “lucky” or “fortunate.” They talked less about money unless I asked them directly about it, and they expressed fewer conflicted feelings about privilege per se. Instead, they talked more about feeling anxious and at risk. I describe taking this stance as “aspiring to the middle.” “Downward-oriented” people like Keith and Karen, on the other hand, were more likely to describe themselves as privileged and to talk about people with less. They also talked more frankly about money and described struggling with feelings of discomfort about their advantages.
These orientations were not set in stone. Many people used both upward- and downward-oriented discourses over the course of our conversations, as I will show. And even when they seemed consistently upward- or downward-oriented, these stances might have had more to do with the conversational situation we were in than with some “permanent” orientation. Yet I did find patterns. Overall, those who openly recognized their privilege lived in more diverse worlds, both literally and imaginatively, than those who did not. They were more likely to have colleagues, friends, and/or family members from more varied backgrounds and with fewer resources. And they were usually more liberal or progressive politically, which made them more likely to have a structural understanding and critique of inequality.2 Upward-oriented people, in contrast, moved in more homogenous social and family
circles, had experienced less class mobility, and espoused more conservative politics (relatively speaking).
The one exception to this pattern was among women in the highest-earning families in my sample, those with household incomes of over $5 million per year and assets of over $20 million. These stay-at-home mothers described themselves as privileged even when they did not have especially liberal politics or diverse social networks. They were “upwardly mobile” in the sense that they had been raised upper-middle-class but were now much more wealthy than that. More important, I think, was that it was essentially impossible for them to face upward, simply because there were so few people above them. For the most part, however, income and assets were not correlated to whether people would face upward or downward.
We might imagine that upward-oriented people simply don’t notice that they are privileged. Social-psychological research on relative advantage, though much less developed than that on relative deprivation, has suggested that people in advantaged groups may not recognize their advantages because they see their situation as “normal” or “neutral,” while the minority position stands out. The classic example of this tendency comes from studies of race and whiteness: white people’s experience tends to be seen as neutral, while that of people of color is seen as “exceptional.”3 But my interviewees are not in the numerical majority, as whites have historically been in the United States; nor is wealth analogous to whiteness, because it is not taken for granted in the way that whiteness is. “Middle-class” status and cultural capital, as opposed to “working-class” status, are often taken for granted, but wealth is not. Furthermore, as I have noted, the people I spoke with live in or just outside the most unequal city in the United States at a moment when economic disparities are especially prominent. And of course downward-oriented people do recognize and talk openly about their privilege relative to a wide range of others, indicating that it can be visible.
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