Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  Paul strongly and repeatedly framed the basis of deservingness in general as work. When I asked, “And people who have less than you, do you think they deserve less?” he responded, “Some of them, absolutely. I mean, Occupy Wall Street, I mean, what have they done? They sat in a park doing nothing. You know?” Later, in talking about a pair of younger colleagues with whom he had shared some personal financial information, he said, “It’s good, I think, because by seeing what they can work towards, it may drive them to work harder.” But he wanted to make sure they didn’t feel “entitled,” by which he meant thinking “that they should be there already without working as hard.” He insisted that his children would have paying jobs when they were in high school, saying “There’s no doubt in my mind. One thousand percent.”

  This kind of orientation was exactly the one I had expected when I started my research. The idea of working hard on an equal playing field as the most desirable means to get ahead is the definition of the American Dream, which permeates American ideology and popular culture.2 By the same token, other scholars have shown that privileged people often explain and justify their social advantages by alluding to their hard work.3 My research both supports and challenges this idea. On the one hand, most of the people I interviewed, whether upward- or downward-oriented, echoed Paul’s emphasis on working hard as one basis for deserving wealth. They valued self-reliance and independence and wanted to see themselves as productive rather than parasitic. And they cared deeply about instilling a work ethic in their children.

  On the other hand, very few of them used this discourse as uniformly and as emphatically as Paul did. Talia, for example, was a stay-at-home mother whose family lived on her husband’s $500,000 annual income from his job in finance. I met her for the interview at the apartment they were in the middle of renovating; she walked me through the rooms, describing how they were rearranging the space and showing me samples of the colors she was thinking about using on the walls. Later, as we continued the interview in a café, Talia told me she would never talk about “specific dollars” related to her renovation because it was “gauche” and because “you never know when it’s going to go away. So don’t brag about what you have.” I took the opportunity to ask if she ever felt guilty about her privilege. She responded, “No. I mean because I don’t feel like, I feel like we’re good people and we don’t—my husband works really hard. And you know, hopefully we’ll be lucky enough to stay in this apartment and, you know—I don’t—no, ’cause I think we give back a lot, too.” When I then asked if she deserved it, she said, “Yeah. I mean I worked really hard and I, you know, I don’t live a lifestyle that’s like, so decadent.” Talia mentions her own hard work, as we might expect, but she also mentions her husband’s work, their moral status as “good people,” the possibility of not keeping the apartment and the “luck” involved if they do, their prudent lifestyle, their disdain for bragging, and their “giving back” through charitable donations.

  Most of the people I spoke to invoked this range of concepts, framing their own hard work as only one part of a constellation of morally worthy practices and affects. How they talked about work varied, however, according to the source of their money. Those who had earned all or most of their wealth drew relatively easily on the language of hard work and, sometimes, intelligence, to talk about their advantages. But most of them believed that hard work was not the only factor explaining their success or underpinning their worth. They spoke particularly of having been lucky. They also pointed to other kinds of behaviors and feelings required of them in order to be morally worthy, especially the need to be economically prudent in the face of risk.

  Those who lived on wealth they had not earned—inheritors and stay-at-home mothers—could not draw so easily on ideas of themselves as hard workers. Inheritors felt uncomfortable, sometimes “guilty,” about living on wealth they hadn’t worked for and accumulated themselves. Stay-at-home mothers—all of whom were highly educated and had work experience—described mixed feelings about not earning their own money or “contributing” economically to the household. People in both categories emphasized their worthy, hard-working selfhood—even in the absence of paid work—by highlighting their own productivity, effort, and work ethic and by drawing boundaries against images of themselves as lazy or self-indulgent dilettantes. Most inheritors of wealth insisted on working for money even when they didn’t need to. Stay-at-home mothers highlighted the work they did for their families, which I call the “labor of lifestyle.” And they associated themselves with the hard work of others, including their spouses, parents, and themselves in earlier phases of life.

  The struggles of these people show that “hard work” carries deep symbolic significance. They also demonstrate that not all forms of work are equal in symbolic value. It is much easier for paid, public employment to seem like “real work” and, therefore, to serve as an indicator of moral worth. This tendency draws on and reproduces a longstanding failure to see unpaid household labor (typically performed by women) as having economic value.4 This kind of labor does have symbolic value, inasmuch as it is linked to the morally worthy work of mothering. However, much of the consumption work these women do does not seem to count as morally legitimate “hard work.” Thus, as sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels argued thirty years ago, the notion of achieving merit through hard work is itself deeply gendered, inasmuch as unpaid work tends to be the (symbolic as well as actual) province of women.5 As we will see in chapter 5, the “value” of this unpaid labor also becomes a site of tension in couples.

  EARNING AS MORALLY WORTHY HARD WORK

  Like Paul, most earners immediately reached for the idea of hard work when confronted with the question of the legitimacy of their wealth. For example, I asked Monica, the upward-oriented real estate agent, if she felt guilty about having more than others. She responded, “I don’t feel guilty. I mean, I work hard. My husband works hard, my kids work hard. I don’t feel guilty.” When I asked Betsy, the former consultant, if she felt she “deserved” her lifestyle, she told me she wanted to avoid “entitlement” but still emphasized hard work. She said, “I think we worked hard for it. I don’t think it was, like—I don’t think we feel entitled to it. But I think we feel like, you know, especially for [her husband], he puts in a ton of hours. I actually think he’s underpaid for the amount of time and energy and stress that is involved. … I don’t know that I like the word deserve. But I feel like we’ve worked for it.” Betsy is reluctant to say explicitly that she deserves her lifestyle exactly because she and her husband have worked hard for it, but she invokes the work itself as a legitimator.

  Again like Paul, upwardly mobile earners alluded to their upward trajectory as evidence of hard work and intelligence and hence of merit. As we have seen, Miriam earned over $1 million per year as a banker. When I asked if she thought she deserved what she had, she said, “I think I work my ass off, so I think ‘deserve’ in that sense, I think I have earned what I have by a lot of hard work. … I don’t feel that anything has been handed to me at all. I think that I worked hard for what I achieved in school, and I worked hard for what I’ve achieved professionally, and I still work hard.”

  Notably, Miriam also draws on the idea of self-sufficiency as a key dimension of achievement. As I described in chapter 1, Miriam was “downward-oriented,” acutely conscious of her privilege relative to others, at least partly because of her class background and the political activism of her parents. In describing this tension she said, almost as if trying to convince herself, “But I don’t think my father would think there’s anything wrong with working hard and making money. It’s sort of crazy, right? I mean, they gave us these opportunities, and [so] I was able to go to these schools and I’m able to make this money. And they gave me that, right?”

  Warren, a private equity entrepreneur from what he called a “middle-class-slash-working-class” background, said that he felt “different” at his Ivy League college. But, he said, “the difference was e
mpowering” because it was clear that he was there because of his intelligence, not his family history or connections. “The people who were around me … recognized that the fact that I didn’t go to Andover makes me a little special. ’Cause it wasn’t kind of like, quote-unquote ‘handed to me.’ … The fact that my father didn’t go to college was, like, this kind of badge of honor, or talent. … It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m no legacy [admission]. I didn’t go to private school. I’m just, you know, I’m actually smart.’”

  By the same token, earners and former earners highlighted their self-sufficiency by distinguishing their earned wealth from money they might have inherited. Ursula responded to my question about whether she deserved her lifestyle by saying, “I don’t know how to answer that. Over other people? Do I deserve it instead of somebody else? I feel like I worked hard. I mean, I don’t think anything has just dropped in our laps. … I think we deserve what we have in the sense that we worked hard to get it. This is not something we’ve inherited.” Frances was a stay-at-home mother married to a hedge fund director, with tens of millions in family assets. When I asked about how her parents saw her lifestyle, which was more lavish than theirs, she responded by emphasizing that her husband had earned the money that supported them. She said, “I think they’re probably proud of [her husband]. You know, we’re not living on his inheritance. We’re living on money that he-we made. And I think they’re very proud of his success. And so they’re okay with it.” By invoking “money that he-we made,” Frances associates herself with the earning of the money, although her work had contributed little in monetary terms and she had long been a stay-at-home mother.6 These women had been raised in upper-middle-class families, so they could not claim upward mobility as Miriam and Warren did, but they still focused on earned income rather than on financial and other advantages they might have received in their upbringings.

  LUCK, HELP, AND STRUCTURAL ADVANTAGE

  In speaking of poor people, Paul told me, “I don’t feel the need every time I pass someone [asking for money] to give them money because I’m more fortunate. They don’t do—some of them, not all of them, it’s a stereotype—don’t do shit. Others do some really good stuff and maybe, you know, whatever it is, play music—I mean I’d rather give money to someone who’s on a subway working hard and playing music than someone who’s sitting there literally doing nothing saying, ‘I’m hungry.’” Stephanie, a stay-at-home mother married to an earner of about $500,000, told me, “Well, I mean, there’s certainly people that work really, really hard, and just can’t get ahead, or even buy a house. But then there’s also a lot of fucking lazy people that are on the dole, that want to stay there. … They think that government should be taking care of everything.” Both Paul and Stephanie strongly frame the basis of deservingness as work and frown on “dependency” on the state.

  Paul and Stephanie also both acknowledge the fact that many people do work but still “can’t get ahead”—but then they gloss over this fact, much as Paul also glossed over the help he had received from his in-laws. However, to my surprise, very few earners I interviewed skimmed over this contradiction so glibly. Even when they alluded to their own hard work as one reason for their success, many also saw themselves as having been “lucky.” Wendy, the corporate lawyer, told me, “I don’t know what I deserve, but I feel lucky that I have the opportunity to get paid what I do. Because there are people who work their asses off and they don’t get paid a lot. For some it’s because that’s their choice, and for others it’s because they just haven’t had the opportunity. And I didn’t deserve the opportunity, particularly, I was just lucky.” Wendy challenges commonplace ideas about meritocracy—the notion that hard work means one deserves more—in two ways. First, she foregrounds the fact that many people work hard and do not get paid well rather than mentioning it perfunctorily and then turning away. Second, she points out that she did not especially “deserve” opportunities that led her to work in a high-paying job.

  James, who worked in real estate, had accumulated over $3 million in assets. He echoed these themes when he said, “You just get lucky. … I was lucky to be born to a mom and a dad who gave a shit—I hit the lottery in so many ways.” Like Wendy, James mentions others he knows who do work hard or are smart who haven’t ended up where he has. He continued, “I think the mistake is if you start to think that your success means that you’re smart. A lot of it’s just luck. I mean a lot of it is, you know, if you get the opportunity, and there’s no telling if you do, to jump on it. But there’s guys who are, in my view, just as smart as me or smarter than me who have been in [this work] for the same amount of time as me and haven’t made that money.” He concluded, “And so it doesn’t, and this is a view I’ve evolved to, but it doesn’t make sense to feel guilty about it. I mean life is cruel, it just is. And sometimes it’s—you know, I’m talking to you today, I could be dead of cancer next year. Who knows?”

  Yet even as these earners may explain their success by talking about luck, it is hard work that constitutes them as morally worthy. James said, “I worked my ass off, but I got lucky. I wasn’t gunning for any of this, it just happened. Again, I did work hard and I don’t feel, like, undeserving or whatever, but I do feel lucky.” James suggests that if he hadn’t worked hard, he might be “undeserving.” But given that he has, he can be both “lucky” and worthy.

  To recognize that luck plays a role in success is to recognize that hard work is not the only factor. But to emphasize luck is also to obscure structural advantages that have likely also made a difference. “Luck” is arbitrary rather than the systematic result of having grown up in particular kinds of families, attended particular schools, developed certain skills and social networks, and so on.7 While James acknowledges that having a certain kind of parents made a difference for him, his reference to the “lottery” and his ultimate conclusion that “life is cruel” suggest that there really isn’t anything one can do to change the system. As Power et al. have noted, “The use of ‘luck’ as an explanation for success is significant because it signals an acknowledgement of the uneven distribution of opportunities at the same time as overlooking more structural explanations for that maldistribution.”8 Brown et al. refer to this interpretation as an “‘individualization’ of the systematic inequalities in education and life-chance.”9

  Notably, some of the partners of earners I interviewed did allude more or less explicitly to the ways in which the playing field is uneven. Lucy was a stay-at-home mother whose husband had earned many millions of dollars in private equity. Asked if she deserved her lifestyle, she said, “Nobody deserves it.” I asked, “So you don’t feel like you deserve it?” She responded, “No. Oh my gosh. Are you kidding me? No, absolutely not. I don’t know what ‘to deserve’ means.” She continued, “I think that there’s a combination between intellect, hard work, and a lot, a lot, a lot of luck. Really, truly. So I think some people are unlucky and other people are lucky. And I also know a lot of very smart people who are trying, and it’s not working.” She went on, hesitatingly, “My husband works very, very hard. But the amount—it’s a disproportionate amount. You know? And you—it’s hard to—it’s hard to defend that, I think, in truth. It really is. And so I can’t—so I’m, you know, definitely sheepish about it. I’d say that I’m definitely sheepish about it.” Lucy not only recognizes the luck involved in her husband’s success but also the “disproportionate amount” of reward he receives relative to those in other kinds of work. She also recognizes and strongly dislikes the role of social networks, what she calls the “club mentality,” in determining outcomes, saying that “what should matter” is “productivity and what you can produce, and a kind of personal hunger and all of those things.”

  Yet despite these critiques, Lucy and others I talked with still returned to the central narrative of hard work as legitimating.10 Lucy described her husband as “self-made”—even as she acknowledged his class advantages. She said, alluding to his parents’ having paid his elite
college tuition, “His parents gave him every gift. And the gift to do whatever he wanted in an amazing school. But,” she continued, “he didn’t get rent checks from his parents. He didn’t get spending money, discretionary spending at any point, you know? So he’s very much self-made.” Vera, who lived mainly on inherited wealth of over $1 million, was very progressive and had an extremely detailed critique of economic and racial inequality.11 Yet she told me of her partner, who worked in finance and did not come from a privileged background: “I’m proud of his success. … [He] worked full-time as a short-order cook and went to college full-time. Like, he killed himself. He did it himself. I’m just, like, proud of him. … I mean, I know that being white helped. He looked, like, the right color. I know that. But he’s also—he works his ass off and he’s brilliant.” These interpretations foreground work as the source of moral worth, minimizing even as they recognize particular kinds of unevenly distributed advantages.

  In any case, most people in high-earning families were loath to talk about structural disadvantage. As I described in chapter 1, some of these interviewees felt affronted by Obama’s talk of rolling back the Bush tax cuts for earners of more than $250,000 and saw politicians who talked about inequality as, in Marie’s words, “creating division.” Talia told me her husband was no longer supporting Obama. He thought, and she agreed, “that a lot of people in finance have been sort of cast as, like, the villain. I mean, there have been a lot of villainous people in finance that have done some really awful things. But [her husband] sent himself through business school.” She also said that there should be “some recognition” of people who “have earned the money.”