We had this conversation with our older daughter, who seems to think we’re millionaires—billionaires. And so [her husband] said, you know, “The reality of it is, we could probably give you everything you want. We’re not going to.” … So we can give you everything you want now. But when you become an adult, we can’t afford for you to be a screw-up. We don’t have the kind of generational wealth that can support that. So at some point, you’ve got to stand on your own and figure it out. So why you don’t get everything is because we can’t support that, later down the road. You’ve got to be able to figure out strategies and ways to deal with it.
(Notably, Marie changes the word “millionaires” to “billionaires,” perhaps because she realizes that she and her husband are millionaires.) Other parents also emphasized that it is especially important for their kids to have skills in order to navigate the unpredictable future.
Often, however, this risk was almost entirely hypothetical. Olivia told me, “I don’t want my kids, actually, to be in a position where their whole self-worth, and their whole identity, and their capacity to function, is connected to what they have. ’Cause it can go away. You know? I mean, it can—things happen. And you want capacities that aren’t attached to that.” She described an imaginary scenario in which the family lost all its money, saying “I could go out there and work hard.” She said she could work again as a social worker, or “go work at Starbucks. I have worked at Starbucks before. I can do it again.” For this reason, she said she would be “much more comfortable with” her children’s having real marketable skills rather than being, for example, conceptual artists. Yet in the end she said that this possibility was remote. I asked if she cared about these skills “because of this issue of risk? I mean, if it all went away? Or because there’s something you think is morally better about that?” She responded, “I think it’s a moral issue. Yeah, I do think it is a moral—because I think the risk is fairly minor.”
So having a strong work ethic and marketable abilities is not only a hedge against risk; it also helps make children better people. Indeed, passing down this discourse of risk helps constitute children’s legitimate dispositions in three ways. First, as Olivia’s account shows, it teaches children that having a work ethic is part of being a morally worthy person. Second, it teaches children to feel at risk, which is another way not to feel entitled (as I argued in chapter 2 about adults). And third, it helps parents and children feel that they don’t really need their privilege, that they could survive without it, which also distances them from being “entitled.”
THE NOT-ENTITLED ENTITLED SELF
As I’ve shown, in their efforts to raise “good people” who are not “entitled,” affluent parents employ strategies of constraint (on behavior and consumption) and exposure (to social others of various kinds). Presumably, of course, most parents want their kids to be moral actors, and, at least in the United States, entitlement is broadly seen as negative and undesirable in both children and adults. Parents across the socioeconomic spectrum also try to constrain their children’s sense of entitlement and think about what kinds of influences their kids are exposed to. But some of these strategies are specific to affluent and wealthy parents. Such parents, as Pugh has shown, are especially prone to using “‘symbolic deprivation’” in the context of having significant resources.24 These parents, unlike those with more limited means, must also offer their children narratives about the high levels of consumption they ultimately do enjoy. Practices of intentional exposure to those with less are presumably more confined to these parents as well.
In these families, constraint and exposure also stand in tension with expansion, or, to pick up Kate and Nadine’s word, “enrichment”: the imperative to amplify children’s experience and develop their potential. In the end, of course, expansion mostly wins. In terms of consumption, what is taken away from these children is at the margins, and what is required of them is relatively minimal. They live in spacious homes, usually with their own rooms (and often bathrooms). They play music and sports and travel internationally. They receive significant customized attention from paid workers including tutors, teachers, and therapists of many varieties. And their parents spend significantly on the “pathway consumption” that ensures their advantaged futures.25 In terms of exposure, parents try to help their children situate themselves in relation to others with less, but only inasmuch as such exposure does not interfere with their getting a wide range of life experiences and the best schooling for their individual needs. They are told how “normal” others live and encouraged to appreciate their own advantages, but those advantages are very rarely curtailed.
Instead of limiting material entitlements, these parents are giving their children a “sense of their place.”26 In showing their children what is “‘normal’” for others, these parents implicitly delineate another kind of normal for themselves. And, as they help their kids locate themselves in the world, these practices and discourses cultivate their children to be capable of inhabiting that space appropriately, in a behavioral and emotional sense. Having a good work ethic, being a nice person, and knowing how to navigate difference are useful skills, so fostering these traits is a form of giving children the tools to survive in an uncertain world. But, I have argued, this cultivation also produces a particular set of dispositions, a habitus that helps them occupy their social advantages with moderation, appreciation, effort, and reciprocity. As Donovan said, about his children’s education around money, “I do think that I’ve done the most important things. Which is modeling behavior for them, again about appropriateness, about being grateful for what you have, about recognizing that it can in fact disappear fairly easily if it’s not handled prudently.” Affluent parents want their kids to see that they have more than others but not to feel that they are better than others. They try to pass down the sense of obligation they feel to make themselves worthy of their privilege. And, as they produce good people, parents also become good people.
CONCLUSION
In November 2016, James B. Stewart wrote a New York Times column in which he tried to pin down the net worth of British writer J. K. Rowling, author of the fantastically successful Harry Potter series.1 In the piece he attributes his interest in her assets to the fact that she is “that all-too-rare commodity in the ranks of the ultrawealthy—a role model.” He continues, “Not only has she made her fortune largely through her own wits and imagination, but she also pays taxes and gives generously to charity. At a time of bitter disputes over rising income inequality, no one seems to resent Ms. Rowling’s runaway success.” What struck me about this piece, first, is that Stewart invokes two of the characteristics of the good wealthy person that I have described: Rowling is hard-working, as indicated by her upward mobility, and she gives back liberally.2 He doesn’t mention her lifestyle, but a 2006 Daily Mail article describes her relatively moderate consumption as “a valuable and uplifting counterpoint to the circus of pointless and continuous spending” of other celebrities, and it seems unlikely that Stewart would think she was such a role model if she were perceived as an ostentatious consumer.3
Even more notable is Stewart’s claim that “no one seems to resent” Rowling’s success, despite widespread critiques of extreme economic inequality, because she acquired her fortune meritoriously and uses it to help others. The implication is that if she had inherited her money or otherwise obtained it without working, and if she were not generous with it, she would be resented—perhaps rightly so. Instead, because she is deserving, she is not part of the problem of increasing inequality. It is precisely this connection, between how affluent people inhabit their wealth and how they are seen and see themselves as legitimately entitled to it, that I have explored in this book.
My conversations with affluent New York parents reveal the challenges of managing privilege in a society that prides itself on egalitarianism and meritocracy at a historical moment of extreme and increasingly visible inequality. Some people, especially those who were do
wnward-oriented, spoke more openly with me than others about feeling uncomfortable with their privilege and perhaps felt it more intensely. But all the people I talked with signaled discomfort. They struggle, with others and with themselves, to define their own entitlements and obligations and those of their partners and children. These struggles engage a broad range of objects and experiences, from sofas to schools, handbags to houses, vacuum cleaners to vacations.
I have argued that as they grapple with these questions, these New Yorkers are trying to see themselves as “good people” by cultivating particular practices and affects. Good people work hard. They live prudently, within their means. Their lifestyles are focused on their families and on meeting needs they construe as basic and reasonable. Self-indulgent purchases are exceptional “treats” that they could live without. They “give back” through work, philanthropy, volunteering, and everyday practices of generosity to others. They don’t brag or show off, and they treat other people respectfully regardless of social differences, but they maintain an internal awareness of and appreciation for their advantages. And they raise children who will not feel or act “entitled.” Whether or not my interviewees actually adhere consistently to the imperatives of good personhood they describe (an issue I discuss in the appendix), the fact that they work so hard to interpret themselves as doing so is key to understanding how inequality is legitimated.
CULTURAL LEGITIMATION
AND INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT
My findings illuminate a real cultural ambivalence about privilege in the United States. Confusing representations of wealthy people proliferate, invoking both aspiration to and judgment of high-end consumption. These images sit uncomfortably next to social norms of not talking generally about social class and specifically about one’s own advantages over others. Despite the ideological prominence of the American Dream and the assumption that pursuing wealth is unequivocally desirable, having wealth is not simple and straightforward.
The accounts of my respondents clearly show that there are right and wrong ways to inhabit wealth, what I call a cultural logic of legitimate entitlement. This logic is not limited to the people I spoke with. It resonates precisely because it constitutes common sense more broadly. It means, first, working hard, consuming prudently, and giving back; second, being both aware of and modest about privilege; and third, not feeling as if one deserves more than others. This logic draws fundamentally on the symbolism of the morally worthy middle class. The most visible elite lifestyles—those of “real” housewives or wolves of Wall Street—are widely seen as over the top, unnecessary and thus worthy of critique. In contrast, in their appeals to ordinariness, my respondents move to occupy the cultural legitimacy of the middle class. They want to be in the middle, not in a distributional sense but rather in the affective sense of having the habits and desires of the middle class. As long as the wealthy can distance themselves from images of “bad” rich people, their entitlement is acceptable. In fact, it is almost as if they are not rich.
It is especially striking that the middle is symbolically available to everyone, even if they have $50 million and are thus actually at the tippy-top of the income distribution, as long as they can claim a particular kind of disposition and lifestyle. This availability matters because it forms part of the normalization of affluence, the larger cultural process by which the top comes to seem like the middle. If people at the top are those who buy $20 million houses in the Hamptons, those in the middle can be the people who earn $2 million per year and have $5 million in assets. This normalization of affluence is also visible in U.S. popular culture, in which lifestyles that would actually be quite expensive (including spacious homes, domestic employees, family vacations, and fashionable clothing) appear in ostensibly “middle-class” settings on television and in the movies.4 Certain kinds of consumption thus come to seem “normal” in general, as they do to my respondents. The wealth that supports these “reasonable” lifestyles is made harder to see and thus to critique. At the same time, the actual middle class and the poor disappear from public view.
As I have argued, legitimate entitlement is based on individual moral worth, established through particular modes of sentiment, disposition, and behavior. It’s about what people do and how they feel, not what they have. It is therefore located in moral judgments of the behavior and affect of individuals rather than of distributions of resources. As we judge rich people for consuming well or badly, working hard or being lazy, giving money away or keeping it, we create distinctions that legitimate the system. Even negative judgments of individual behavior reproduce the logic of legitimate entitlement, because to say someone is inhabiting privilege incorrectly is also to say that it is possible to inhabit it correctly. This focus on distinctions among individuals draws attention away from institutions and social processes such as the systematic unequal distribution of resources.
Yet social structures and institutions do shape the possibilities of wealthy people—as they do those of all people—in crucial ways. On the one hand, economic privilege is itself anchored in labor markets that offer extremely high rewards for particular forms of labor and low rewards for others, and also in labor law that disadvantages workers relative to employers. Elites accrue cultural capital and networks, which are useful in entering those same high-paying labor markets, in particular social and educational environments. Economic advantage further rests on tax policies that favor holders of economic capital and higher earners relative to lower ones, as well as those who want to bequeath wealth to their children. White wealthy people, the vast majority of the privileged, also benefit from individual and institutional racism and white privilege.
On the other hand, the sense of risk that many of the people I talked with feel is also a product of particular institutional arrangements. High earners often face unstable employment conditions and fluctuating incomes. The lack of significant state support for education, housing, heath care, and retirement makes individuals responsible for their own security.5 Crucially, such conditions both drive the fears of the wealthy and result from their actions. Those who work in finance and related industries contribute to the same volatile markets that make them nervous about their own economic situations. Wealthy people often advocate policies, such as lower taxation, that weaken the state and hence increase individuals’ responsibility for their own welfare. Although in the short term such measures seem rational, as they allow rich people to keep more of their money, in the long term they create a system that spawns anxieties among the wealthy themselves.
Scholars and activists have long pointed out that people often interpret structural problems—in this case, a radically unequal distribution of resources—as individual ones.6 It is common, for example, to blame poor people for their own poverty, suggesting that they do not work hard enough or are otherwise morally deficient when in fact they face structural disadvantages in educational and legal institutions as well as in labor markets. People who struggle economically are also apt to blame themselves rather than the system for their failure to advance.7 The wealthy people I talked with vary in how much they explain their social position solely with reference to hard work and other individual attributes. But they manage their discomfort with privilege by turning inward, toward managing affect and behavior, rather than outward, toward social structure and distribution. Of course, trying to be worthy of privilege at the top of the income distribution is not the same as blaming oneself or being blamed for economic struggle at the bottom. But the failure to connect what C. Wright Mills called “personal troubles of milieu,” by which he meant problems of individuals in their immediate social environments, to “public issues of social structure” is the same.8 To put it more succinctly: the personal is political.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Despite their discomfort with their wealth, the people I interviewed never ratchet down their spending or change their lifestyles significantly. In fact, the opposite is true. As they get older, they spend more and more on dresses, sofas
, or homes, in the process Beatrice described as “luxury creep.” They gain practice carrying out large consumption projects such as renovations and become comfortable spending the amounts of money required for these. They continue or begin to employ housekeepers, nannies, designers, architects, personal shoppers, personal assistants, personal trainers, tutors, and therapists, among others. As their children get older, parents turn away from the possibility of giving them sustained exposure to difference or paid work in order to give them other kinds of opportunities. Even those who have been most uncomfortable with affluent lifestyles grow accustomed to their advantages. Their social networks often become more homogenous as they come to consist largely of other private-school parents or their affluent neighbors. Yet, at the same time, these affluent New Yorkers consolidate their deserving identities. They see themselves as retaining the “mindset” and affect of hard workers and reasonable consumers, even though they may not work for pay, and even as their consumption spirals upward. Those who have had deep misgivings about their privilege come to frame such qualms as “unproductive” and allow them to fade into the background.
But what else could they do? Would it matter if they consumed less? If they “gave back” more? Or if they “gave up” something of more substance? A few of my interviewees thought so, as we saw in chapter 4. But many did not see taking meaningful action as possible. Even those who worried about inequality were not willing to sacrifice individual advantage for a slim shot at improving the collective good, for example by putting their children in public school. Yet maybe if there were clearer ways to attach some of this ambivalence to alternative political ideas or practices, these people would support them. Of course, as we have seen, most weren’t interested in changing the system, despite the conflicts they felt.
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