However, I think the larger political task highlighted by these findings has less to do with prescribing how wealthy people should act and more to do with deconstructing this logic of legitimate privilege, which focuses on individual actions and measures behavior and feeling, not distribution, with a moral yardstick. What would happen if we stopped distinguishing between individual good and bad rich people and engaged questions about a more egalitarian distribution of material and experiential resources? What would it mean, for example, to say that we should be critical of the fact that J. K. Rowling is a billionaire—regardless of how she came by her fortune, how she spends it, or whether she gives it away—just on the basis of the idea that such wealth is inseparable from extreme inequality, which is both pernicious to society and itself immoral?
To some extent recent public discourses critical of inequality emerging from the Occupy movement, the Fight for Fifteen struggle for a $15 minimum wage, and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign have raised exactly these questions. As we have seen, the people I talked with sometimes responded quite negatively to these critiques, interpreting them as personal judgments, as when high earners reacted defensively after President Obama advocated repealing high-wage tax cuts. But this tendency to feel personally affronted by public criticism of inequality also has to do with exactly the same process of attaching entitlement to individual merit. That is to say, to believe that J. K. Rowling should not have a billion dollars when other people have nothing is not to suggest she is a bad person for having the billion dollars. The distribution of the assets is the problem, not the individual behavior, disposition, or feelings—or any other characteristic—of the person holding the assets. If it were possible to separate critiques of inequality from those of individual behavior, wealthy people might not take such critiques so personally.
To divorce questions of distribution from those of individual merit does not mean separating them from moral criteria, of course. A more egalitarian distribution of resources across communities (national or otherwise) can be defended as a morally better form of social organization because it benefits more people and, ultimately, society as a whole. But advancing such a perspective is still no easy task. Wealthy people tend to resist giving up their short-term advantages, and their outsize political and media power means that they disproportionately control both the terms and the outcomes of the debates on these issues. Perhaps more important, the idea that people deserve resources based on individual moral affect and action is broadly taken for granted in the United States across the gamut of political opinion or economic position. Nonetheless, to raise issues of distributional justice means to challenge the legitimacy of distinctions among individuals based on moral worth, as much at the top of the income scale as at the bottom.
METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX
MONEY TALKS
This book is the result of the most difficult research project I have ever worked on. To take just the most extreme example: I found interviewing and writing about affluent people, most of whom live within ten miles of my home, more challenging than interviewing and writing about Chilean fishing industry workers who lived in remote areas, with unpredictable schedules, in Spanish, when I was 22 years old and working almost entirely on my own. This project was not only logistically complicated and time-consuming but also emotionally draining and anxiety-producing, as I have struggled with questions of research design, access, analysis, and ethics.
There are undoubtedly many reasons that I found this research so challenging. But a central one is that many of the taken-for-granted ideas and discourses about wealth and wealthy people that I have tried to deconstruct in this book also affected my capacity to collect and analyze evidence. First, I was myself subject to many of those ideas (recall the old saw about fish not being able to see the water they swim in). For example, I, like many others, intuitively imagined “real” rich people as only the super-rich. Also like many others, I was inclined to think of professionals earning $500,000 as “upper-middle-class.” I now see this as a function of some of the cultural tendencies I have identified here, such as the attachment of “middleness” to certain kinds of lifestyles, especially in contexts like New York, where life is expensive and the super-wealthy abound. I have also felt constrained by the same logics of moral judgment that I have tried to illuminate. It has been challenging to interpret what my interviewees were saying while retaining some kind of consciousness of my own affective and normative responses to them.
Second, the delicacy and privacy of the subject matter also affected my methodological practice. Social silences about money and class made it hard to find people to talk with as well as to bring up these sensitive issues in these conversations. It was difficult to know how participants might read my class position and how those readings might influence how they talked with me. In the writing, I have struggled with how to most effectively maintain confidentiality, which I also feel more concerned about breaching than I have in previous projects, given the intimate nature of these questions of money and privilege.
In this appendix I offer a fairly standard account of the methodological choices I made, including more detail on the people I talked with, how I recruited them, and the mechanics of the interviews and analysis. But I also reflect on how the issues I have analyzed in the body of the book came into play.
RESEARCH DESIGN
I came to this project through both previous research and personal experience. In a previous study I had interviewed people who often stayed in luxury hotels, which had revealed ambivalent feelings about their entitlement to consume luxury service and in some cases about class entitlement more generally.1 Both the interviews and my ethnographic work in hotels had also illuminated a strong norm of reciprocity among guests, who felt that they had a moral responsibility to treat workers well. Although I did not see it in these terms at the time, I would say now that these consumers wanted to be worthy of their entitlement to luxury service. I was also raised with class privilege, so I was familiar with these feelings both because I shared them and because I had seen them among family members and friends, especially those with liberal politics. So I was interested in investigating these affects and practices in more depth. Research I had conducted on the personal concierge and lifestyle management industry also raised questions about how people with the disposable income to hire this type of service provider understood the value of aesthetic and reproductive labor.2 Therefore, exploring consumption of goods and services seemed like one avenue into understanding these experiences of privilege.
In-depth interviewing is the best method for investigating, in the words of Lamont and Swidler, “where people live imaginatively—morally but also in terms of their sense of identity—what allows them to experience themselves as good, valuable, worthwhile people.”3 As Allison Pugh points out, in-depth interviews also illuminate emotions, including anxieties, in particular cultural and social contexts.4 In-depth interviews were therefore the logical method to use to explore how respondents made lifestyle choices and how these choices were shaped by and connected to their feelings about privilege and entitlement. (Later I discuss some of the trade-offs of this approach.)
As noted in the introduction, I wanted to speak with privileged parents of relatively young children, expecting that they would be making important lifestyle decisions, possibly for the first time, particularly regarding where and how to live and how to care for and educate their children. I imagined that younger people would be thinking less about long-term questions of lifestyle; they were also likely to have less money and hence fewer options. Older people seemed more likely to have made these decisions long before and not to be considering them so explicitly now. (This frame, of course, excludes people making alternative choices, who might not rely as heavily on “family” rhetorics of legitimation as these subjects ultimately did.)
One critical question, as I have noted, was how to define privileged people, given that privilege is relative. Because I thought it would be diffic
ult to get people to talk with me and it would be impossible to sample on the basis of precise income or asset numbers, I wanted to be flexible. And I wanted to cast a somewhat broader net than is commonly used. The public focus on the top 1 percent had not emerged when I began this study in 2009, and in any case, as I explained in the introduction, I think this definition of privilege is too restrictive. I find it odd to suggest that anyone between the bottom 20 percent or so and the top 1 percent is somehow in the same group.5
I decided to begin by looking for people with household incomes of $250,000, which was in the top 5 percent in 2010.6 I also chose this income criterion because it was the level over which the Obama administration was proposing to eliminate the Bush tax cuts. As such, it had acquired both symbolic and material significance. People often remark to me that “$250,000 is middle-class in New York.” This is empirically false, at least if we take the median as the middle, because the median income in New York City is about $52,000.7 Furthermore, the idea that $250,000 is middle-class assumes a level of legitimate need rather than investigating it. For example, a 2009 New York Times headline trumpeted, “You Try to Live on 500K in This Town.”8 The corresponding article took for granted that the hypothetical earner’s family’s “needs” included a Manhattan apartment, a summer home, two vacations a year, a nanny, a personal trainer, and private school. Designing research on needs on the basis of assumptions about needs seemed unwise to me. Additionally, as we have seen, wealthy people often assert that they are not “really” rich, pointing to even wealthier people. I did not want to build this justification into my sample. I also sought respondents with assets (not including home value) of over $1 million, which was an arbitrary decision. Ultimately, most of the people I talked with had income and wealth well above this level.
I believed that occupation, class background, political beliefs, gender, race, and sexual orientation were important potential sources of variation in how respondents would feel and talk about consumption and privilege. But adjudicating among the effects of these covarying characteristics would not be possible in a sample of this size. Ultimately I decided to make a virtue out of this messiness, sample for range, and look broadly at themes and variations that emerged in interviews. I focused primarily on obtaining variation in whether wealth was inherited or earned.
FINDING RESPONDENTS
It is notoriously difficult to gain access to elites for research purposes.9 Many qualitative studies of wealthy people identify subjects according to their affiliation with organizations such as schools, exclusive clubs, or charitable groups.10 Such studies take this affiliation as a proxy for wealth or affluence and seek subjects through this filter, which was not logical in my case. A few studies use random sampling within a previously defined population.11 Such sampling was not appropriate for a study as exploratory as mine, especially given the covariation of possible factors described above combined with my desire for in-depth conversation, and poses significant challenges in any case.12 I thus decided to use snowball sampling.13 This choice sacrifices generalizability and representativity in favor of depth. However, my goal was not to make generalizable claims about all people in a certain income or wealth bracket but rather to explore the ways they talked about their lifestyle decisions and social positions, as explained in the introduction. Indeed, I was and remain more interested in mapping differences comparatively than in making broad claims about this very diverse population.
With the previously stated parameters in mind, I sought people to interview primarily through friends and colleagues who had attended elite colleges or lived in affluent neighborhoods, asking them to give me the names of their friends or acquaintances. I initially said that I was looking to interview people who were making or had recently made major lifestyle decisions, including buying homes or choosing children’s schools. Because I imagined that potential participants might not want to identify themselves as wealthy (a supposition ultimately borne out by the responses to the word “affluent,” as I discussed in chapter 1), I did not use this criterion explicitly with potential respondents, instead saying I sought “professional” families. The vagueness of what I was looking for, I think, made it hard for me to identify people to talk with, though I did conduct about twelve of the total fifty interviews in this phase.
I eventually realized that several of these people had carried out home renovations. I knew that home renovation was very common in New York and that it was a topic people are often eager to discuss. And from what I had already heard, I believed that this topic would raise the financial, aesthetic, and lifestyle issues I was interested in. Doing a major renovation also indicated that these people owned their homes and had significant disposable income. I therefore shifted my focus to people doing renovations. Like any sampling frame, this approach excluded some possible respondents, notably renters and owners who had not renovated. On the positive side, using this frame allowed me to include people farther removed from my own network in the sample and possibly less similar to each other. That is, people I knew or had interviewed recommended others they did not necessarily know very well, particularly their neighbors, which meant I was not only tapping into their close networks.
As noted in the introduction, I also met a few people (ultimately seven in the core sample of fifty and all five of the noncore sample of unmarried people without children) via organizations that represent progressive wealthy people. (Such organizations include Patriotic Millionaires, Resource Generation, Responsible Wealth, and Wealth for the Common Good, as well as foundations such as Astrea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Bread & Roses Community Fund, Haymarket People’s Fund, and the North Star Fund.) I contacted staff of these organizations, who contacted possible respondents on my behalf. In one case, at the beginning of the project, the staff member chose particular people to approach and then gave me their names once they had agreed. In the other organization—which I contacted further into the project—the staff member sent an email I had composed to about forty-five members. (I asked him if I should use specific numbers for assets and income, and he responded, “I think numbers are good … otherwise people think ‘I’m not wealthy’ or ‘I’m not upper income.’ I see it all the time.” Later I realized that this response anticipated my claim that many affluent people do not want to characterize themselves as such.) Only five people contacted me expressing interest, of whom I ultimately interviewed four.
In general, even after changing the topical focus of the interviews to renovation, I had trouble finding people willing to talk with me, despite the promised confidentiality of their responses. Some friends, colleagues, and acquaintances asked others who refused. One or two who were in these categories told me that they themselves wouldn’t want to do it if I had asked them. Some people who had said they would participate did not respond to repeated emails. One woman who had initially agreed to participate told me she was “swamped” with her kids and therefore too busy, when it turned out that the kids were at summer camp. A few people I contacted through the progressive groups eventually stopped responding to my emails, even though they had agreed to be interviewed. Even more notable was the lack of snowballing after interviews. People I had interviewed who said they would find friends for me to talk with either failed to respond to my follow-up emails or told me the people they’d asked didn’t want to do it. A few women said their husbands would be happy to talk with me, but when I followed up they told me their husbands had refused.
These overt and implicit refusals seemed at least partly related to the fact that affluence and money were topics of the interview. I suspect that the interviewees realized that recruiting other participants would mean that they would have to talk to their peers or friends about money themselves and admit that they had talked about it with me. Occasionally this suspicion was confirmed explicitly. For example, a colleague offered to connect me to a family member who worked in finance but later rescinded the offer, saying that she felt “protective” of him, given the subject matter. Two
potential interview subjects, both women, said they didn’t want to talk with me because the money issues in their lives were too “private” for their husbands (echoing what female respondents I did talk with said about their own husbands).
INCOME AND ASSETS
I have described the sample in the introduction, including both the “core” sample of fifty and the “noncore” sample of five people without children, who were also either younger or older than the core respondents. Here I offer more of a breakdown of their financial situations. I have estimated their total assets given what they told me about their income, savings and investments, spending, and debt, including mortgages—and, in a few cases, based on likely earnings in their occupations. I used public records on housing prices to confirm what respondents told me about their housing costs. I did not use a consistent instrument for asking about financial information, although I should have (another way in which I allowed discomfort with talking about money to affect my practice). In the best cases I was able to ask specific questions about income, assets, debt, and monthly spending, as well as about home values, and I believed that the respondents knew the answers to those questions. In those cases, I am relatively confident that I have a good sense of these people’s finances. But in other cases I do not have comprehensive information. This might be because I did not ask, they would not tell me, or—most often—they said they did not know. Many of my respondents were able to tell me their earned income but not their assets. People from families with wealth have often not inherited the assets they will receive upon the deaths of their parents or other family members. Calculating income for earners with significant assets invested in their businesses is difficult. For example, one respondent’s husband had foregone his salary in changing his private equity business, but he had also recently received a windfall payment of over $5 million. As I have noted, respondents seemed very likely to underreport their assets, and I have also been more comfortable estimating them conservatively. So I believe I have probably underestimated these numbers.
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