In order to avoid reporting data I am not sure about, I have classified respondents by the primary types of assets they talked about living on—earned income or accumulated assets, usually inherited. Three respondents in the sample claimed that their households had over $5 million in earned income annually; three earned over $3 million; six had over $2 million; and three more earned over $1 million. These are minimum numbers, as in several cases I am sure my respondents were underestimating their incomes and/or not including capital gains income. These fifteen households also had net assets of at least $1 million, although I suspect the number was much higher for most (certainly it rose to $50 million in several cases). In most of these families the wives did not work for pay; in all cases except one, the only or primary income came from finance, corporate, real estate, or consulting work. Seven additional households had incomes of over $500,000 annually. Of these twenty-two total families, I believe at least five had inherited or would inherit wealth in the millions of dollars. Five of the remaining families in the sample earned $250,000–$400,000; two of these had some inherited wealth, but in both cases the respondents told me they had spent most of it. Most of these families still obtained their income through finance, law, and business, but a few had earners working in creative occupations such as advertising, architecture, and nonprofits.
Of the families who lived primarily on income from their assets, eight had assets, mostly inherited, of over $8 million (significantly over in several cases). Two additional families had assets of over $5 million, and four more had assets of over $3 million. Of these fourteen families, ten had inherited the bulk of these assets. A few of these families also earned or had earned incomes of over $500,000. The last inheritor household had an inheritance I estimate at over $1 million. Most people in these households currently worked in the arts, nonprofits, or academia, although a few (those with accumulated rather than inherited assets) either had worked or currently worked in finance, technology, or related occupations.
EXPERT SERVICE PROVIDERS
In the book I also draw on interviews with thirty providers of lifestyle services to elites in a range of fields. These service providers (what Goffman called “curator groups” and Bourdieu called “cultural intermediaries”14) have intimate knowledge of their clients’ decisions and thought processes around lifestyle and play an active role in their choices about spending, accumulating, and giving away money. Many service providers talked at length about their clients, which broadened my data on consumers, and for the most part what they described echoes what I heard.
I had conducted a project on the personal concierge and lifestyle management industry before beginning this research.15 Therefore, interviews with personal concierges as well as ethnography among them preceded those with wealthy consumers and indeed shaped some of my interests in this project. I do not draw on all of those interviews here; I include only those with the twelve concierges who owned or worked in relatively successful businesses and thus had extensive experience with clients. Two of these had also worked as personal assistants.16 Concomitant with the wealthy-consumer interviews, I pursued interviews with eighteen expert service providers in financial and philanthropic advising, interior design, art advising, tutoring, real estate, architecture, personal cooking, wedding photography, and therapy. These interviews were generated by snowball sampling, and these respondents were much easier to find than the wealthy ones. The interviews lasted, on average, 90 minutes and were recorded, transcribed, and coded.
THE INTERVIEW PROCESS
As noted, I come from a privileged background myself, which includes being educated in elite institutions. So I was in some ways quite similar to my interviewees, especially those in more creative-class jobs with progressive politics. Because they were closer to my own social networks and to progressive organizations, I connected with these respondents first. Although I was nervous about talking about money with these people, I did not worry too much about sharing a common language or style. Many of my interviewees lived in Brooklyn, as I do (though none of them lived in my neighborhood), so we shared a local context. When meeting them, I wore standard academic-professional clothing, which is relatively casual; they tended to be informally dressed.
When it came to interviewing people in single-earner wealthy families, however, I was more intimidated, as this was not a world I knew. The first time I planned to drive out to the suburbs to conduct an interview, I felt anxious about my 1994 Honda Civic. It had giant white patches on the roof and hood, products of years of East Coast winter street parking, which stood out against the dark blue of the rest of the car. I was afraid the state of the car might make my interviewees see me as impoverished and thus not talk openly with me. I felt so self-conscious about this that I took the car to two different body shops to find out how much it would cost to have it repainted. The lower quote was $800, which seemed like a lot to spend on an ancient car I rarely drove simply to assuage my status anxiety for a few hours. In the end, I’m not sure anyone I interviewed even noticed the car, which I used to get to only a few of the interviews.
I also felt the need to upgrade my wardrobe for these encounters. I went to the Eileen Fisher outlet store in Secaucus, New Jersey, to buy (on sale!) the kind of expensive yet relaxed clothes that I thought would be appropriate for summertime interviewing of elite people, mostly women. I thought I should seem a little dressy without appearing formal, and ultimately I believe this was the right approach. However, most of the women I interviewed, especially the stay-at-home mothers, dressed quite informally for our meetings. Several met with me in exercise clothes because they had just come from working out—something the upper-class women Susan Ostrander interviewed would never have done. In the end, I felt more comfortable talking with these participants than I had expected to.
Our conversations flowed partly because I possessed the same cultural capital as my interviewees in many areas. I understood their references to elements of their backgrounds and lifestyles, such as boarding schools and colleges, local restaurants and leisure pursuits, and the basics of investments. Having lived in New York for years, I knew the differences among neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn and something about jobs in finance (and much more, of course, about those in academia and nonprofits). Surely there were more issues that I might have tripped over if I had not been from the same background, but these were invisible to me. Some of this implicit knowledge became explicit when my research assistant was unfamiliar with certain luxury goods and services, such as NetJets, the private airplane rental service. Transcribers likewise lacked certain referents of elite consumption and education, such as—to take four examples that came up in a single interview—Chippendale furniture, RISD (the Rhode Island School of Design), Hermès, and Groton (an elite boarding school).
I did try to signal my own cultural capital in these areas, to avoid the possibility that interviewees would construct me as too far outside their worlds. But when it came to furniture, clothing, and accessories, my ignorance became manifest. Although I had heard of mainstream brands and designers, I often did not understand the finer distinctions among them. For the most part I did not reveal my lack of knowledge to respondents, but sometimes my naïveté was helpful in getting them to explain, for example, the characteristics of the suburb they lived in or the stores where they shopped.
The interviews were essentially conversations, focused primarily on consumption practices and definitions of needs, though also covering personal histories and characteristics. These practices included the purchase, design, and renovation of homes; child care and schooling; leisure expenditures; daily consumption of goods and services such as food, clothing, and personal care; and personal services. This approach encouraged respondents to talk about how they think about spending money, where they feel uncomfortable about these decisions, and how lifestyle choices are implicated in family and social relationships. My focus on home and family also presumably led respondents to talk about their concerns about thei
r children and all the issues related to family that I have described. It is possible that if I had been more focused on talking about their choices of goods such as cars or clothing, the conversation would have been different.
In terms of the rhythm and mechanics of the interviews, I had a list of interview questions, but I used it to guide the interviews only in a very general way. Near the end of an interview I would check the guide to make sure I had covered all the central themes. I do have more data on some topics than on others in certain cases, especially when the interviews were time-limited by the respondents. Once I shifted focus in the interviews to look at moral conflicts more specifically, I would ask about entitlement and feelings of deservingness at the end of an interview if the respondent had not brought these issues up already. I also asked about income and assets at the end if these topics had not arisen.
As noted, I usually sensed some kind of discomfort with talking about money, though less so with the people I had found through the progressive organizations and others who were downward-oriented. With practice, I improved at asking people about money, especially about specific income and asset numbers. But in two cases, both with inheritor women married to earners, I felt a kind of interactive barrier, like an invisible wall, preventing me from inquiring about numbers (especially total assets), and thus I did not ask.17 Two or three people refused to share income and/or asset numbers with me even when I did ask. Some of them talked about money euphemistically, referring to “saving our acorns” or “a little boodle of money.” Willa told me the amount of her renovation ($1.5 million) but referred to it as “a lot of beans.” These are formulations with a kind of homey, down-to-earth connotation—the opposite of expressions of excess. Service providers I talked with told me their clients often had trouble talking about money. As I described previously, however, some people expressed relief at being able to discuss these issues.
The interviews ranged from one to four hours in length; the vast majority lasted about two hours. All but one were conducted in person,18 most commonly in the respondent’s home (thirty-three of fifty), in a café or restaurant, or in an office (mine or the respondent’s). All were digitally recorded. With two exceptions, the interviews were professionally transcribed, and they were all coded using Dedoose, by me or by a research assistant.19 I analyzed the information by reading and rereading both complete interviews and groups of coded excerpts.
One often hears the advice to continue interviewing until one reaches “saturation.”20 I did indeed begin to hear the same kinds of narratives and concerns over and over again, especially among two populations: stay-at-home mothers married to earners and liberal inheritors of wealth working in creative-class occupations. I also got to a point at which respondents’ networks began to overlap, especially as I interviewed parents with children at the same school who had been introduced to me through different channels. I feel relatively confident that if I continued interviewing people in these populations I would not hear anything significantly different from what I have already heard. However, I would have liked to be able to interview more earners, male and female. Because high earners typically work so many hours, they are a very hard population to reach. I would also have liked to talk with more spouses of inheritors. And I could have continued pursuing access to the old-money New York families who are better known for their philanthropy. This lack of comprehensiveness is another price I pay for not having limited the categories to begin with, but it leaves plenty of room for others to pursue more precisely delineated research with particular populations.
POSSIBLE CRITIQUES
Scholars of interviewing methods might offer a number of critiques of this research.21 First, they could say that my respondents’ talk might not match their behavior.22 We already know that they consume at a level that is unattainable for the vast majority of people in New York and elsewhere. Maybe they also lie around “eating bonbons all day,” in Stephanie’s words, instead of working hard. And perhaps they violate the behavioral norms they claim to adhere to, treating other people rudely or constantly bragging about money. But their actions are not my central interest. Perhaps these people do not live up to the values they express; but the fact that they do espouse these values of hard work, reasonable consumption, and giving back is key to understanding cultural legitimations of inequality. I read their discourses not as shallow justifications but as portraits of the worthy people they want to be and descriptions of what this worth consists of. Whether their behaviors matched their accounts is less important for my purposes. Furthermore, as I have said, I think trying to adjudicate whether wealthy people are “really” good people not only is impossible but also reproduces individual-level judgments that ultimately legitimate inequality.
Second, one might argue that my respondents’ accounts, even at the level of discourse, do not represent the truth of their experience. These responses could simply be strategic justifications of privilege. Or they might have been elicited by the artificial interview situation and therefore not be rooted in “real” feelings. Perhaps the interviewees assumed that I was less advantaged than they and therefore shaped their responses to minimize their status-competitiveness or conspicuousness and emphasize their being “down to earth.” It is impossible to know exactly what was going on in the minds of interview participants or to know how my presence affected these conversations, so some of this might be going on. And people do take different stances in different contexts and with different interlocutors, although this possibility does not make what they say untrue.
However, even to the extent that respondents were telling me what they imagined I wanted to hear, what they imagined I wanted to hear is precisely the object of interest—what they think constitutes worthy personhood. These accounts of good personhood were consistent and often emerged without my asking about them. As Sherry Ortner has noted, through interviews one can see “cultural patterns across texts” that “amount to a cultural discourse.”23
More important, my respondents gave many kinds of examples, though not always intentionally, to support my sense that they felt conflicted. They also communicated indecision and struggle through various elements of their speech, particularly hesitation, vehemence, and word choice, which I have noted in various places throughout the book.24 Their explicit expressions of relief to be talking about these issues and their tendency to look to me for validation also suggest that the worries they talked about were truly felt. More concretely, as noted, I verified assets (especially housing prices) wherever possible and never came across an instance of people having exaggerated their worth, though some had underestimated their home value, supporting my claim that they tend to minimize their affluence. And, as I have shown, the service providers I interviewed independently recounted seeing their clients struggle with these tensions around money and privilege.
A third critique might be that even if one accepts my claims about these respondents, they were probably unusual relative to other privileged people. As I have suggested, most media representations of wealthy and affluent people do not describe the conflicted, morally striving wealthy parents I have written about in this book. They resemble instead the stereotypical “entitled” wealthy. Furthermore, my interviewees constantly invoked such “bad” rich people, in their social networks or their families, as foils for themselves. So perhaps the liberal New Yorkers I have studied are exceptions, and most wealthy people do not share these fears about being illegitimately entitled or care about being morally worthy.
However, such a possibility seems counterintuitive to me. It stands to reason that most privileged people (like people in other social classes25) want to feel morally worthy. In the United States, as noted, such people are responding to a long tradition of egalitarianism, as well as to a more recent shift to meritocratic criteria for moral worth. And these shifts are occurring in the midst of rising, and increasingly publicly discussed, inequality. It would be hard not to have to deal with moral challenges to entitlement in this context
in some way, even if these challenges are not apparent to others. Again, wanting to interpret oneself as morally worthy can coexist with other kinds of beliefs and behaviors.
Nonetheless, a range of characteristics probably shapes how people both feel and talk about privilege and their ideas about deserving it. My interviewees are not only politically liberal but also largely secular, highly educated, and professional, and their discourses may differ from those of people who vary on these dimensions. Even within the group of people I interviewed, discourses and practices differ based on some combination of political views, source of wealth, class background, and social networks. Furthermore, being at a life stage of family formation has influenced their thinking on these issues relative to that at earlier moments in their lives, as we have seen.26
Further research could, and should, explore differences in orientations among wealthy people more systematically on the basis of these characteristics and at different life stages, as well as on the basis of gender and race/ethnicity. Microcultures of wealth are likely to differ in different locales, even within the United States. National contexts probably also influence the discourses and actions of elites around their privilege because cultural repertoires of merit and entitlement vary and are, in fact, reflected in and reproduce systems of economic distribution.27 Finally, it would be useful to investigate change over time in elites’ self-conceptions, although such an approach would face a challenging dearth of evidence. These ideas may respond both to long-term changes in cultural notions of meritocracy and to shorter-term economic and political cycles that influence the prevalence and salience of inequality.
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