CONFIDENTIALITY
I have been extremely concerned about preserving anonymity in writing about these respondents, given the intimacy and privacy of some of what they told me. My central concern has not been that they would be identifiable to the general reader, which I believe is essentially impossible, but rather that people who knew I had interviewed their friends or neighbors would be able to identify them. Thus I have been less concerned about the people who came to the study in such a way that they are unlikely to be identifiable—that is, no one knows they spoke with me—and more concerned about those who entered through their own close friends, who may recognize them in these pages.
I refer to the participants with pseudonyms, and I have modified some of their characteristics. I do not describe people physically or link them to identifiable features of their homes, a necessity that unfortunately precludes including richer ethnographic detail. I do not include a table of all of the participants and their characteristics because it could be used to identify respondents through the process of elimination. And I do not always identify which respondents were married to each other. As readers will have noticed, I sometimes refer to individuals without pseudonyms in order to avoid creating characters who can be identifiable across the text. (That is, if a certain characteristic is likely to identify a respondent to someone who knows she spoke with me, I usually do not attach a name to the characteristic.) In order to avoid identifying respondents who had built new homes, I refer to their projects as renovations. In masking certain characteristics, I have been attentive to the possible consequences of my decisions and have avoided making changes that are likely to affect the reader’s capacity to evaluate my argument (such as major changes to demographic or biographical characteristics of my informants).28
The most complicated and perhaps controversial decision in this regard is not to identify named respondents by race. This choice leads to the risk that racial differences will not be acknowledged and that the reader will assume that all speakers are white. It also removes the reader’s ability to imagine that certain characteristics may have to do with race. But because I interviewed several clusters of people of color who knew each other, I felt that the risk of mutual identification was high enough that I was obliged ethically to mask them this way. (Indeed, several people of color worried that they would be identifiable to the larger world if I used their real characteristics; for example, one woman asked me not to identify her Manhattan neighborhood because so few affluent people of color live there that she thought she would be identifiable if I did.) As I have said, the small number of people of color in the sample and their variation in terms of other characteristics meant that I found few systematic differences related to race. Where I have found such differences or possible patterns, I have described them without identifying particular respondents by race or by using pseudonyms assigned just for that section of text.
JUDGMENT
As I have suggested, popular representations of wealth, wealthy people, and especially wealthy consumption are often voyeuristic. Such representations also mobilize images of rich people as—at least potentially—morally unworthy. Indeed, it is precisely these kinds of representations that my respondents are struggling against. I have struggled with them, too. Ultimately, of course, my point has been to illuminate the normative issues surrounding these discussions, but to work in the midst of them was hard. It has felt almost impossible to write and talk about these consumers without participating in exoticizing, sensationalistic curiosity about wealth and/or making, or seeming to make, moral evaluations. Just describing some of their consumption practices can feel prurient, and simply stating how much money they have or describing their homes can feel judgmental. It is hard to write that certain people nearly always travel first class or spent a million dollars on a home renovation without participating in preexisting cultural ideas about legitimate needs. I have tried to find a tone that avoids judgment entirely, though I have doubtless not always succeeded. Sometimes I have struggled even to choose particular words. For example, when describing my respondents’ lifestyles, I have been tempted to use the word cushy, but it seems slightly negative. I have usually chosen comfortable, which sounds to me less negative but more euphemistic.
I have also wondered whether the empathy I feel for the people I talked with is blinding me to the contradictions in their accounts or, conversely, if my own critical politics are standing in the way of my comprehension of them. I have tried to be attentive to both these tendencies as well as to follow standard procedures for coding, returning to interview text repeatedly, and sharing my work with others.
I have experienced a wide variety of responses to this work from readers and audiences. Many readers have acknowledged that they felt judgmental of respondents while reading this work, and some have encouraged me to try to forestall potential judgments by highlighting this tendency up front, as I did in the introduction. Some friends and colleagues, usually those from less privileged backgrounds, have thought I was being too generous to respondents because they judged them harshly (“What assholes!”). Other friends, especially those who have more class privilege, were more sympathetic to these interviewees. One friend said it was “like reading about myself.” I have also sometimes felt that I have struck a nerve among academic readers who may be using some of the same interpretative moves I describe here to avoid feeling privileged themselves.
I still feel anxious that my respondents will feel their trust has been violated, even if they are not identifiable, because they may feel that they are being judged or that their private emotions and struggles have been brought to light here in a way they did not expect. My anxiety about this is another indicator of the strength of the prohibition on talking publicly about money and privilege. However, I hope that these people will not think I have written about them sensationalistically or gratuitously. And I believe that it is culturally, politically, and sociologically important to try to foster conversations about money, morality, and selfhood in the context of the vast class inequalities that mark the contemporary United States.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1.John, a young progressive person with wealth, told me a similar story, of a friend who was buying a penthouse apartment but insisted as a condition of the sale that the PH be removed from the elevator and replaced by the floor number.
2.Fussell 1983, chapter 1.
3.Keller 2005, ix; see also Ortner 2003.
4.Of course this equality has always been, and remains, imaginary, given the long and multifaceted history of the marginalization and oppression of Native Americans, people of color, women, immigrants, and workers of all kinds. See, e.g., Nakano Glenn 2002; Zinn 1980.
5.On the American Dream, see Cullen 2004; Hochschild 1995; McCall 2013.
6.Nakano Glenn 2002.
7.DeMott 1990. See also Kendall 2005 on “consensus framing.”
8.See, e.g., Bartels 2008; Cooper 2014; David and Kim 2015; Hacker 2006; Hacker and Pierson 2011; Heiman 2015; Katz 2012; Lane 2011; Pugh 2015; Schor 2016; Sennett 2007; Standing 2011.
9.E.g., Krugman 2002.
10.“In 2010, the top one percent owned more than 34% of net worth, and the next 9% owned an additional 40%, leaving just over 25% of net worth for the remaining households” (Keister 2014, 353). See also Hacker and Pierson 2011; Keister 2005; Keister and Moller 2000; Piketty 2014; Saez 2015.
11.Chetty et al. 2015; Norton and Ariely 2011.
12.Frank 2007; Kenworthy 2015; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009.
13.Pew Research Center 2016. They define “middle-income” people as those adults with annual adjusted household incomes of between two-thirds of the national median and double the median.
14.Dwyer and Wright 2012; Wright and Dwyer 2003.
15.There was always some tension between the type of work seen as middle class (nonmanual work usually) and these lifestyle possibilities, which, when unions were stronger, were more often available even to manual workers conside
red “working class” (see Halle 1984). For a recent discussion of the concept of the middle class, see Heiman et al. 2012.
16.Anat Shenker-Osorio (2013) argues that “middle class” is “a frozen phrase, no longer rooted in the meaning of component parts that ought to designate economic status between two others. Instead, it has become a status, a brand—a label you opt to adopt.”
17.Max Weber (2003 [1958]) famously argued that American Puritans, influenced by Calvinist theology, worked hard to show that they had been “chosen” by God to be among the “elect.” Closely coupled with disciplined hard work was disciplined consumption. Weber drew on the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, whose Almanac brimmed with aphorisms promoting industry and economy and eschewing excessive consumption. Franklin’s maxims included, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” “Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,” and “Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure when he is really selling himself a slave to it.” Hard work and prudent consumption led, in Weber’s view, to the accumulation of capital that was the foundation of capitalism in the United States.
18.See, e.g., Gilens 1999; Katz 2013.
19.Veblen 1994 [1899]. In Veblen’s model, even leisure became conspicuous. Women and servants, for example, wore impractical clothes, such as corsets and uniforms, to show that they didn’t need to work, which reflected positively on the husband/master.
20.Fan 2016; Levin 2016. Perhaps ironically, both articles refer to, and were likely inspired by, a reality TV show, Ultra Rich Asian Girls of Vancouver. For a comprehensive analysis of the portrayal of wealthy people in the media, including a discussion of this type of “price-tag framing,” see Kendall 2005. For scholarly research on the new rich in China and their moral quandaries, see Osburg 2013.
21.Piff 2014; Piff et al. 2010; Piff et al. 2012; Vohs et al. 2006. See Korndörfer et al. 2015 for a review of this literature and a contradictory set of findings. See Lamont 2000 on working-class men’s views of “people above” as, among other things, snobbish, competitive, and uncaring.
22.See Khan 2011, whose definition matches that of my interviewees. Annette Lareau (2011) uses the term in a different way: to describe a sense of belonging in particular environments and the feeling that one has the right to ask questions and receive attention from others. See Sherman 2017.
23.Frank 2008; Freeland 2012.
24.Sengupta 2012.
25.This term is typically defined as describing someone with investable assets of $1 million or more (see Hay 2013, 3).
26.See McCall 2013 for a nuanced discussion of media coverage of income inequality since 1980.
27.McCall 2016. Her data show that the level of concern with inequality was also high in the mid-1990s.
28.Bourdieu 1984; Daloz 2012; Khan 2012; Mears 2014; Schor 1998, 2007; Veblen 1994 [1899]. On the super-rich, see, e.g., Beaverstock and Hay 2016. Given the difficulty of accessing elites, scholars tend to look at what is visible (e.g., Mears 2014; Spence 2016). Some recent research looks at men’s “consumption” of women’s sexual and embodied capital in their pursuit not only of distinction but also of economic and social capital (e.g., Hoang 2015; Mears 2015b).
29.See Khan 2012; Ostrander 1984; Ostrower 1995. Research on membership in social clubs, for example, tends to highlight the exclusionary aspects of these organizations and spaces (Chin 2011; Holden Sherwood 2013; Kendall 2002). Recent research on French social clubs has examined these spaces of elite positioning comparatively, noting a corresponding variation in (and struggle over) forms of sociability and social capital accumulation and deployment, but this work retains a concern with distinction and exclusion (Cousin and Chauvin 2014). Research on schooling primarily focuses on how parents seek a leg up for their children in educational institutions (Johnson 2006; Lareau and Weininger 2008; in the UK context, see, e.g., Devine 2004; Reay 1998, 2005a; Vincent and Ball 2007).
Furthermore, researchers have shown that even as social institutions become more outwardly meritocratic and diverse in terms of race/ethnicity and gender, they still function as sites of exclusion in less obvious ways. Lauren Rivera (2015), for example, shows that even as more people of color graduate from college, and even as elite firms pay lip service to hiring them, privileged white interviewers often, though not consciously, exclude these newcomers in favor of candidates more similar to themselves culturally. Shamus Khan (2011) has argued that despite the increasingly diverse population of students in elite schools such as St. Paul’s and the use of “hard work” (rather than entitlement through birth) as a justification for privilege, those who show themselves to have a sense of “ease” are more likely to be seen as truly belonging to the elite. Thus the exclusion once based on obvious mechanisms such as explicitly restricted admission to country clubs or elite colleges, or on the refusal to hire certain kinds of people for certain jobs, has become more embedded in less visible cultural processes.
30.Khan 2011; Khan and Jerolmack 2013.
31.Lamont 1992. See also Sayer 2005; Sherman n.d.
32.Reay 2005b. On working-class people’s lived experience, see, e.g., Bettie 2003; Hochschild 2016; Jensen 2004; Kefalas 2003; Lewis 1993; MacLeod 1995; Rubin 1992 [1976]; Sennett and Cobb 1993 [1973]; Silva 2013; Skeggs 1997; Willis 1979. For work on poverty, see Desmond 2016; Edin and Kefalas 2005; Edin and Lein 1997; Edin and Shaefer 2015; Goffman 2014; Hays 2003; Newman and Massengill 2006; J. Sherman 2009; Young 2004. On the middle class in the United States, see Ehrenreich 1989; Heiman 2015; Newman 1999. On race and the middle class, see Jackson 2001; Lacy 2007; Pattillo 2007, 2013.
33.Many studies compare “middle-class” people to those who are “working class”; in such studies the middle-class person is usually defined as having a college education and/or a professional or managerial job. Because the comparison of interest is to those below, these studies usually do not differentiate between middle class and upper middle or upper class (e.g., Cucchiara 2013; Lareau 2011; Streib 2015). Studies explicitly focused on the “professional middle” may use education as the differentiating factor (Nelson 2010), which makes it difficult to see how to define an “upper class” (because there are limits to how much education a person can have); others focus on the “upper middle class” without clearly defining it (Johnson 2006). Defining class according to education, without reference to income, actually makes an “upper-class” categorization impossible (see Sherman 2017). On parenting and/or education, see also Ball et al. 2004; Devine 2004; Irwin and Elley 2011; Johnson 2006; Pugh 2009.
34.Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Social Register was a directory of the names, addresses, and other information pertaining to the elite; inclusion defined membership in the establishment in much of the twentieth century.
35.Ostrander 1984. See also Kaplan Daniels 1988 for a study of women in a similar class position, focusing on their work as volunteers.
36.Baltzell 1964, 1991.
37.For a discussion of this transition, see Khan 2011, chapter 1. See also Ostrower 1995; Savage and Williams 2008.
38.See Karabel 2005; Lemann 1999.
39.Hay 2013; Reay et al. 2007; Rothkopf 2009; Sklair 2001.
40.Brooks 2000; Khan 2011. For recent synopses of the literature on cultural omnivorousness, see Karademir Hazir and Warde 2016 and Warde 2015.
41.Sassen 1988, 1990.
42.Fiscal Policy Institute 2010; McGeehan 2012; Roberts 2014.
43.Gregory 2014.
44.Roberts 2014. Roberts also shows that in 2013 the citywide poverty rate was 21 percent, meaning that 1.7 million people were living below the poverty line. In 2015 a New York Times poll found that 51 percent of New Yorkers felt they were “not getting by” (Burns and Russonello 2015).
45.Fry and Taylor 2012. The level of residential racial segregation, though high, is actually decreasing somewhat. See Alba and Romalewski 2017.
46.Martin 2015.
47.The city has particular cultural characteristics, and its
residents are likely to differ from their counterparts elsewhere. But this is true in any location, and I thought it made sense to keep a cultural context constant rather than aim for representativity across a broad population (impossible in a sample of this size, in any case, and especially hard to obtain when looking at elites) (Page et al. 2013; Small 2009). See appendix.
48.On “elites,” conceptualized as those with social, economic, cultural, and political power, see Khan 2012. Social class is a complicated concept to define and to measure. It can be defined in terms of one’s location in a distribution of income and wealth; in terms of various features related to occupation; in terms of ownership of various forms of capital; or (especially when it comes to the middle class) in terms of particular kinds of consumption. For discussions of these possibilities, see Halle 1984; Lacy 2007; Lareau and Conley 2008; Wright 2005. Typically, empirical researchers using the concept of class deploy some combination of income, education, and occupation (which usually cluster together, though see Halle 1984) to indicate class position. The “upper class” in the United States has traditionally been defined not by income (though high income, wealth, and control of capital were presumed) but by belonging to particular elite institutions (Domhoff 1971; Ostrander 1984). As those institutions have waned in importance and elites have become more diverse, the “top 1 percent” has become a more common category of analysis (e.g., Page et al. 2013). Such a focus on distribution, like my focus here, fails to theorize the differences among class locations of people whose wealth is earned versus inherited, who have different relationships to capital or different levels of autonomy and authority, or who possess different ratios of economic to cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). It would be useful to revisit this question. There are meaningful theoretical as well as empirical differences in my sample—for example, between families that control large amounts of global capital and those who are salaried and could be thought of as “upper middle class” or “professional-managerial class” (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979). However, I believe the distributional definition is appropriate for my primary purpose here of looking at lived experience.
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