49.See, e.g., Khimm 2011. Defining elites as the top 1 percent or the top .1 percent may make sense for studies of political influence. But those in the top 5 percent or even 10 percent, despite garnering lower returns in recent years than the top .1 percent, remain extremely privileged relative to the rest of the population. To imply that there is no meaningful difference in lived experience between the top 5 or 10 percent and the median, for example, is problematic.
50.Rivera 2014.
51.Estimates of the top percentages vary significantly depending on how and when they are calculated (see Bricker et al. 2016). Lisa Keister uses data from the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to place the cutoff for the top 5 percent of income nationally at $205,335 in 2010 (personal communication). Emmanuel Saez (2015) claims that in 2012 an income of $394,000 was the bottom of the top 1 percent nationally; $161,000 was the bottom of the top 5 percent. According to Business Insider, in 2015, to be in the top 1 percent in New York City required an income of $608,584, whereas being in the top 5 percent required $246,596 (Elkins 2015). Liu (2012) uses data on New York City tax filers (not the same as households) to suggest that the cutoff for the top 1 percent in 2008 was $595,029, whereas in 2009 it had dropped to $492,422.
The top strata of wealth are also hard to define; Keister (2014) draws on SCF data to set the top 1 percent at $6.8 million in 2010, in which year she also calculates that the threshold for the top 5 percent was $1,863,800 (personal communication). Bricker et al. (2016) show estimates of the threshold for the top 1 percent in net worth as varying from almost $4 million to almost $8 million in 2012. Reports of the average incomes or assets of the top 1 percent are skewed because of the extremely high values at the very top, which is why I use thresholds. And medians are a better indicator of the middle of the category. On the question of whether $250,000 is “really” privileged in New York City, see the appendix.
52.The sampling process and all my methodological decisions are described in detail in the appendix.
53.I also interviewed five wealthy people who were unmarried and childless, either younger or older than the rest of the sample. I refer to people in this “noncore” sample occasionally throughout the book, and their discourses are broadly similar to those of the others.
54.U.S. Census Bureau 2016. See also Roberts 2014.
55.Keister 2014. I have estimated net worth based on what respondents told me about their incomes, assets, monthly spending, and debt and on public records of property values. See appendix.
56.Khan 2011.
57.Several interviewees who did not have advanced degrees were married to spouses who did.
58.Two of these women worked very occasionally for pay.
59.Page et al. 2013.
60.Those who did not own homes had owned homes previously and were between places or were seriously considering buying expensive homes.
61.For example, Margaret worked in a nonprofit; her husband worked in the entertainment industry. Her household income at the time I interviewed her was almost exactly $250,000; they had assets of $80,000, a few thousand dollars in debt, and no family money. She and her husband owned their home (though they paid about $4,000 to the bank every month for the mortgage), but it was in a less affluent Brooklyn neighborhood. Their children were in public school, and Margaret expected them to remain there. They rarely traveled and were the only people in my sample who did not have a housecleaner. A couple of additional respondents had been wealthy but had encountered financial problems; for example, Rebecca’s renovation and unexpected medical bills had nearly bankrupted her when she and her husband both lost their lucrative jobs in the 2008 recession, although she had some inherited wealth to fall back on.
62.On “consumption work,” see Weinbaum and Bridges 1976.
63.Bourdieu 1984.
64.For more detail on these interviews, see the appendix. On the relations between expert service workers and their clients, see Sherman 2014. On personal concierges specifically, see Sherman 2010 and 2011.
65.See, e.g., Domhoff 2010; Johnson 2006, 123–124; Ortner 2003, 10.
66.In some cases this refusal was quite productive because it allowed me to ask why they didn’t want to talk about it.
67.See Chin 2011 for a similar finding.
68.Ostrander 1984, 35, 26.
69.Ibid., 101.
70.Service providers I interviewed tried to refrain from being judgmental of how their clients spent money, often saying, “Well, I don’t want to be judgmental, but …” Both the idea that it is inappropriate to judge others and the desire to avoid exposure because it can lead to judgment produce silences around money, entitlement, and inequality. See Strieb (2015, 35) on avoiding class judgment in a different context.
71.Streib 2015, 36; see also Bonilla-Silva 2006.
72.Kluegel and Smith 1986; Lamont 1992, 2000; McCall 2013; McNamee and Miller 2004; Schulz 2012.
73.See McNamee and Miller 2004. Note that it is often referred to as the “Protestant work ethic,” which minimizes the consumption dimension.
74.In the sense in which Khan (2011) uses the term. On money and morality, see Carruthers and Espeland 1998; Kornhauser 1994; Lamont 1992, 2000; Zelizer 1994.
75.Hochschild 1989b.
76.This concept comes from Gramsci (1971). For an ethnography of classed “common sense” in the United States, see Heiman 2015.
77.This focus on selfhood mirrors, in a sense, a similar phenomenon among working-class young people in the “mood economy,” who blame themselves for failing to achieve the trappings of adulthood, such as a home, steady job, and family (Silva 2013; see also Lewis 1993).
78.See Small 2009.
79.Graham 1999; Lacy forthcoming. Annette Lareau has begun a qualitative interview study comparing white and African American high-net-worth families, but it is too early to have results (personal communication).
CHAPTER ONE: ORIENTATIONS TO OTHERS
1.I did not ask my respondents explicitly about what social class they thought they were in. The concept of social class is complicated, and it is hard to know how people understand it. Furthermore, we know that Americans tend to identify as middle class and to think that their income is average. Instead, I attended carefully to how they talked about their class location and about their sense of themselves as privileged or not. I paid special attention to what other people they tended to talk about and in what ways, and I occasionally asked who they compared themselves to. Sometimes toward the end of interviews I asked direct questions about their feelings about people with less or more than they had if they had not mentioned this theme.
2.See Leach et al. 2002 for a social-psychological typology of characteristics they argue predict different forms of recognition or denial of advantage.
3.Leach et al. 2002; Pratto and Stewart 2012. On whiteness, see also Frankenberg 1993; Lipsitz 1998; McIntosh 1988.
4.See Harth et al. 2008.
5.For a review, see Smith and Pettigrew 2014. See also Frank 2007.
6.“The maternalistic dynamic is based on the assumption of a superordinate-subordinate relationship” (Rollins 1985, 186). Maternalism is a “unilateral positioning of the employer as a benefactor who receives personal thanks, recognition, and validation of self from the domestic worker” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, 172).
7.Rivera (2014) also makes this point.
8.See Cooper 2014; Pugh 2015.
9.In this discussion I have assigned different pseudonyms to these women than those they are given elsewhere in the book to avoid making them identifiable. See appendix.
10.I think of affluent as meaning less wealthy than wealthy, and also as a euphemism for wealthy. Friends and colleagues I have asked about this, however, often disagree, believing that the two words are essentially equivalent, which is what Pam and Beverly seemed to believe as well.
11.See, e.g., Jackson 2001; Lacy 2007; Pattillo 2013.
12.One woman’s father had married into extreme wealth when she was in middle school, creating
in her what she called a “dual consciousness” as both a wealthy and a not-wealthy person. Another respondent had lived in a more lower-middle-class style for several years after his wealthy grandfather got angry at his parents and cut them off.
13.It is impossible to say with this kind of evidence which comes first—one’s orientation to privilege or the diversity of one’s relationships (or politics or job). As the quotations I have shared show, once people enter certain kinds of environments, such as jobs or schools, those environments will provide reference points in the form of people with more or fewer resources. But of course one has made the choice between public or private school, or between working in one sector or the other, in the first place—choices that presumably have come from some preexisting orientation.
14.Leach et al. (2002, 156) refer to “strategic modesty” about privilege as one way people deal with guilt over their advantages.
CHAPTER TWO: WORKING HARD
OR HARDLY WORKING?
1.Unless these issues came up on their own—which they often did—I usually saved this question for the end of the interview. I thought it might provoke negative responses, because it so directly alluded to the interviewees’ privilege and could imply that I thought they did not deserve what they had.
2.See McCall 2013.
3.Gaztambide-Fernández 2009; Ho 2009; Khan 2011; Khan and Jerolmack 2013; Lacy 2007; McNamee and Miller 2004. For similar discourses in France and England, see Power et al. 2016. McCall (2016) finds that the top 1 percent are especially likely, relative to other income groups and other possible factors, to agree that hard work is important for getting ahead. Khan 2011 shows how young people at an elite boarding school learn to deploy this discourse.
4.Folbre 1991; Kaplan Daniels 1987; Sherman 2010.
5.Kaplan Daniels 1987, 1988.
6.As we will see in chapter 5, her husband was careful to recognize her labor as contributing, which helped her frame herself this way.
7.Lareau 2011; Rivera 2015.
8.Power et al. 2016, 311.
9.Brown et al. 2016, 200.
10.Heather Beth Johnson (2006) has also shown that affluent people simultaneously recognize and deny their advantages. Her interviewees agreed that having educational advantages provided a leg up but also asserted a strong belief in the American Dream and equality of opportunity, even when confronted very explicitly with this contradiction.
11.I do not include Vera in the core sample of fifty because she is not a parent. See appendix.
12.On media framing of structural issues as individual ones, see Kendall 2005.
13.Respondents with inherited wealth who also earned significant amounts of money were typically less conflicted about it than those who lived primarily on their inherited wealth. These respondents were able to rely on the “earner” discourse of moral worth while also avoiding the anxiety felt by earners who lacked a safety net.
14.Odendahl 1990; Ostrander 1995a.
15.Ostrower (1995, 108) also makes this point.
16.Thaler 1999. See also Zelizer 1994 on “special monies” and Zelizer 2012 on “relational accounting.” On the changing of the meaning of money according to the source, see Carruthers and Espeland 1998; Kornhauser 1994.
17.Ostrander 1984; see also Kaplan Daniels 1988.
18.Two of these women had some paid part-time work, but very few hours, and they spent most of their time on unpaid household and family work. They would not have defined themselves as “stay-at-home mothers,” partly for the reasons I describe in this section.
19.Stone 2007. See also Blair-Loy 2003.
20.Weinbaum and Bridges (1976) coined this term, although they are not referring to the lifestyle work of wealthy women but rather to everyday consumption tasks such as grocery shopping.
21.Folbre 1991; Sherman 2010.
22.Folbre and Nelson 2000; Strasser 1982; Weinbaum and Bridges 1976.
23.Kaplan Daniels 1988.
24.African American women have worked for pay since the end of slavery in much greater numbers than white women and have been morally judged on the basis of not doing so, which has implications for their decisions about leaving paid work (Barnes 2015).
25.She had chosen this amount not because it reflected the market value of her work, which she thought would in fact be higher, but because it was the amount of dividend income she could generate from her assets while also paying taxes and her children’s private school tuition. Hence, to call it a “salary” was purely symbolic.
26.Macdonald 2011.
27.See Silva 2013 for a related argument about working-class youth: that the “mood economy” leads them to explain their economic position in terms of individual affect, thus assigning responsibility only to themselves.
CHAPTER THREE: “A VERY EXPENSIVE
ORDINARY LIFE”
1.On “ordinariness,” see Savage et al. 2001; Sayer 2005.
2.The same is true of judgments we might make of their lifestyle choices.
3.Zelizer 1994, 2012.
4.Bourdieu 1984.
5.Ellen was one of the expert service providers I interviewed, not part of the sample of fifty wealthy parents, because she lives in another city, but I did talk with her about her experience of privilege as well as about her work.
6.On managing feeling, see Hochschild 1989a.
7.See Frank 2007.
8.See Pugh 2009 on children’s consumption as a mechanism of belonging.
9.Because he had no children, I include Nathan in the noncore sample. See appendix.
10.Sherman 2011.
11.Many of these experts work on commission or otherwise receive a percentage of what the client spends, so in that sense they have a monetary incentive to encourage higher levels of spending. However, those I interviewed described themselves as more concerned with making clients happy than with persuading them to buy the more expensive items. On how luxury hotel workers similarly cultivate entitlement among hotel guests, see Sherman 2007.
12.The majority estimated that they spent $240,000–$360,000 ($20,000–$30,000 per month). These estimates were imprecise, often simply referring to the monthly total on the credit card statement, not always including kids’ school tuition, which was sometimes paid for by grandparents or other family members, or mortgages.
CHAPTER FOUR: “GIVING BACK,”
AWARENESS, AND IDENTITY
1.Other researchers have also identified this cultural imperative. See, e.g., Ostrander 1984, p. 36 and chapter 6; Power et al. 2016; Whillans et al. 2016.
2.See Sayer 2005, chapter 7, on egalitarianism and interpersonal relations across class.
3.Scholars such as Diana Kendall (2002), for example, have pointed out the tension between the attempts of the upper-class women she studied to help others and the exclusive organizations they construct through which to do this. Furthermore, as some of these researchers have noted, most of these women’s charitable giving benefits their own communities. On these issues see also Chin 2011; Odendahl 1990; Ostrander 1984, 1995a; Ostrower 1995; Silver 2007.
4.Note that the “hair shirt” is a religious image of extreme self-sacrifice and discomfort, not unlike Ellen’s reference to a “vow of poverty” in the previous chapter.
5.Nicole similarly suggested that “nice” people should not be judged. As I noted in chapter 3, she was upset that her husband’s family members judged her for consuming in a way they found excessive but she thought was reasonable in New York. She said, “I think the reason why I feel like, really annoyed at being judged, is because it feels really unfair. I tried very hard to not, like—I can’t afford to be that kind of person. And I’m not that kind of person. And if you want to meet that kind of person, I’ll introduce you to them. And guess what? They’re really nice, and you shouldn’t give them grief either, you know?” Nicole suggested that being “that kind of person”—illegitimately entitled and thus worthy of critique—is based not only on how much one has but also on how “nice” one is.
6.I fo
und this symbolic requirement in my study of luxury hotels (Sherman 2007); workers understood reciprocity and niceness as the basis for entitlement to highly personalized luxury service. Reciprocity from guests to workers was one of the key means by which the obvious inequality between them came to seem normal. When guests treated workers with friendliness and gratitude, the class difference between them faded into the background. See also Sayer 2005, chapter 7.
7.This is according to my very rough calculations, which were especially difficult to make in the case of inheritors. Many interviewees could not estimate with confidence how much they gave away. See appendix.
8.Although I tried to ask all interviewees about their charitable habits, I did not address the topic in as much detail as I did some of the other issues. Thus I cannot make precise claims about recipient organizations or amounts.
9.For example, one African American man worked to “bring fitness to communities of color.” Creating this access is one way he could “give back and make a difference,” which mattered to him partly because of health problems in his family.
10.Ostrander 1984; see also Kaplan Daniels 1988; Odendahl 1990.
11.Chin 2011; Domhoff 1971; Kaplan Daniels 1988; Odendahl 1990; Ostrower 1995. See Silver 2007 for a review.
12.See Kaplan Daniels 1988 for an in-depth study of the “invisible careers” of wealthy women volunteers.
13.One suburban woman explained to me about the Junior League: “I moved here, and I was like, ‘What am I going to do,’ right? And I don’t know anyone. So what the Junior League really does—it’s a bunch of women that just want to volunteer. And a way to do it. They need a forum, to [do it]—so, it’s all about giving back. But you need a forum to do it. So they already have set up things that you can do.”
14.Many New York elites are, of course, deeply invested in being patrons of the arts and other social and educational institutions. These are likely to be the old-money and super-rich elites I did not interview (see, e.g., Ostrower 1995).
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