Uneasy street The anxieties of affluence

Rachel Sherman, 1970-

Book - 2017

"[The author] draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers--including hedge fund financiers and corporate lawyers, professors and artists, and stay-at-home mothers--to examine their lifestyle choices and their understanding of privilege. [The author] upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing and displaying social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. They wish to be 'normal, ' describing their consumption as reasonable and basic and comparing themselves to those who have more than they do rather than those with less. These ...New Yorkers also want to see themselves as hard workers who give back and raise children with good values, and they avoid talking about money. Although their experiences differ depending on a range of factors, including whether their wealth was earned or inherited, these elites generally depict themselves as productive and prudent, and therefore morally worthy, while the undeserving rich are lazy, ostentatious, and snobbish. [The author] argues that this ethical distinction between 'good' and 'bad' wealthy people characterizes American culture more broadly, and that it perpetuates rather than challenges economic inequality. As the distance between rich and poor widens, [this book] not only explores the real lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us."--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

305.5234/Sherman
0 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 305.5234/Sherman Due Dec 1, 2024
Subjects
Published
Princeton : Princeton University Press [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Rachel Sherman, 1970- (author)
Physical Description
xiii, 308 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780691165509
  • Acknowledgments
  • 1. Orientations to Other: Aspiring to the Middle or Recognizing Privilege
  • 2. Working Hard or Hardly Working?: Productivity and Moral Worth
  • 3. "A Very Expensive Ordinary Life": Conflicted Consumption
  • 4. "Giving Back," Awareness, and Identity
  • 5. Labor, Spending, and Entitlement in Couples
  • 6. Parenting Privilege: Constraint, Exposure, and Entitlement
  • Conclusion
  • Methodological Appendix: Money Talks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

This is an unusual book about wealthy people. More specifically, it considers how affluent individuals understand their privilege and negotiate the tension between their wealth and morality. Sherman (New School) conducted in-depth interviews with 50 parents in 42 households--all of them with annual household incomes greater than $250,000--in New York City. She finds that those individuals made sense of their wealth by convincing themselves that they were "good people": they described themselves as hard workers; they wanted to be prudent consumers; and they felt obligated to "give back" to society. Moreover, to feel morally worthy and avoid entitlement, these rich New Yorkers had to work on their feelings--independence, modest desire, and appreciation--and were eager to pass these behaviors and values to their children. With rich ethnographic detail, this book reveals the often-hidden side of the economic elite: moral ambivalence. This exceptionally lucid book is a work of exemplary sociological imagination and deserves to be widely read. It is an ideal combination of social significance and qualitative skills that may also spark broad discussions and shape public attitudes about economic inequality. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Junpeng Li, Central China Normal University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.