Poor rich

After examining the relationships between staff and customers in luxury hotels and palaces, Rachel Sherman enters the apartments of wealthy New Yorkers and highlights the conflicts of young couples of wealthy parents in a society where merit and work are valued. The book opens with Mr. Weber’s famous theodicy of happiness, which emphasizes that “happiness wants to be “legitimate””. In the series of 50 interviews conducted with a “new elite” marked by meritocracy, R. Sherman highlights the ambiguous relationship with money of these wealthy people who, despite an expensive lifestyle, share the aspirations of the middle class. The respondents are Americans who graduated from the most elite universities, defend economic liberalism as well as openness and diversity and work for many in finance, marketing, banking or advertising. Newly wealthy – the author specifies that the heirs she met are not from the old American aristocracy (p. 15) – they all have annual incomes placing them in the richest 5% of New York City, to which is added, for many of them, a substantial patrimony (see note 51, p. 263-264).

R. Sherman shows that the legitimation of wealth is guided by the idea that the essential thing is not how much one has, but how one relates to what one has. The respondents do not reinvent their story to legitimize it, but rather make efforts to show themselves to be worthy of this accumulated money. They thus recognize that the level reached by their income is not always legitimate, but will consider this money deserved if “forms of disciplined actions” (p. 90) are deployed in return. This thesis is developed in the 6 chapters of the book, underpinned by the enigma contained in the title – Uneasy Street. The Anxieties of Affluence – financial ease tinged with anxiety.

A moral aspiration to the ordinary

The first chapter explores how respondents perceive their privileges and situate themselves in social space. R. Sherman proposes a binary typology and distinguishes respondents ” downard-oriented “, who do not hesitate to acknowledge their ease in comparison, in particular, to those who have less than them, to those surveyed” upward-oriented “, who consider themselves to be middle class, citing as evidence the wealth and lifestyle of some of their acquaintances whom they know to be more well-off. These two forms of assessment of their position shed light on both the degree of closure and openness of the environment in which the respondents operate and their political orientation. Despite these differences, the latter all wish to “be morally worthy of (their) fortune” (p. 56) and to this end emphasize that they share the aspirations of the middle class.

The respondents’ efforts are deployed in three directions, set out in chapters 2 to 4. A first moral imperative is to remind the sociologist of their “rigorous work ethic” (p. 74) – whether it is paid or not. For example, the author met many housewives, often highly educated and having previously worked, who insist on their many daily tasks (children, organizing the entire household, charitable activities, etc.), anxious to break with the image of wealthy women whose days are mainly devoted to maintaining their bodies and their image.

The imperative of “prudence” (p. 90) in consumption constitutes a second characteristic feature of the efforts deployed to deserve one’s fortune and to establish this moral aspiration to the ordinary. R. Sherman discusses here the argument of T. Veblen, who insists on the ostentatious and distinctive dimension of the consumption of the leisure class. The act of spending, on the contrary, is not self-evident. R. Sherman shows the unease that surrounds it, in particular when prices reach amounts that the respondents know are unusual. The qualification of certain purchases or services as exceptional precisely makes certain expenses possible: if the costly renovation of a house, an expensive trip or a certain purchase of clothing is qualified as exceptional, it is because the respondents do not consider it as a right and thus behave like ordinary people, who simply have the particularity of being endowed with substantial means. The demand for prudence in consumption therefore does not prevent respondents from becoming accustomed to a very expensive lifestyle.

The final moral imperative is the obligation to “give back,” which is expressed both in the concern to treat everyone equally and in the donations of money and time to various causes. R. Sherman notes, however, that these donations are first directed toward the spaces frequented by the respondents, such as private schools, prestigious universities, or cultural and religious institutions.

The last two chapters of the book show how conflicts crystallize in couples on a daily basis around these three imperatives – work, prudent consumption, and gifts. How do spouses, especially when they are not the source of the household income, spend this money? The arrival of the first children changes the division of tasks and the allocation of resources within couples, and also provokes discussions about money: what to hide/show of one’s wealth from one’s children, where to go on vacation, which school to enroll them in, or how to instill in them a sense of limits in terms of consumption? So many questions that, for the author, justify the limitation of the survey to these couples of young parents. Rather than questioning the material advantages of their children, they “want (the latter) to understand that they have more than others, without believing themselves to be better than others” (p. 229), that they see in certain expenses something special, even if these are often usual for them.

When wealth is tinged with anxiety

R. Sherman puts forward several arguments to explain the unease that accompanies spending and the respondents’ anxiety about money. First, some respondents live with the idea that they could lose their job and therefore their source of income overnight. This perspective helps us understand the distance they put with their current lifestyle and the idea that they should be able to be happy with less. It also reflects a feeling of insecurity that reduces the impression of being privileged:

Worrying about household finances is another way to avoid a sense of affluence. (p. 69)

The weight of the gendered division of labor in couples sheds light in another way on the anxiety that inhabits these wealthy New Yorkers. Seeking to obtain interviews in a survey that R. Sherman describes as the “most difficult research she has worked on” (p. 239), she had the idea of ​​entering the field by soliciting people around a subject less taboo than money, but which easily allows the question of maintenance expenses to be addressed: that of house and apartment renovations. This explains why 3 quarters of her respondents are women, who take care of the renovation and are, more broadly, often in charge of expenses – shopping, school, children’s leisure activities, organizing vacations, etc. R. Sherman shows how these women, especially when they have put their careers aside with the arrival of a first child, feel constrained in the expenses they incur, considering that they are using money that is not theirs. If some end up hiding certain amounts or purchases from their husband, he maintains a level of control which, very often, leads them to be careful about their spending, which they must be able to justify.

In the shadows, the practices

The author shows in a stimulating way how anxiety and wealth can go hand in hand, but she does not always decide between the explanations she provides. Following her, the propensity for caution in purchases would first be the fruit of a moral imperative aimed at legitimizing one’s wealth. But one is tempted to think that it is perhaps the only product of the strong constraints weighing on women’s spending highlighted in the last chapter, the gendered division of tasks being particularly glaring around money and its management. As the author underlines in a stimulating methodological appendix, many of the women she met do not have a complete view of the couple’s assets: on the amount of assets held, as on the means of holding them. How, then, can we spend on them money over which the author tells us they have precisely little control?

Here we come up against a more general difficulty, which is encountered by any sociologist who first seeks to collect the discourses and representations of the respondents, that is to say here “portraits of the deserving people that they would like to be and descriptions of what this conception of merit is based on” (p. 252). The lesser importance given to practices, which “do not interest him in the first place” (ibid.) explains that she only resorted to interviews. The entry through apartment renovations nevertheless suggests that there was, around this object, material to observe the relationships established with the professionals in charge of renovations. Furthermore, the few anecdotes peppering the interviews fully illuminate the tensions around the expenses studied by R. Sherman. More systematic attention paid to practices or accounts of practices would undoubtedly have made it possible to better restore the place occupied by this moral aspiration to the ordinary, apart from the moment when the sociologist explicitly invites the respondents to reflect and put words to their financial comfort.

R. Sherman’s book reminds us how, in terms of investigating the wealthy, it may be relevant to break with the usual approach to wealth that restricts fortune to the “super-rich” and to those who, like the characters in certain series, films or reports, display their extraordinary lifestyle (p. 239). Such a focus only focuses on the moments and spaces where fortune is embodied and leaves aside the work of many wealthy people, won over to meritocratic ideals, to remain “ordinary”. R. Sherman thus underlines the importance of studying wealth by paying attention to more taboo, more invisible, more intimate aspects, like money and spending. His approach, while not allowing us to account for the logic of accumulation, breathes new life into the literature on the lifestyle of the most fortunate and on meritocracy, by highlighting the daily tensions that punctuate the consumption decisions of young wealthy couples.