Is It Really That Hard To Be Rich?

When I browsed the Guardian’s Inequality Project page, I didn’t immediately expect to see stories about the ‘plight of the rich’. But when I read Rachel Sherman’s piece, based on her recently launched book called ‘Uneasy Street, The Anxieties of Affluence’, I was intrigued.

She draws on rare interviews that she conducted with fifty rich New Yorkers. Her main finding was how her interviewees were conflicted between being “both wealthy and morally worthy — especially at a historical moment of extreme economic inequality”.

She speaks to hedge fund financiers and corporate lawyers, artists and stay-at-home mothers. She makes the distinction between “upward oriented” and “downward oriented” people. The first group focuses on people with similar or more wealth than they have, whereas the latter group looks at what more they have, and seeing themselves as privileged.

Sherman explains it as follows: “If people at the top are those who buy $20m houses in the Hamptons, those in the middle can be the people who earn $2m per year and have $5m in assets. This normalisation of affluence is also visible in US popular culture, in which lifestyles that would actually be quite expensive appear in ostensibly middle-class settings on television and in the movies. At the same time, the actual middle class and the poor disappear from public view.”

Sherman lists interesting questions she saw interviewees struggle with: “How could these affluent parents give their children high-quality education and other advantages without spoiling them? How should they resolve disagreements about spending priorities with their partners? How should they talk with others […] about these decisions?”

Without judgement, she managed to speak with a group on the upper side of the inequality story that is mostly talked about, rather than listened to.