A Brief Book Review of Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman
“Start my day up on the roof / There's nothing like this type of view / Point the clicker at the tube / I prefer expensive news” - Frank Ocean, “Super Rich Kids” (2013)
“I don't want much, f***, I drove every car / Some nice cooked food, some nice clean drawers” - Jay-Z, “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” (2001)
There’s an Onion headline I like—and which I’m going to butcher—that goes something like this: “Woman Seated at Bar Upset That Couple Nearby Arguing in Hushed Tones Instead of More Loudly So She Can Follow Along.” For those who have ever empathized with this hypothetical woman yearning for a stronger sip of tea, this book is for you. Rachel Sherman has done a remarkable job entering, describing, and deconstructing the lives of young affluent families in New York City. By “affluent” she means those in households making more than $250,000, and with more than $1 million in assets. (Most of the families she interviewed though had far more in both income and wealth.) For those reading these numbers and thinking, “That’s not that much in New York,” this book is also for you (if not perhaps about you). (Sherman reminds us that the median household income in New York is approximately $50,000 to $60,000.) She contends that one of the most reliable behaviors of the relatively well-off is to justify their status by contextualizing it in comparison to those with more or less. To explain this, Sherman introduces a useful framework: Her subjects are typically either upwardly oriented or downwardly oriented. These are not hard and fast categories, but flexible vantage points through which the affluent in America, whether it came through earned income or inherited wealth, try to legitimize their occupancy of privilege. Essentially those with an upward orientation think, “I’m a good person because of how I behave; there are people with more resources who behave worse.” Those with a downward orientation think, “I’m a good person because of how I behave; there are people with less than I have who I am kind towards on a regular basis.” An upward orientation tends to come along with a conservative or apolitical view of society. Conversely, a downward orientation tends to imply a liberal or progressive political bent.
Rather than being a straight forward book about the lifestyles of the rich and anonymous, Sherman, a feminist scholar at the New School focused on domestic labor, devotes the second half of the book to understanding the power dynamics in couples arising from differences in income, wealth, and how they value unpaid household labor. It’s all fascinating. Thankfully the couples being interviewed aren’t speaking in hushed tones. The conclusion Sherman guides us toward is troubling for anyone worried about inequality in American society: whether couples ethically negotiate with each other about the societal and domestic legitimacy of their income, wealth, and unpaid household contributions (e.g., “lifestyle labor”), this is usually muted once kids enter the picture. At this point couples begin making decisions that advantage their families irrespective of society at large. With children giving them new found reason for investing in themselves and (intentionally or unintentionally) perpetuating inequality (e.g. ‘schooling’), they tend to not spend time challenging structural and systemic biases that give them privilege in the first place. They also often take as a personal attack any conversations about solutions to inequality. If a reduction in equality is to come, Sherman leads us to believe that it seems unlikely without active government intervention and higher taxation. As one interviewee in the book says, “I was gonna be a revolutionary, and then I had that first massage.”
This book goes well with Matthew Desmond’s brilliant Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which focuses on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum, following some of the poorest families in Milwaukee trying to make ends meet and pay rent. As well as J. Paul Getty’s How to Be Rich (1965), which despite its title is not an instruction manual on earning wealth but a forceful meditation on the responsibilities of it. I’d also suggest Margo Jefferson’s Negroland (2015), which follows the author’s upbringing in a Black affluent enclave in Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s and the ways in which wealth and race mixed to amplify and trouble her life.