If we're eating the rich, who's on the menu?
An incomplete ramble on my inability to define "rich" and my unease with class identities
Hello! Every week of January 2021 has evoked a different flavor of chaos, and I feel like I am in a mental tailspin. But here I am, newslettering for your entertainment and my… desire to prove to myself I can do something consistently for once? I can’t get the day of the week consistent though, as you can see.
Special thanks goes to Daniel, for being who he is and for being my second pair of eyes this week.
I have had the good fortune of reading a lot of excellent articles recently, one of my favorite Internet blessings. I will pass a few on to you:
Breaking Up With White Supremacy Was Always The Endgame, on the reality that to really live up to your Black Lives Matter declarations, you’re probably going to have to break up with some white people. This was a good response/assessment of recent media that has fixated on the whole “these crazy Capitol attacks are tearing families apart” angle. I highly recommend reading this. It’s not a demand that you chop chop anyone in your life, but it is a reminder that the reality is that some people that you love will not be letting go of white supremacy.
How the anti-abortion movement fed the Capitol insurrection, on how the violence at the Capitol was in many ways unsurprising to pro-choice advocates who have faced years of brutal harassment and violence from white supremacist anti-abortion groups.
When protective orders don’t protect, a story of domestic violence that as always reads far too similarly to other reporting on domestic violence. This is a topic I am always upset about. There is the homicidal, aggressive, outright physically violence and then there are the more subtle components that are everywhere—emotional manipulation, uneven relationship power dynamics, gaslighting, negging.
The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, which goddammit. I haven’t even seen all of The Office but I didn’t need to for this piece of writing to hurt me. It takes previously written about groupings and dynamics of characters in the TV show and maps them onto our social classes and I am still trying to figure out what to do with this information.
A Crowded Table, a poignant reflection on the origins of a very nice refinished table and how we fail to care for so many people in society.
Uyghurs in America Want to Share Food and Culture. For Them, It’s a Matter of Survival. on exactly what the title says.
A fossil fuel town, saved by the wind, showing that climate action and the economy, just like public health and the economy, are NOT IN OPPOSITION, no matter what much of the Republican Party claims.
As always, I must thank the people who actually read this newsletter, despite its variable levels of quality. You can reply to this email directly or find me by some other means if you want to converse, about eating the rich or anything else.
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Obligated to mention $GME
I’m not here to comment on GameStop. There are plenty of takes out there, and I hope one of your main takeaways from all this hullabaloo is that the stock market and much of the economy is fake, it is not objective, and it is comical, truly comical that we prioritize these concepts that we made up instead of the very real people who are in need of healthy food and clean water and housing and opportunity. Economics is also, as I’ve mentioned before, extremely biased towards men and work done outside of the household. This is not to discount the entire field of economics! They do some great stuff, they just need to let go of some of their antiquated models and many of their deeply obnoxious, outspoken acolytes who worship free market capitalism.
My thoughts today are still related though. There’s been a lot of discourse about the rich versus the poor, and the staggering wealth inequality of the United States. This is all immensely important. But my question today is, who are the rich and the poor? How do we even do the whole class struggle thing if I’m confused on class identities? Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I have a terrible understanding of who is rich, and how many people think of themselves as middle class when they are probably not in the middle class. I’m not here to give you numbers to delineate the classes, you can use Pew’s website to see about that here.
Our pals Elon and Jeff are on a different level
Yes, we all know Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are worth amounts that no longer feel real. $185,000,000,000 for Elon, $182,000,000,000 for Jeff. Look at all those zeros. What does that even mean at that point? I’ve run into a lot of crazy breakdowns or visualizations of Jeff Bezos’s wealth, like this Twitter that reminds us everyday that Jeff Bezos could potentially end world hunger and he chooses not to. I have a lot of questions for both of these men, first and foremost: Why are you the way that you are? But after that, I just want to know what it is they’re keeping all that money for. How does it feel to spend money when you probably don’t even have enough desires to spend it all? Is it just an empire-building power trip? I don’t know. I’ll never know. And yes, I do know that net wealth doesn’t mean they have all this money in cash at their disposal, a lot of it is in assets. But still.
I also realized that in my head “rich” is so broad a category that it is not even useful. I’ll give you a few examples of markers of being rich in my mind to illustrate. All celebrities are rich, yes? Yes. If your family has a house you go to vacation in that is not occupied by others the rest of the time, you’re rich. In most cases, if you went to private school you’re probably rich. If you use “summer” as a verb you’ve gotta be rich. If you can regularly buy things without looking at the price you’re rich in my book or you’re very reckless and I’m worried about your finances. Honestly, if you officially have an explicit and calculated net worth, I probably consider you rich. I know these are imprecise, and probably biased, but I also don’t think I’m alone in believing these.
Some of these things are achievable in two-income households if you’re both in the professional-managerial white color work category. These are jobs you could feasibly get after attending college, even if you were not born wealthy, although I want to acknowledge that there are still a lot of financial barriers in place. Some of these things are only really achievable if you have a trust fund, if you’re “old money,” if you have multiple hit songs or something like that. These are pretty different in terms of accessibility. These are pretty different in terms of the amount of influence you actually wield and the life you live.
But to me, they all count as “rich.” What does this category even really mean when the range is so wide though?
Taylor Swift is worth $365 million and she is one of the world’s highest paid celebrities. That is so much money, but also that is nothing next to our friends Elon and Jeff. I don’t think we’re appropriately angry about the scale of wealth billionaires hold because our brains can’t even compute. I hope this data visualization helps.
Anyways, enough about these two. Where’s the rest of the money? Patrick Wyman has this great piece called American Gentry, about the pretty low visibility gentry class of the US AKA the more small potato rich people (million to tens of millions), whose wealth is tied to where they are. Obviously, “small potato” is a joke here. Anyways:
“This kind of elite’s wealth derives not from their salary - this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like doctors and lawyers - but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political power. In some places, they have an effective stranglehold over what gets done; in others, they’re important but not all-powerful.”
This is not the glamorous elite 1% I was envisioning. I have honestly never thought about these people as rich, but it does make sense. More than 19 million Americans fall in the top 1% globally. 19 million. In 2018, you needed a net worth of $871,320 or more to qualify. So a lot of those rich people are not the five to ten white dudes that Forbes and other media outlets are simping over.
Yeah, the middle is big but it’s not this big
I’m pretty sure a decent share of people who surely qualify as rich would self-identify as “upper middle class.” I don’t think they’re actively lying or intending to be deceitful. But it’s still weird.
The shame of being poor is wrapped up in the false myth of meritocracy and the American Dream, it’s tied up in the idea that your wealth is a reflection of your moral character or your work ethic and that if you’re poor it’s your fault. That’s obviously unfair and toxic and you can see why people might be hesitant to self-identify as poor or lower class. On the flip side then, aren’t rich people all glorious and smart and deserving of their wealth? We kind of do still act like it, but increasingly (and maybe more so among the younger people), being rich is something people get judged for, or may want to keep quiet because they don’t want presumptions or to seem like they are bragging. Also, our media depictions of the poor and the rich are pretty extreme on both ends, so when nobody can identify with those, I guess it makes sense to land on the middle class.
The middle class is usually associated with family, with hardworking Americans living the dream. The working class is supposed to aspire to become the middle class and the middle class is the backbone of America and then I guess if you’re extra special you get bumped up to the upper class. Except whoops, the middle class is being hollowed out. Many people have incomes that technically place them firmly in the middle class, but due to the rising costs of housing, medical bills, childcare, elder care, and also things like student loan debt, they don’t really have savings and are living precariously. So striving for the middle class is also just less and less attainable…
All of these ideas of class and wealth and status are fuzzy partially because we as a society are reluctant to talk about money on a personal level. It defines much of our lives and we love to yap about the economy but then… I know that salary transparency helps close the gender pay gap and it helps people to negotiate salary and whatnot, but still I am terrified to talk about money. I feel weirdly shameful, like it’s something to conceal. I don’t even know how to really understand my own class identity. Part of this is driven by the fact that my parents are immigrants and no matter what security we might attain, the frugality and the anxiety that it could all fall apart is steadfast.
We don’t talk about class the way we talk about gender, race, culture, sexuality, but it also shapes so much of our lives, and the former intersects with the latter in many ways. I don’t have a solid sense of my friends’ class identities. It’s not like I’m out here desperate to know the net worths of anyone so I can judge them. But it’s weird realizing after months or years of knowing someone that they grew up with and have always had a lot more money than you. It slips out in small ways. When someone remarks on how cheap something is when you think it’s pretty expensive. When you visit someone’s house and it is visibly larger and nicer than yours. When you learn that they were paying full price tuition this whole time, and you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for financial aid.
I was talking to a friend about how some people could so easily throw hundreds or thousands of dollars at GameStop this week, and how it feels to do the mental calculation of how many hours of minimum or close to minimum wage work that money is worth, especially when you know people who are working at minimum wage. It’s not like I am offended, it just feels weird. I also grew up in many respects economically privileged and lucky, and I’m sure I’ve also said or done things that made people feel weird.
Here’s another thought I haven’t fully processed. The median household income in the US is $68,703 per year. That is for four people. I know many people from college starting out in finance and consulting who are making way more than that, for one person. This is not about any individual, this is just another moment where I am floored. We pay many of our essential workers minimum wage, a minimum wage that is less than half of what would be considered a livable wage, and we call them essential and clap for them and offer them free pizza. The $15 minimum wage, which doesn’t even track with inflation, is still up for debate in many peoples’ minds and the Democrats are hyped about giving it to us in… 2025?
We shouldn’t be focusing all our outrage on any small group of wealthy individuals. Some of them do deserve our outrage, but, as always, it goes back to The System, whatever that is. The structures in place that allow for the inequality of resources, the culture we swim in that still acts like everyone deserves exactly what they get. I still don’t know how to talk about or feel about money.