Book Launch | Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join us for a launch event for Rachel Sherman’s new book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017). Sherman will be present in conversation with Ron Lieber.

From TV’s “real housewives” to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on “easy street”? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman 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. Sherman 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. Sherman 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, Uneasy Street 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.

Rachel Sherman is associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (University of California Press, 2007), analyzes how workers, guests, and managers in luxury hotels make sense of and negotiate class inequalities that marked their relationships.

Ron Lieber is a journalist and author of the “Your Money” column for The New York Times, which addresses a variety of personal finance issues, from investing to paying for college to mortgages and homes. He is also the author of The Opposite of Spoiled, a guide to teaching kids about money and values.

Co-sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities.