I've recently finished two books that are very different but I'm going to review them together because they are oddly similar.
The first one I read was "(Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class" by Nan Mooney. The gist of this book is that people who went to college for degrees in creative writing or art history are pissed because they came out of school with massive amounts of student loans and can't get jobs that pay enough to cover their apartments in Manhattan, much less a nice detached split-level in New Jersey. The entire book is devoted to exploring the raw deal that the "creative professional class" gets when their special snowflakeness turns out not to command the income they would prefer. In other words, it turns out that the middle class, unlike being poor or being rich, is NOT an inherited position, but one each generation must earn themselves. And it's HAAARRRDDD.
Whiny doesn't begin to describe it. The entire book whines about how easy it is to lose the house you purchased with 0% down (or, in some cases, a 110% mortgage) and how no one could be expected to save what with what things cost now-a-days. The solution is for more government support of artists at the style to which they would prefer to become accustomed.
It's a well-researched book and full of references to Brookings Institution studies and every Barbara Ehrenreich book or article ever written. In fact, there's an 11 page bibliography that is heavy on Paul Krugman and Elizabeth Warren. Notably absent: Hayek. The other thing notably absent: any suggestion at all that people refrain from going to Harvard or becoming artists if they can't afford it, and save up for things they want in life. In fact, she specifically pooh poohs the concept of saving:
This book had me grinding my teeth wanting to yell at her about personal responsibility. But, hey, that's explicitly what she was TRYING to offload.
Later, towards the end, she has a heading called "personal responsibility". It was amusing. You could tell that editors and reviewers had been trying to tell her something. "You need to put something about PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY in your book" they must have been saying. So she put two pages in where she suggests you become educated about your own finances and try not to live beyond your means. Even here she still doesn't mention saving, just getting help in understanding how to refinance your debt. Then she suggests that you not resign yourself to the fate of living on what you can make, but get involved in a revolution to get the government to pay you better.
When I googled her I found out that she left Manhattan after writing this book to move in with her parents when she was "single, broke and pregnant" at the age of 38. I'm sure her parents are thrilled. Oops, maybe not. More googling shows that she then had another child (so she has two under the age of 4 now as a 42 year old unmarried writer) and her Dad just died. Well, maybe her Mom had a good job.
The next book was "The Legacy of Inherited Wealth: Interviews with Heirs" by Barbara Blouin & Katherine Gibson. It came out of their experiences being therapists counseling people who suffered from being inheritors of great wealth. It was told with great heart and a total lack of snarkiness, even when "I'm An Alcoholic" screamed across the page like a watermark on one of the stories (where a woman rants how her lousy ex-husband stole all her money - by giving it to her to spend.)
There were 17 different stories about how people handled being plunked into the upper class without deserving it. Some of them longed to be middle class. A few longed to be poor. A few were just fine and dandy with circumstances as they were. Several of them talked about their desire for social justice and to use the money they had philanthropically. One gave away all his money and started on the lecture circuit preaching that everyone else ought to, too. There were suicides and alcoholism and drug addiction represented at the levels I've noticed. But there was an undercurrent of hope as eventually all these people damaged by too much money learned to be okay with it after all. The ones that hadn't died from drug overdoses, that is.
Barbara Blouin is active in a group called "The Inheritance Project" that tries to help the very wealthy be decent people, despite their significant personal challenges. In an odd way, I found it more hopeful and inspiring in terms of people taking personal responsibility than I did the book about people demanding they stay in the middle class.
Another thing I found interesting is that the desired lifestyle of the inheritors is PRECISELY the desired lifestyle of Nan Mooney: working in the arts or in low-paid not-for-profit sector in jobs where you are not worried about having to trade your day's actual labor for money. I've tried to tell this to my clients before: the people who are "making it" as sculptors or artists? They have trust funds buying their houses, cars, health insurance and education. This is also true for a lot - although by no means all - of the people working in not-for-profits for $24K/year, and often times the wealthy person donates to the organization enough to cover their own salary.
These two books were about "class" and I've always found this a bit murky. Nan Mooney describes it as people making $30K to 100K. Barbara Blouin describes it as "people who do not need to work for a living." Both of them were trying to nail down how people's parents' class affected their own class. As someone who is "bi-classal" I find this interesting at a personal level. I may do more reading on this, but I'm not sure I will. I never know what to do with these conversations.
Because, in the end, it doesn't matter to me what my parents have or don't have. It's 11:30 on a Monday morning and what happens to me depends on what I do next.
The first one I read was "(Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class" by Nan Mooney. The gist of this book is that people who went to college for degrees in creative writing or art history are pissed because they came out of school with massive amounts of student loans and can't get jobs that pay enough to cover their apartments in Manhattan, much less a nice detached split-level in New Jersey. The entire book is devoted to exploring the raw deal that the "creative professional class" gets when their special snowflakeness turns out not to command the income they would prefer. In other words, it turns out that the middle class, unlike being poor or being rich, is NOT an inherited position, but one each generation must earn themselves. And it's HAAARRRDDD.
Whiny doesn't begin to describe it. The entire book whines about how easy it is to lose the house you purchased with 0% down (or, in some cases, a 110% mortgage) and how no one could be expected to save what with what things cost now-a-days. The solution is for more government support of artists at the style to which they would prefer to become accustomed.
It's a well-researched book and full of references to Brookings Institution studies and every Barbara Ehrenreich book or article ever written. In fact, there's an 11 page bibliography that is heavy on Paul Krugman and Elizabeth Warren. Notably absent: Hayek. The other thing notably absent: any suggestion at all that people refrain from going to Harvard or becoming artists if they can't afford it, and save up for things they want in life. In fact, she specifically pooh poohs the concept of saving:
"There's a pervasive notion in recent media that, though retirement security might be a legitimate concern for low-income workers, when it comes to the middle class, lack of savings is a question of more discipline and less procrastination. If only educated professional could start saving early and sensibly, they'd be fine. But stories like Lewis's reveal the flaws in this sort of logic. The reality is that stagnant salaries and higher health-care, housing, child-care and education costs make it very difficult for even educated middle-class professionals to save anything at all. Because we're pushing so many major financial decisions to later in life - in the hopes that later will be when we can finally afford them - those high-cost expenditures are bumping up against our retirement years. With so many people going back to school later, having children later, and buying homes later, the balance of our financial ecosystem has changed. Retirement can hit at the same time we'll be trying to put our kids through college, and before we've managed to pay off our mortgages. Not only is there less to stow away these days, but there's less time in which to do it."
This book had me grinding my teeth wanting to yell at her about personal responsibility. But, hey, that's explicitly what she was TRYING to offload.
"Over the fifteen years I've spent in the workforce, I've been personally responsible for covering most of my own health care and all my retirement savings." She then goes on to say how unacceptable this is and how it drove her to write this book "to understand what we as a society must do so that circumstances for those in situations similar to my own might change."
Later, towards the end, she has a heading called "personal responsibility". It was amusing. You could tell that editors and reviewers had been trying to tell her something. "You need to put something about PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY in your book" they must have been saying. So she put two pages in where she suggests you become educated about your own finances and try not to live beyond your means. Even here she still doesn't mention saving, just getting help in understanding how to refinance your debt. Then she suggests that you not resign yourself to the fate of living on what you can make, but get involved in a revolution to get the government to pay you better.
When I googled her I found out that she left Manhattan after writing this book to move in with her parents when she was "single, broke and pregnant" at the age of 38. I'm sure her parents are thrilled. Oops, maybe not. More googling shows that she then had another child (so she has two under the age of 4 now as a 42 year old unmarried writer) and her Dad just died. Well, maybe her Mom had a good job.
The next book was "The Legacy of Inherited Wealth: Interviews with Heirs" by Barbara Blouin & Katherine Gibson. It came out of their experiences being therapists counseling people who suffered from being inheritors of great wealth. It was told with great heart and a total lack of snarkiness, even when "I'm An Alcoholic" screamed across the page like a watermark on one of the stories (where a woman rants how her lousy ex-husband stole all her money - by giving it to her to spend.)
There were 17 different stories about how people handled being plunked into the upper class without deserving it. Some of them longed to be middle class. A few longed to be poor. A few were just fine and dandy with circumstances as they were. Several of them talked about their desire for social justice and to use the money they had philanthropically. One gave away all his money and started on the lecture circuit preaching that everyone else ought to, too. There were suicides and alcoholism and drug addiction represented at the levels I've noticed. But there was an undercurrent of hope as eventually all these people damaged by too much money learned to be okay with it after all. The ones that hadn't died from drug overdoses, that is.
Barbara Blouin is active in a group called "The Inheritance Project" that tries to help the very wealthy be decent people, despite their significant personal challenges. In an odd way, I found it more hopeful and inspiring in terms of people taking personal responsibility than I did the book about people demanding they stay in the middle class.
Another thing I found interesting is that the desired lifestyle of the inheritors is PRECISELY the desired lifestyle of Nan Mooney: working in the arts or in low-paid not-for-profit sector in jobs where you are not worried about having to trade your day's actual labor for money. I've tried to tell this to my clients before: the people who are "making it" as sculptors or artists? They have trust funds buying their houses, cars, health insurance and education. This is also true for a lot - although by no means all - of the people working in not-for-profits for $24K/year, and often times the wealthy person donates to the organization enough to cover their own salary.
These two books were about "class" and I've always found this a bit murky. Nan Mooney describes it as people making $30K to 100K. Barbara Blouin describes it as "people who do not need to work for a living." Both of them were trying to nail down how people's parents' class affected their own class. As someone who is "bi-classal" I find this interesting at a personal level. I may do more reading on this, but I'm not sure I will. I never know what to do with these conversations.
Because, in the end, it doesn't matter to me what my parents have or don't have. It's 11:30 on a Monday morning and what happens to me depends on what I do next.
