The appealing myth of the frugal billionaire
"Commending rich people for their frugality is also a way of policing regular people for spending money on anything other than the absolute necessities. The subtext is clear: If Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg are happy with modest homes and budget cars, everyone else should be, too.
For the wealthy, frugality is framed as an admirable sign of self-control; for everyone else, it’s a requirement. The question isn’t how much money one has to spend, but how that money is spent."
“I think wealthy people who care about feeling like they are morally worthy of their privilege and who want to be seen as normal are always using people like that as their foil,” Sherman said. “That’s something that they can say, ‘Well, we’re not that.’ By saying that, they’re often signaling, ‘Well, we’re wealthy, but we’re not the kind of wealthy that wants all the attention, that has this over-the-top taste.’ They sort of distance themselves from that.”
That also means downplaying their own spending habits. The families Sherman interviewed spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private school tuition, home renovations, and lavish family vacations each year, but most of them continued to classify their spending as normal.
One woman told her husband that he wasn’t allowed to “talk about what we pay for things to your family outside of the city … they’ll think that we are the craziest people in the world. And we’re not. We’re, like, totally normal people.”
Another said she took the label off the $6 bread she bought at the grocery store because she didn’t want her nanny to see it — and, more importantly, because she was uncomfortable with the vast inequality between her own family and the nanny’s.
Lauding the wealthy for their thriftiness is also a way of blaming people for their own poverty. “There’s a whole image of the welfare queen driving a Cadillac,” Sherman said, referring to Ronald Reagan’s infamous description of public assistance recipients who spent the money on luxury goods instead of basic needs. “That’s why food stamp spending is restricted in particular ways; there’s this idea that poor people can’t be trusted.”
In other words, the financial advice millionaires dispense onto the masses ignores basically every structural problem that keeps people poor in the first place, from poorly funded public schools to stagnating wages to being saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. Frugality is presented as a simple position to a complicated problem — a promise that anyone who saves enough money and has the right mindset can be rich, or, at the very least, not poor.
"Commending rich people for their frugality is also a way of policing regular people for spending money on anything other than the absolute necessities. The subtext is clear: If Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg are happy with modest homes and budget cars, everyone else should be, too.
For the wealthy, frugality is framed as an admirable sign of self-control; for everyone else, it’s a requirement. The question isn’t how much money one has to spend, but how that money is spent."
“I think wealthy people who care about feeling like they are morally worthy of their privilege and who want to be seen as normal are always using people like that as their foil,” Sherman said. “That’s something that they can say, ‘Well, we’re not that.’ By saying that, they’re often signaling, ‘Well, we’re wealthy, but we’re not the kind of wealthy that wants all the attention, that has this over-the-top taste.’ They sort of distance themselves from that.”
That also means downplaying their own spending habits. The families Sherman interviewed spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private school tuition, home renovations, and lavish family vacations each year, but most of them continued to classify their spending as normal.
One woman told her husband that he wasn’t allowed to “talk about what we pay for things to your family outside of the city … they’ll think that we are the craziest people in the world. And we’re not. We’re, like, totally normal people.”
Another said she took the label off the $6 bread she bought at the grocery store because she didn’t want her nanny to see it — and, more importantly, because she was uncomfortable with the vast inequality between her own family and the nanny’s.
Lauding the wealthy for their thriftiness is also a way of blaming people for their own poverty. “There’s a whole image of the welfare queen driving a Cadillac,” Sherman said, referring to Ronald Reagan’s infamous description of public assistance recipients who spent the money on luxury goods instead of basic needs. “That’s why food stamp spending is restricted in particular ways; there’s this idea that poor people can’t be trusted.”
In other words, the financial advice millionaires dispense onto the masses ignores basically every structural problem that keeps people poor in the first place, from poorly funded public schools to stagnating wages to being saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. Frugality is presented as a simple position to a complicated problem — a promise that anyone who saves enough money and has the right mindset can be rich, or, at the very least, not poor.
