ogc163
Superstar
It’s easy to place the blame for America’s economic woes on the 0.1 percent. They hoard a disproportionate amount of wealth and are taking an increasingly and unacceptably large part of the country’s economic growth. To quote Bernie Sanders, the “billionaire class” is thriving while many more people are struggling. Or to channel Elizabeth Warren, the top 0.1 percent holds a similar amount of wealth as the bottom 90 percent — a staggering figure.
There’s a space between that 0.1 percent and the 90 percent that’s often overlooked: the 9.9 percent that resides between them. They’re the group in focus in a new book by philosopher Matthew Stewart (no relation), The 9.9 percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.
There are some defining characteristics of today’s American upper-middle class, per Stewart’s telling. They are hyper-focused on getting their kids into great schools and themselves into great jobs, at which they’re willing to work super-long hours. They want to live in great neighborhoods, even if that means keeping others out, and will pay what it takes to ensure their families’ fitness and health. They believe in meritocracy, that they’ve gained their positions in society by talent and hard work. They believe in markets. They’re rich, but they don’t feel like it — they’re always looking at someone else who’s richer.
They’re also terrified. While this 9.9 percent drives inequality — they want to lock in their positions for themselves and their families — they’re also driven by inequality. They recognize that American society is increasingly one of have-nots, and they’re determined not to be one of them.
I recently spoke with Stewart about America’s 9.9 percent — the people who are semi-rich but don’t necessarily feel it. We talked about fear, meritocracy, and why the 9.9 percent are so obsessed with nannies. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below:
So, to start out, you write about the 9.9 percent and a “new aristocracy” in America. Who are these 9.9 percent?
The statistical side of it is very imprecise. I don’t think of the 9.9 percent as just everybody who has more than a certain amount of money and less than another amount of money. I see it more as a culture, and it’s a culture that tends to lead people into the 9.9 percent of the wealth distribution. It’s a cultural construct that is defined by attitudes toward family, toward identity issues about gender and race, by education and educational status and the idea of what constitutes a good career, which is mainly professional and managerial.
What does the culture look like? How do these people separate themselves out?
The guiding ideology is essentially that of a meritocracy. The driving idea is that people get where they are in society through a combination of talent and work and study. The main measures of that are educational attainment and material well-being, and anything that we provide to society or other people is on top or on the side of that and is a reflection of our own virtue and not in any way necessary for social functioning or part of a good life. It’s always, essentially, a sacrifice.
The obvious place to look for it is the whole college admissions game. But I think that’s kind of limited, too. I put a lot of emphasis on the family aspect because I think that’s a place where you really see in operation the attitudes and practices that go into child rearing and family formation.
You have at least two very different groups emerging in American society. At a high level, you have people who have their kids late in life after getting a lot of education, have fewer kids, and invest massively in them. And then you have a large group that is much closer to the traditional style of having kids early and not investing as heavily in them — although many of them, of course, try to emulate the practices of the upper-middle class.
One of the things you write about in the book is how much this 9.9 percent are willing to invest in their children — in nannies, in schools, in extracurriculars. Where does this pressure come from, this urge people have to make their kids the best?
I think the driving motivation is fear, and I think that fear is well-grounded. People intuit that in this meritocratic game, the odds are getting increasingly long of succeeding. They work very hard to stack the odds in their kids’ favor, but they know as the odds get longer, they may not succeed.
That’s coupled with another one of the traits of this class, which is a lack of imagination. The source of the fear is also this inability to imagine a life that doesn’t involve getting these high-status credentials and having a high-status occupation. This life plan looks good, and it certainly looked good in the past when the odds were more sensible. But it’s not a great deal. It’s something that isn’t just harmful to the people who don’t make it, it’s also harmful to the people who get involved and do make it, in some sense.
In what way is it harmful to the people who do make it to the 9.9 percent and the people who don’t?
I’m not suggesting it’s equally harmful. The psychological damage to the upper-middle class is kind of trivial compared to the substantive damages other people face. But it is, nonetheless, pretty real.
I would point to the sociological and psychological evidence that you have significant increases in anxiety-related disorders and other forms of unhappiness even among people who are fairly well off. It’s a trade-off that all or most of them are willing to make. But it’s not a free lunch.
Well, even if people are on paper wealthy, they often don’t feel wealthy. They’re always looking at someone who has a little bit more than them. How does that play out here?
That’s almost the defining aspect of life in a high-inequality world. And the important thing is that it affects people all the way up.
I know people who are in the top 1 percentile of the wealth distribution who just feel incredibly poor and stretched because they’re looking around and see other people who have got just that much more and can do that much better. That insecurity is what runs throughout the system. Just because you’re in the top decile, or 9.9 percent, that doesn’t mean you escape it. In some ways, you’re more subject to that insecurity. That drives people to do crazy things to stay where they are and to avoid falling.
To what extent does the upper-middle class drive inequality, and to what extent are they driven by inequality?
Most of this culture of the 9.9 percent is an effect and a consequence of inequality. That said, it’s one of those effects that becomes a contributing cause; it’s part of a feedback loop.
Most of the root source of inequality is structural, and I think much of it goes to an economy that’s no longer as competitive, where you have oligopolies rising without significant challenge. The balance of power between what we call workers and what we call capitalists is out of whack, and that’s a fundamental source of inequality. Race and gender can also play into inequality.
That inequality does have these fundamental sources, and once it’s in place, other mechanisms come in to lock it in and to exacerbate it. That’s where the culture of the 9.9 percent comes in. This culture that focuses on meritocracy becomes a way to justify a professional credentialing game where certain categories of workers are able to carve out high rents for themselves. It’s where certainly families — because they have excess resources — are able to over-invest and lock in benefits.
Those are mostly consequences of rising inequality, but then they feed back into it in obvious ways. They lock people in place, they tend to make it harder for large numbers of people to do well, they exacerbate the irrationalities in society.
It all sounds very gloomy, but I’m not actually that gloomy. I just think this is the way human societies work. There’s nothing in human nature that says we’re particularly good at forming large, complex societies that make everybody better off. These are sort of the forces of entropy at work in human society. I don’t want to be some sort of misanthrope condemning all of humanity. My point is that we are imperfect at forming reasonable societies, and we need to understand those imperfections if we’re to do better, which we can.
We’ve talked a lot about the culture of the 9.9 percent so far, but what does that culture mean for everybody else? The people who can’t afford to super credential their kids and send them to Harvard?
I think the underemphasized concern here is the extent to which the other 90 percent end up buying into this value system to some degree. I’ve been in the child-rearing game, and I see a lot of the madness firsthand — parents freaking out when their child takes a sip of soda out of the refrigerator because they somehow imagine this is really going to make it impossible for them to demonstrate enough virtue to get into the right college. They will curate every experience for their kids — every travel experience, every friendship.
I mostly see it among members of the upper-middle class who can afford it. But increasingly, the same sets of values and practices are clearly spreading to where people can’t afford it and where it doesn’t make sense. They’re also buying into this idea that kids have to be absolutely optimized, maximized so they can get onto the narrow path that leads to a stable upper-middle-class life, and otherwise it’s Starbucks until the end of time.
It basically takes away a potential countervailing mechanism. If society were such that you produce this one noxious class but then that gives rise to a reaction of people angry with this class and then acting out, you might have some conflict. Hopefully, it’s not violent but can be mediated through political institutions, but you have at least a mechanism that might lead to a solution. But when the ideology starts to spread, it effectively removes the basis for that conflict, it neutralizes the opposition in a way, and that’s a problem. It means that the system just continues further down the road toward greater instability.
There’s a space between that 0.1 percent and the 90 percent that’s often overlooked: the 9.9 percent that resides between them. They’re the group in focus in a new book by philosopher Matthew Stewart (no relation), The 9.9 percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.
There are some defining characteristics of today’s American upper-middle class, per Stewart’s telling. They are hyper-focused on getting their kids into great schools and themselves into great jobs, at which they’re willing to work super-long hours. They want to live in great neighborhoods, even if that means keeping others out, and will pay what it takes to ensure their families’ fitness and health. They believe in meritocracy, that they’ve gained their positions in society by talent and hard work. They believe in markets. They’re rich, but they don’t feel like it — they’re always looking at someone else who’s richer.
They’re also terrified. While this 9.9 percent drives inequality — they want to lock in their positions for themselves and their families — they’re also driven by inequality. They recognize that American society is increasingly one of have-nots, and they’re determined not to be one of them.
I recently spoke with Stewart about America’s 9.9 percent — the people who are semi-rich but don’t necessarily feel it. We talked about fear, meritocracy, and why the 9.9 percent are so obsessed with nannies. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below:
So, to start out, you write about the 9.9 percent and a “new aristocracy” in America. Who are these 9.9 percent?
The statistical side of it is very imprecise. I don’t think of the 9.9 percent as just everybody who has more than a certain amount of money and less than another amount of money. I see it more as a culture, and it’s a culture that tends to lead people into the 9.9 percent of the wealth distribution. It’s a cultural construct that is defined by attitudes toward family, toward identity issues about gender and race, by education and educational status and the idea of what constitutes a good career, which is mainly professional and managerial.
What does the culture look like? How do these people separate themselves out?
The guiding ideology is essentially that of a meritocracy. The driving idea is that people get where they are in society through a combination of talent and work and study. The main measures of that are educational attainment and material well-being, and anything that we provide to society or other people is on top or on the side of that and is a reflection of our own virtue and not in any way necessary for social functioning or part of a good life. It’s always, essentially, a sacrifice.
The obvious place to look for it is the whole college admissions game. But I think that’s kind of limited, too. I put a lot of emphasis on the family aspect because I think that’s a place where you really see in operation the attitudes and practices that go into child rearing and family formation.
You have at least two very different groups emerging in American society. At a high level, you have people who have their kids late in life after getting a lot of education, have fewer kids, and invest massively in them. And then you have a large group that is much closer to the traditional style of having kids early and not investing as heavily in them — although many of them, of course, try to emulate the practices of the upper-middle class.
One of the things you write about in the book is how much this 9.9 percent are willing to invest in their children — in nannies, in schools, in extracurriculars. Where does this pressure come from, this urge people have to make their kids the best?
I think the driving motivation is fear, and I think that fear is well-grounded. People intuit that in this meritocratic game, the odds are getting increasingly long of succeeding. They work very hard to stack the odds in their kids’ favor, but they know as the odds get longer, they may not succeed.
That’s coupled with another one of the traits of this class, which is a lack of imagination. The source of the fear is also this inability to imagine a life that doesn’t involve getting these high-status credentials and having a high-status occupation. This life plan looks good, and it certainly looked good in the past when the odds were more sensible. But it’s not a great deal. It’s something that isn’t just harmful to the people who don’t make it, it’s also harmful to the people who get involved and do make it, in some sense.
In what way is it harmful to the people who do make it to the 9.9 percent and the people who don’t?
I’m not suggesting it’s equally harmful. The psychological damage to the upper-middle class is kind of trivial compared to the substantive damages other people face. But it is, nonetheless, pretty real.
I would point to the sociological and psychological evidence that you have significant increases in anxiety-related disorders and other forms of unhappiness even among people who are fairly well off. It’s a trade-off that all or most of them are willing to make. But it’s not a free lunch.
Well, even if people are on paper wealthy, they often don’t feel wealthy. They’re always looking at someone who has a little bit more than them. How does that play out here?
That’s almost the defining aspect of life in a high-inequality world. And the important thing is that it affects people all the way up.
I know people who are in the top 1 percentile of the wealth distribution who just feel incredibly poor and stretched because they’re looking around and see other people who have got just that much more and can do that much better. That insecurity is what runs throughout the system. Just because you’re in the top decile, or 9.9 percent, that doesn’t mean you escape it. In some ways, you’re more subject to that insecurity. That drives people to do crazy things to stay where they are and to avoid falling.
To what extent does the upper-middle class drive inequality, and to what extent are they driven by inequality?
Most of this culture of the 9.9 percent is an effect and a consequence of inequality. That said, it’s one of those effects that becomes a contributing cause; it’s part of a feedback loop.
Most of the root source of inequality is structural, and I think much of it goes to an economy that’s no longer as competitive, where you have oligopolies rising without significant challenge. The balance of power between what we call workers and what we call capitalists is out of whack, and that’s a fundamental source of inequality. Race and gender can also play into inequality.
That inequality does have these fundamental sources, and once it’s in place, other mechanisms come in to lock it in and to exacerbate it. That’s where the culture of the 9.9 percent comes in. This culture that focuses on meritocracy becomes a way to justify a professional credentialing game where certain categories of workers are able to carve out high rents for themselves. It’s where certainly families — because they have excess resources — are able to over-invest and lock in benefits.
Those are mostly consequences of rising inequality, but then they feed back into it in obvious ways. They lock people in place, they tend to make it harder for large numbers of people to do well, they exacerbate the irrationalities in society.
It all sounds very gloomy, but I’m not actually that gloomy. I just think this is the way human societies work. There’s nothing in human nature that says we’re particularly good at forming large, complex societies that make everybody better off. These are sort of the forces of entropy at work in human society. I don’t want to be some sort of misanthrope condemning all of humanity. My point is that we are imperfect at forming reasonable societies, and we need to understand those imperfections if we’re to do better, which we can.
We’ve talked a lot about the culture of the 9.9 percent so far, but what does that culture mean for everybody else? The people who can’t afford to super credential their kids and send them to Harvard?
I think the underemphasized concern here is the extent to which the other 90 percent end up buying into this value system to some degree. I’ve been in the child-rearing game, and I see a lot of the madness firsthand — parents freaking out when their child takes a sip of soda out of the refrigerator because they somehow imagine this is really going to make it impossible for them to demonstrate enough virtue to get into the right college. They will curate every experience for their kids — every travel experience, every friendship.
I mostly see it among members of the upper-middle class who can afford it. But increasingly, the same sets of values and practices are clearly spreading to where people can’t afford it and where it doesn’t make sense. They’re also buying into this idea that kids have to be absolutely optimized, maximized so they can get onto the narrow path that leads to a stable upper-middle-class life, and otherwise it’s Starbucks until the end of time.
It basically takes away a potential countervailing mechanism. If society were such that you produce this one noxious class but then that gives rise to a reaction of people angry with this class and then acting out, you might have some conflict. Hopefully, it’s not violent but can be mediated through political institutions, but you have at least a mechanism that might lead to a solution. But when the ideology starts to spread, it effectively removes the basis for that conflict, it neutralizes the opposition in a way, and that’s a problem. It means that the system just continues further down the road toward greater instability.