Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence

by Rachel Sherman Narrated by Liz Thompson

Overview

A surprising and revealing look at how today's elite view their own wealth and place in society 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. Author bio: Rachel Sherman is associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. She is the author of Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. Sherman lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"There's a lot of abstract talk about the 1 percent, but how do they really live? The sociologist Rachel Sherman’s new book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, draws on her interviews with 50 wealthy New Yorkers to give us a sense. Sherman takes a dispassionate approach to find out how those who are 'benefitting from rising economic inequality' experience 'their own social advantages.' She elicits her subjects’ thoughts about work and productivity, charitable giving, marital discord and more. Worthwhile humanizing ensues, as do plenty of squirm-inducing moments."—-John Williams, New York Times Book Review

"We don’t know as much about affluent people as we think we do. Caricatures abound, but the socioeconomically lucky don’t often offer themselves up for study. That all changed with Rachel Sherman’s Uneasy Street. Nominally a sociologist, Sherman has written what is really a psychological study, and I’ve found myself returning to it frequently to remind myself of uncomfortable questions that lurk just below the surface of the lives of people who have much more than average. . . . The voyeurism here is minimal; the judgment nearly nonexistent. But with each reading, I’m a little more unsettled, in the best possible way."—-Ron Lieber, New York Times

"Ms. Sherman's book does take absorbing measure of what has become a corrosive reality in New York: the tendency among well-off people to regard their circumstances as entirely ordinary 'Manhattan poor' as others have put it."—-Ginia Bellafante, New York Times

"Sherman offers something new and surprising: a look inside the 1 per cent's minds. . . . She shifts our understanding of today’s dominant class."—-Simon Kuper, Financial Times

"There have been many cogent analyses of income inequality. Sociologist Rachel Sherman's welcome addition probes the psychology and socio-economics of affluence."—-Barb Kiser, Nature

"Sherman's analysis is informative, insightful, and nuanced."—-Glenn Altschuler, Psychology Today

"Although it is easy to judge the rich for [their] 'anxieties', Rachel Sherman suggests that this often distracts us from examining the wider 'systems of distribution that produce inequality'."—-Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education

"Uneasy Street is an important book. It is an all too rare empirical study of how the rich see themselves."—-Daniel Ben-Ami, Spiked Review

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171228378
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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