Say buh-bye! Via Tracy O @ Flicrk
Yesterday’s New York Times continued its coverage of rich, white, not-particularly-sympathetic New Yorkers and the decline of their American Dream. Unlike their woeful and possibly hoaxy article on DABAs –i.e. young women Dating A Banker, or, as Kanye and I like to call them, golddiggers–this one looks at the potential social upside of being surrounded by other young, well-educated people who have fallen on hard times, especially when those other people made a shitload more money than you do.
The tiny, white sampling of the population the Times writes about this time are art gallery workers, who are almost exclusively female. They’ve been previously caricatured in the media as hot trust-fund babies in little black dresses who take the job as a time-filler between college and marriage, often to a rich dude they meet in their line of work. Still, they are mostly Ivy Leaguers, many with master’s degrees. Parental subsidies mean these young ladies are spared the indignity of living in the outer boroughs or shoe shopping at Payless, and it’s a good thing, because art gallery workers “typically earn $19,000 for a junior position to $50,000 for a midlevel specialist at an auction house, perhaps a fifth of what peers make working in law or banking.”
But as their fellow banker/lawyer Ivy League alums hit the unemployment line, the overeducated but underpaid are having the last laugh:
The downturn has hidden benefits in the form of a social correction that puts them on more equal footing with their friends working — or formerly working — on Wall Street.
“Now we have an even playing field,” said Lydia Wickliffe Fenet, an affable 31-year-old who heads special events at Christie’s and says she has cut back on the number of nights she goes out and is choosing less expensive places. “My friends say, ‘Let’s go have a beer instead of a $40 drink.’ ”
Brooke Lampley, who is 28 and has been at Christie’s for four years specializing in Impressionism and modern art, said her college classmates who were laid off from their Wall Street jobs now follow more pedestrian pursuits. Most recently some of those friends went to a rodeo.
“I shouldn’t say it, but I was jealous of my college friends,” she said. “But not anymore. Their choices helped them establish lives, but not the ones they wanted. I’d rather be doing something I like.”
And to this I say, “Amen, sister.” I may not have gotten parental subsidies, but I too am a white girl with a top-notch education and who went into a creative field that pays substantially less than what my friends earned in finance, p.r., marketing, etc. My starting salary was $19,000 and macaroni and cheese played a large role in my life. It was worth it: I was intellectually stimulated, got to meet important, fascinating and/or famous people and could put my right brain to good use rather than cranking out numbing, exhausting hours at a white-collar sweatshop.
My better-compensated friends gloated about their salaries and the fabulous Manhattan real estate they bought, but like these art gallery workers, I couldn’t resist a frisson of pleasure when the bubble deflated. Actually, I actually got two bites at the schadenfreude apple: one circa 2000 when the tech bubble burst and my peers’ six-figure, free-sushi-Friday dot com jobs dried up, and one this year, when the i-bankers and hedge funders saw their filthy lucre evaporate. Granted, that second bite was kind of bitter, because some of my life savings evaporated too, and the industry I work in has undergone successive rounds of layoffs that have affected some of my nearest and dearest.
If I get laid off tomorrow, though, I will have spent the last 12 years in a job, and a business that I love. Money hasn’t been my main pursuit. And when the money goes away, those of us who didn’t worship it aren’t left as disillusioned and angry as the people who did.
I would agree were the industry I work in not dying under me. And I can’t help but find that sad as I have spent the last 12 years working in a job I adore (print journalism) and I have never wanted to work in TV or Radio or to write personal opinion columns (which effectively rules out the majority of internet journalism) so you know much as I enjoyed this post I can’t help but feel generally depressed that an industry which I do personally believe is valid is utterly moribund. (I know this isn’t entirely on topic, it’s just been on my mind a lot of late).
um….a 40 dollar drink???? I hope that was an exaggeration.
Truly, the one good thing about being a pauper is that your life really doesn’t change in times like these and the people you’ve hated since college (they were fuckers even as undergrads or have we all forgotten) are bottoming out. Schadenfreude! Catch it!
I am a ball of anxiety this week over the state of my company (a retailer). I know there will be lay offs and although I’ve been told I am fine, I will believe it when it’s Saturday and I still have a job.
Nothing works my beads quite like someone who has “over” (whatever that means) educated themselves and bitches about not getting paid enough. My dad does this (PhD in chemistry, works for the CA EPA). Honey, if you want more moola, go work for Genetech, and don’t expect me to feel sorry for your cushy state job and five thousand vacation days.
Bitter!
I have a college degree and work at a job (admin to an academic department at a college) that requires me to use nothing that I learned in school (BA in English/Political Science). I am making less money than I did before I got laid off from real estate in October, but I’m not complaining because I’m just thankful to have a job, any job.
Ahem. Some of us are not in it for the money. (We are in it for the immigration status. New York, you are a cruel mistress.)
Also, Becky, I do understand what you’re saying, but again having been raised by parents that pulled themselves up into the middle class by sheer luck, and whose family largely still occupies blue collar/service industry jobs – the dominant message I got about work as a kid was: “if you’d do it for free, they wouldn’t pay you.” So while I would never think this of my beloved Becky, I often feel like these exhortations to find a low-paying creative job or one that is “fulfilling” come from a bit of class privilege.
This post arouses some mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, the current economic situation isn’t affecting me and I enjoy my job. I can get by easily on my non-profit salary and am smug about those who bitch about not being able to cope.
On the other hand, I have a a couple friends who grew up in very poor families and worked against massive prejudice and low expectations of society as a whole to get very well-paid jobs. They wanted to have a secure, middle-class lifestyle and build up some wealth in their families. All of them are currently waiting to find out if they will still have jobs in March.
@P.Soul: Oh, there’s no doubt it comes from a class privilege–this is why minorities and people from working class backgrounds are virtually non-existent in media and other creative fields. Those college degrees don’t come cheap and few people can afford to take a job that pays $19,000 a year when they’re saddled with $100,000 or more in student loans (unless, like me, you went to a state school that’s just as good as the Ivies but only cost $8,000 a year).
The thing about this article, which I mention at the top is that rich white New Yorkers are not particularly sympathetic because, well, they’re white and have always been privileged and overeducated. Still, they are the NYT demographic, hence this article. The beauty of this situation is, now we’re all in the same boat, and those of us who’ve been on that boat for years don’t have a lot of sympathy for new arrivals. Especially those who for years rubbed our noses in how comparatively poor we’ve been.
We’re (everyone, not just Harpyness or the Times) talk about class and class-privilege as if it only means one thing, when it fact it has multiple inter-related facets.
I grew up in a white (that’s part of class), middle-class-earning (ditto) family where both parents did work more with their brains than their bodies (ditto). I’ve been financially on my own since 18, since my folks couldn’t afford to put me through college. I’m female (class), with about 11 years of college (massive educational capital), and I teach (which gets a lot of lip service, but not much more) and have also worked in the non-profit arts sector (likewise, it’s got cultural capital, but that doesn’t equal financial capital). I’ve never ever earned more than $28K in a year, own nothing of value, and scrape by. I live in NYC, where that income lands me in a significantly lower economic “class” than someone making 2 or 3 or 4 or 8 times what I make, regardless of their sex, race, education or background.
Whose “class” is higher: a self-taught, African American, male computer programmer who makes $80K a year, or me? An i-banker (or a DABA girl) or me? A 28 year old gallery assistant, or me? Becky, or me?
(Sorry, Becks, I’m not making a challenge, I’m just always bothered about how Americans talk–or rather, don’t talk–about class.)
@Ph.Dork: I think social class in the US is generally determined by who has the most cash. The moneyed class is usually the well-educated–you don’t see many CEOs who don’t have considerable higher education–although not always (see: Jay-Z, A. Rod). But in the US, unlike other places, you can change classes very easily. My father’s father had no money. My father went to college and law school on full scholarship and now makes a great deal of money. He’s upper middle class now, strictly b/c of his education and bank account, and no one would dispute that. It’s one of the reasons I like this country–even if you aren’t born in the upper classes, if you make money or get a good education no one will challenge your right to social mobility (unlike, say, the UK, where the establishment groused about how Margaret Thatcher is a greengrocer’s daughter who didn’t have the right upper-crust accent).
Well, PhD and Becky, I don’t know. I don’t know that I think class is that easy to overcome, and I don’t know that I think that it is totally about who’s making the most money. There are still a lot of things in my life that remind me that I am not like my educated friends. My parents dream of owning an RV, for example, but bringing this up in mixed company brings jeers. When people talk about “white trash,” they are not talking about poor graduate students, they are talking about people whose incomes may even exceed those of graduate students but who still bear that lingering smell of “not having been brought up properly.”
Personally I would say to me class seems a lot more about social expectations and mores than it ever did about money. I am upper middle class now by virtue of my salary, but I still say all the wrong things in mixed company, have the wrong manners, did not see any symphony/theatre/”high art” with my parents.
I don’t think class habitus (cf my main homme, Bourdieu) is necessarily easy to overcome, either, PS. My parents were culturally aspirational, and I benefitted a lot from that, but my looks and clothes and all my other material trappings aren’t going to open any doors for me. Likewise, I can’t afford a lot of the cultural/travel experiences I’d like to enjoy. I wasn’t able to travel outside of the country until I was in my mid-20s, which makes me pretty backwards in some circles. Not having the funds is a big part of it, but it ain’t all. I’m doing some work on (well sorta) a “low” cultural site where class implications are all mixed up, especially compared to NYC, and it’s been through that work that the complexities and subsets of class have become much more apparent to me. Different groups value different things, and your status can change wildly, even if nothing about you has changed.
My dad has an RV, for what its worth, but I think he’s looking to sell it. Your folks want his number?
I think all these comments are really interesting. Here’s my two cents, for what they’re worth:
I think PhDork is completely on the mark when she says that there are different aspects to class. Even if you make a lot of money, I think a lot of people will look down on you for being ‘nouveau riche’ if you don’t have the right manners and habits, even if they don’t actually realise they are thinking that way.
I do think that happens a lot less in America, where a lot of people are proud of having risen in society, than elsewhere (having lived for significant amounts of time in the US, the UK, and Germany). But I actually disagree that it’s easier to move up in class in America.
Or, to put it more precisely, in America you can move up in class more rapidly–but if you don’t, you’re more likely to notice it in your everyday life.
It is simply the fact that there are fewer rich people in the UK and Germany, so what most people are aspiring to is somewhere in the middle, which affords you with a very good lifestyle, plenty of leisure time, etc. A lot of ‘culture’ is more widely available than in America because of state subsidies, so it is not just the rich people who can go to museums and fancy concerts. (That’s one of the things I love about Berlin, you can get almost any kind of culture for less than 10 euros).
There is also less inequality in education. In America, you finish college burdened with debt, which really limits your choices of what to do after graduation. That is not the case in Germany, where tuition is either free or costs a few hundred euros a semester, and is true to a much smaller extent in Britain, where tuition fees are capped for all universities at 3,000 pounds.
And I think the snobbishness of earlier days is fading in Britain. Some may have turned their noses up at Thatcher, but neither Blair nor Brown came from especially privileged families and many aristocratic types are actually a bit ashamed of it now and try to act more middle-class (i.e. Prince Harry using a non-posh accent). Obviously there are exceptions, but the trend is definitely to more equality.
This isn’t meant to say Europe’s got the recipe right, but I think these shades of grey often really go missing when people talk about greater mobility in America.
Shoot, I’ve been working on my dissertation (senior thesis) all day and obviously got into essay mode–sorry for writing a novel!!
I think everybody’s right here. What hasn’t been mentioned yet is that the process of class and social mobility in the US is changing, fast. It has changed radically in the last 25 years. Whereas someone’s parents or grandparents may have been able to get a free education thanks to a formerly wonderful GI bill, or more-generous grants and scholarships, now, due to sheer population and (interrelated) economic pressures, class is not so mobile. There aren’t enough schools for the number of people who want to get a college degree. 30 years ago, the top executive made maybe 25 times what the worker made. Now, the CEO makes 821 times what the minimum wage worker makes. People are living with their parents well into their 30s – that’s not uncommon. We are quickly becoming more like Europe, where middle class people will stay middle class or move down, and people in the lower socio-economic range have fewer and fewer chances to make it to middle class. This is the first generation that will NOT be better off than the previous one. Our era of unabashed growth is over. We’re finally climbing on board the boat that the rest of the developed world has been in for decades. So no matter which aspects of class we consider, they are all changing and increasingly stratifying – quickly.
And Endora, I loved your novel. It’s highly pertinent.
[...] of us when we read this article thought something smelled funny. Including me. The tone was off, the women quoted seemed a little too flip, a little too shameless and [...]
I am a member of GenX,I turn 40 in January. I became a teacher because I thought job security was tradeoff for a lower paying profession. I taught for a semester after Ed school and now there are no jobs at all in my state of California,which is a as nearly as expensive of place to live as New York. I collect unemployment with a Master’s and Teaching certificate. I have 3Xs the education my parents yet only a fraction of their wealth. I am currently living on the edge every month. I was poor as a student, I was poor as a student teacher and now Iam overeducated and unemployed. I want my slice of the pie. Since the Army now Commissions up to 41 I am seriously contemplating joing and there is a war on.