Rich people feel uneasy about being rich; an interesting study that would have been improved by a bit more economics

Dr. Sherman gives a deep and insightful account of fifty upper-class New Yorkers' lives, doing very good qualitative interview research about this difficult to reach population. This research produced a fascinating page-turner. Though, as an economics PhD, I have a different perspective on the economic aspect of this study.

Dr. Sherman and many in her sample are unfamiliar with some concepts which are crucial for understanding the economics of the wealthy. In this study, inheritors and high-earners, as well as their low-earning and non-working spouses and offspring, are all thrown into the same category of rich people. Dr. Sherman acknowledges in the appendix that high-earners are undersampled because they "work long hours." This means that most of the people in the sample do not earn and do not know HOW to earn much money, and they speak about their experience as such. So, let me be clear: these people are the dependents of high-earners. Almost nobody in the book knows or can talk lucidly about where money comes from, because they are the dependents of someone who earned that money, whether it's their spouse or their parents or their grandparents. This is an important remark, because Dr. Sherman spends the conclusion of the book discussing how unjust this inequality is, that rich people are rich for seemingly no reason and can't even clearly explain why they're rich — and it's because she's mainly talking to high-earners' dependents.

So, for everyone else, I'll clarify: money comes from other people paying you to do the things they want you to do. A small fortune comes either from working long hours or from working regular hours but doing something people really want you to do. And a large fortune comes from doing both. Once you have this money, you can do whatever you want with it, including giving it to a spouse, children, or grandchildren. As evidenced by this book, these people won't understand what services you performed for other people and will refer to it vaguely as "having a business" or "working in tech or finance."

Dr. Sherman does not have a concept of a dependent. Instead, she imagines dependents as "consumptive laborers," even if concretely what that means is that they are deciding whether to renovate their bathroom with marble or gold tiling. After speaking to fifty people, of whom it seems around forty were dependents, she reaches "saturation," meaning that she's not hearing any new information in the interviews. But that's exactly because her sample consists mostly of dependents, who have this vague and unsure understanding of money, trumping up the facts that they did hold down a job for five years ten years ago or that they currently have a "job" giving away their own money at ritzy non-profit fundraising galas. That Dr. Sherman doesn't have a concept of a dependent means that she misses out on one major explanation that rich people use to morally justify their wealth: that they married a high-earner, and so their love justifies their wealth. Presumably these people would morally distinguish themselves from gold-diggers who do not deserve their wealth because they do not actually love their spouse.

That Dr. Sherman speaks to so few high-earners because they "work long hours" means that she largely missed out on sampling the very voices that actually finance the system which produces some spoiled rich people. These high-earners are not confused about whether picking marble or gold bathroom tiles merits $2.5 million per year; they can speak lucidly about what a backend Python developer does for a Series B FinTech SaaS scaleup and why that makes $5 million a year. Without talking to many of these high-earners, the sources of the money that the dependents are spending, Dr. Sherman draws a schematic which is incomplete. If this schematic was a car, it's not incomplete because the car is painted mostly white, that the steering wheel is on the left, that it's approximately 40 years old, or that its license plate says "New York;" the schematic is incomplete because the car doesn't have an engine.

I'll finish this review by once again applauding Dr. Sherman for her thoughtful work which I enjoyed reading. In particular, I congratulate her ability to depict spoiled brats in a neutral manner, which is not easy to do and which I am incapable of. Her strategy of targeting home renovators was particularly brilliant. I recommend reading this book for anyone who is curious to hear about the justifications that rich people('s dependents) give to explain their wealth. Even if there are a few blind spots, this study did open my eyes to a world much unlike my own and did cause me to reflect on the broad issues in society. I thank Dr. Sherman for her contribution to this literature, and I hope for a potential sequel in which high-earners consist of a larger portion of the sample.

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