Oil is at $106 a barrel. Mortgage rates are up half a point since February. Gas is nearly $4 a gallon and climbing. White-collar layoffs just hit their highest year-to-date total since 2009. The economy is K-shaped. No, wait, it's E-shaped. No wait, it's É-shaped.
Ink may be spilling faster than crude in Tehran's 5th district, but the economic sound and fury signifies very little to the average upper-middle class media superconsumer taking it in – all those heds, deks, and pull quotes from the President of the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It feels less trenchant than a protest or Edith Wharton.
When the media writes about the middle class, conflating the lower middle and the upper middle, they are writing about two groups that have little in common besides shared bands of income around $100K. When the media writes about the wealthy, conflating the upper middle and the 1%, they are writing about two groups that have little in common besides resilient spending. We've known for 70 years — probably 140 — that when economics are conflated with class, the toll of turmoil is miscalculated. And that's particularly true for the upper-middle class because what's at stake is not just money. Sure, the extra $1.32 on Oat Milk stings. But displacement is what kills you.
Thus Wharton, who wrote about what gets lost when a person cannot "figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room." That's Wharton's description of Lily Bart, who spends The House of Mirth getting displaced very hard in the ass.
"I have tried hard," Bart says, "but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole?"
The hole Lily fits into isn’t a VP-level marketing role at a mid-sized agency. It’s the aristocracy. And, off-putting as it may sound, the upper-middle class largely functions as an aristocracy superimposed on the logarithmic graph of Americans’ net worth. We self-replicate through institutions rather than through inheritance, conferring standing through credentials and connections, but… pahtato, pootato. As Lily learned, the sure sign of an aristocracy is that what's valuable in it is pretty damn worthless outside it. A lot of people in what has come to be understood as the upper-middle class – the top two deciles minus the top 1% (fuck-you money, not fuck-everyone money) – have those kinds of valuables. A film degree from Vassar counts.
In 1963, getting from the median to upper-middle class required multiplying your wealth sixfold. By 2016, it required multiplying it twelvefold, a 2x increase. Over the same period, a degree from Vassar went from costing $13,500-a-year to costing $93,000. The top two wealth deciles left the pack behind, but the material circumstances of those in the lower half of that group (at minimum) didn’t actually change for the better. In New York, the median home now costs 7.3 times the median household income. In Los Angeles, 10.8 times. That's 2x up in the last 40 years. The result is profound precarity exacerbated by the fact that many of the decreasingly unaffordable mechanisms the upper-middle class has historically used to self-reproduce, aren’t as effective as they once were. Legacy admissions are illegal in much of the country. Unpaid internships too. Careers that once allowed those with cultural capital to cash in are disappearing.
C. Wright Mills saw this coming in 1951 when he described a cultural change brought on by the rise of white-collar work: “the basis of security shifted from property ownership to education for a career.” Mills went on to pull a Nostradamus, foretelling the collapse of that credential-based systems due to the inflationary pressure of elite overproduction and an arms race to claim ever-more credentials in order to secure ever-more ordinary jobs. Displacing people who own land requires force or a really big wave3. Displacing people who own land equivalents requires nothing more than patience and a P&L.
Poverty was the smaller of Lily Bart's problems. Displacement was the big one. People who don't understand that write dumb copy. Consider Newsweek noting that "for the first time in a long time, white-collar workers are feeling the pinch of job insecurity that many blue-collar workers have felt for a long time." The phrase "for the first time" is pretty wild given that Mills identified the ever-increasing structural fragility of credential-based class position and its attendant anxieties 75 years ago. What makes this moment unusual is not the precarity of white-collar jobs, but the coincidence of that precarity with the breakdown of the aristocratic upper-middle class project of self-replication.
The project matters. It’s not only a source of feelings. It’s a source of spending. A K-shaped economy suggests divergence. The wealthy spending freely, everyone else pulling back. But within the wealthy there are two groups: rich people unaffected by economic turbulence and semi-rich people overextending themselves to keep what they regard (though they'd never admit it) as a birthright. Headlines like CNBC's "Iran war, oil price surge worsen K-shaped economy" mistake resilient spending for a sign of confidence. Some of it is. Some of it isn’t.
Some of it is a desperate attempt to cling to what used to seem like solid land and now feels like treadable water.
Edith Wharton described Lily Bart as "the victim of the civilization which had produced her." It's hard not to be. Maybe impossible for America's pseudo-aristocrats. Because a poor aristocrat is not lower-middle class or working class or destitute. She's a poor aristocrat. Anyone pretending otherwise is writing fiction.
