Uneasy Street, Rachel Sherman
Uneasy Street, Rachel Sherman
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Uneasy Street
The Anxieties of Affluence

Author: Rachel Sherman

Narrator: Liz Thompson

Unabridged: 9 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/05/2017


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Thomas on December 25, 2019

Wow, I learned a lot from this book. In Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, Rachel Sherman interviews a bunch of super rich people living in New York City about their wealth and how they experience it. She draws a lot of intelligent, astute observations from the interviews. At the same time,......more

Goodreads review by Melissa on July 03, 2020

Originally published in 2017, Rachel Sherman's nonfiction book, "Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence," was not a book I enjoyed reading. At all. This is a book about how the upper-middle class and upper class perpetuate systemic inequality. They do this through voting choices, lifestyle decisio......more

Goodreads review by Tim on August 31, 2018

By the time I finished reading the first page, I was overcome with the feeling that something was missing. Oh, right, it's that my expectations have been warped by the way we discuss the rich in popular culture. Rachel Sherman didn't write this book with the purpose of making fun of the upper class.......more