Class, Behavior, and Just Dessert

Credit department of the company. Miners are pictured drawing money in advance of payday. Inland Steel Company, Wheelwright #1 & 2 Mines, Wheelwright, Floyd County, Kentucky, 26 September 1946. Photo by Russell Lee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

About 11 years ago, now, Gene Marks wrote an essay called “If I Were A Poor Black Kid“. (This essay is no longer officially readable. It gives a note that says “This page is no longer active”. But if you do a ctrl-a and paste the outcome into a notepad file, you can still read the text.)

Here’s a representative paragraph:

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

There were a bunch of responses to this essay and many of them were strongly felt. A lot of them pointed out the whole issue of how everybody thinks that they are extraordinary when, really, they’re probably in the middle of their own pack. Here’s Ta-Nahesi Coates:

When I read this piece I was immediately called back, as I so often am, to my days at Howard and the courses I took looking at slavery. Whenever we discussed the back-breaking conditions, the labor, the sale of family members, etc., there was always someone who asserted, roughly, “I couldn’t been no slave. They’d a had to kill me!” I occasionally see a similar response here where someone will assert, with less ego, “Why didn’t the slaves rebel?” More commonly you get people presiding from on high insisting that if they had lived in the antebellum South, they would have freed all of their slaves.

What all these responses have in common is a benevolent, and surely unintentional, self-aggrandizement. These are not bad people (much as I am sure Mr. Marks isn’t a bad person), but they are people speaking from a gut feeling, a kind of revulsion at a situation that offends our modern morals. In the case of the observer of slavery, it is the chaining and marketing of human flesh. In the case of Mr. Marks, it’s the astonishingly high levels of black poverty.

—

Still, we are — in the main — ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We’d die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that’s ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.

That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook–but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.

I spent years chewing on that. Finally, Kazzy brought to my attention “A Framework for Understanding Poverty” by Ruby Payne:

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne pic.twitter.com/VtIq34KHPv

— Rahul Gupta (@RahulGupta0013) March 8, 2016

Let’s get a bigger version of that (click on it if you want to get a more readable version):

In there, the argument is that the difference between the classes is stuff like the relationship of the member to food, to money, to time horizons. Going back and looking at the “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” essay, you see that it’s just hammering on “I wouldn’t act like a member of the class in poverty. I would act like a member of the *MIDDLE CLASS*!!!”

Heck, if you look at any of the “grind mindset” twitter accounts out there, you’ll see that they’re doing a lot of the same stuff. “Don’t act like a member of the class in poverty… act like a member of the *MIDDLE CLASS*!!!” (and, occasional bursts into “act like the *WEALTHY*!!!”). And you can see people evolve (or devolve) from one to the other. This person has grown and now sees the point of social emphasis on social exclusion instead of self-governance and self-sufficiency. That person is doing the opposite of growing and talking about shifting from managing money to spending, spending, spending.

One of the interesting parts isn’t merely that each group has behaviors that reinforce one’s own staying in the group to which one has become accustomed, it helps everybody reinforce everybody else staying. So, like, if the “poor Black kid” tried to jump from the one to the next, this kid would find that there are punishments for obviously trying to leave in addition to the rewards for fitting in and staying.

This also helps explain how someone raised solidly middle-class in values can make more money, more money, and then even more money and then say something like “Sure, my household makes $200,000… but after the mortgage payment and after the car payments and the food budget and vacations and putting money aside for the college fund and the money we put into the 401k (that we don’t even *SEE*), you only have but so much money left and $200,000 a year just isn’t that much, really.”

In any definition of “rich”, there are usually numbers thrown around. “Somebody who makes $X is officially ‘rich’. They don’t get to call themselves ‘middle class’ anymore!” is a conversation that shows up from time to time and most people probably have a number for X that would make them agree with that statement. And, of course, numbers that will make them say “You know, $X isn’t *THAT* much.”

Even now. Think of a number that would get you to agree with the statement of where you cross over to “rich”. Got it in your head? Okay, well, I found a site that broke down income by percentile and here’s where the interesting numbers are (as of 2021, anyway):

Top 1%? $504,420
Top 5%? $273,850
Top 10%? $201,052
Top 20%? $141,100
Top 25%? $122,500
Top 33%? $100,236
The 50% mark? $67,463

We’ve all been part of the conversations where people explained that $200,000 a year just isn’t that much, really. I mean, after the mortgage payment and after the car payments and… well, it isn’t that much, really. Not where *I* live, anyway. I could see how it might be a lot of money where you live.

I was lucky enough to be linked to a couple of essays about the whole middle class thing recently. One essay on being poor, another essay (from the same guy) on not being poor anymore.

Here’s how the “poor” essay opens:

A few years back, my wife was at a baby shower hosted by a friend by a mutual acquaintance. In a conversation with the hostess, my wife learned they were in a tough financial position – they were always broke, and no amount of budgeting seemed to help them get ahead; they had cut every cost they could and things were just getting worse and worse. She admitted to my wife that she just felt like she was sinking further and further underwater, and didn’t see any way out for her or her family.

Note: The hostess and her husband were both doctors. They had a combined income somewhere upwards of $200,000 a year, and as the conversation developed my wife learned that their problems started and stopped with the hostess not being able to save quite as much as she’d like once the payments on their very nice house and current-year cars were made. At the time she leaned on my wife for emotional support over finances, our family of four’s income was less than $30,000 a year.

The rich essay gets into the whole “how could someone possibly think like this?” issue and figures it out. Here’s a representative paragraph:

Food is huge here. When we were broke, there were constant economic sacrifices in terms of what we bought to eat. We bought more ramen and beans. We restocked less often, and with more restrictions on individual shopping trips. We’d get more rice, and less cheese (an enormous amount of money is spent on cheese once one has the option). We watched for sales pretty closely.

Even now, as I think of the fridge upstairs, we have more than a half dozen kinds of cheese in there. We have two different kinds of sandwich slices (sharp cheddar for Maribou, pepper jack for me). We have two different kinds of shredded cheese (shredded Mexican blend for the stuff that requires cheese sprinkled on top, shredded Italian blend for doctoring up frozen pizzas). We have cracker slices for snacks. And we have a container of feta. Oh! And a tub of shaved parmesan for pizzas and salads and whatnot. Sometimes we have bleu cheese in there too. Sometimes we have goat cheese in there. And I completely forgot about the string cheese!

And then, once you get a little bit more into the essay:

You go to social events you might otherwise have skipped, and you accept invitations to go on trips to visit family you otherwise couldn’t have come near affording. You stop being the only person who doesn’t bring a decent gift to your friend’s kid’s birthday party.

It’s all great, but you look down at the end of the month and find you’ve spent all your money, or at least enough of it that you feel strapped. It went just as fast. You start telling poor people that you and them are the same.

The part of the essay that moved me to write this one says simply:

If you have money, most of your problems just go away. They take money with them, but they leave.

And I go back and look at the median household income again. $67,463.

Let’s face it, $67,463 just isn’t that much.

But if you were making $68,000 a year last year, you were making more money than half the country. $100,000? You’re in the top third. $200,000? You’re a hair’s breadth away from the top decile in the country.

It probably doesn’t *FEEL* like that, though. Even if you start bringing in a lot more, you’re still going to feel like a member of the old class.

And I can’t even imagine what it would take to set up a set of incentives to get someone to move from a mindset of the old one to a mindset of the new one. Well, up, anyway.

It’s probably pretty easy to incent going down.