> "I'd never want to marry a millionaire." One of the customers - male -
> asked her, "Why not?" She said, "They have more problems than poor
> people. The more money you have, the more problems you have." The guy
> said, "Yeah, when I was unemployed, I never had any bills. Then I got a
> job, and now it's nothing but bills. Credit cards, those are the worst.
> They just suck you in with credit cards." I know it's dangerous to
> generalize about class consciousness in America from two data points, but
> it's mighty tempting.
firstly, i think you would do well to recognize the "i'd never want to be rich" comment as one in a long tradition of hegemonic constructions of the poor little rich/boy girl images/stories that infuse US culture. that's not to say that there isn't something there, something critical of consumerism and lifestyle consumption. the ideology works nicely to help people accept their lot in life
to some extent i think USers understand, no matter what income they're at, relative deprivation. they aren't deeply conscious of it, but it's there when they have the time to reflect on it. most people don't. you feel deprived--like you don't have as much as everyone else--because you gauge yourself according to your own milieu. e.g., when i went to grad school i used to gush to think that i might make 30k per year. my colleagues were bemused. "diddly squat!" they'd say. "we make nothing. besides you'll make more than that kelley!"
when i was teaching the brat-spawn of the uber-wealthy (e.g., members of the family that patented the zipper) i discovered that, for them, the marker of class distinction was whether or not you went to private or public school no shit. for them, if you went to public school your parents were low lifes who didn't care about your education. I'M NOT KIDDING. this came up several times over the three years i taught at these two institutions. life was pretty miserable for those students there on sports scholarships and otherwise who had gone to public schools.
anyway, to teach them about relative poverty, i used to have them get into "families" (groups of 3 or 4) and make a budget. the first was for a single mom, 2 kids, the other for same mom with partner and 2 kids trying to save for down-payment/college eds.
their task was to find out how much things costi (rent, utilities, auto insurance [rural area], food, sundries, clothes, etc] i had instructed them to interview people they new about their budgets (profs, administrative staff, coaches, etc). but they overwhelmingly balked--it's not polite to ask people about money (not something that was a norm in my world...).
i also had them do an exercise on "cultural capital" where they were to determine what kinds of things people would buy, where they'd shop, what they'd eat, clothes they'd wear, based on their social class (income, education, occupation).
oh my, coming from a world in which 30k/yr was considered the wages of the well-off, we *all* learned something. in my world, JC Penny's was upscale. in their's JC Penny might as well be walmart. it was interesting and typical for them to see how they knew a lot about the markers of cultural capital for themselves but little, really, about the lives of others without reverting to stereotypes/images/etc gleaned from the media. same for me too, tho. i didn't know have the things they referred to in that exercise.
one young man, who's parents made nearly 500k, both lawyers in NYC area interviewed his grandmother who maintained that her budget for meals was $5000/month. i can still remember sitting there grading papers, simply astounded that anyone could spend that much just on eating out--and i guess that included everything for her--transportation, tips, picking up the tab, dues at clubs, etc.
most of them had NO idea how much anything cost. they confessed to never having really bought anything but CDs, nor did they worry about how much things cost. they simply purchased it. i mean seriously, some of them wouldn't have been able to tell you how much a bag of potato chips cost. beer maybe. :)
kelley