The Tragedy of SID: Status-Income Disequilibrium
BROOKS, DAVID
The Tragedy of SID: Status-Income Disequilibrium By David Brooks The editor had triumphed. All through a long New York spring evening, it had been John Updike this and Norman Mailer that. He'd...
...The big lobbying firms, which hire politicians and top officials when they retire, could simply begin paying the politicians a decade or two before they actually go to work for the firms...
...The editor was joined by an investment banker from Morgan Stanley and a lawyer from Wachtel Lipton and his wife...
...He can stay at the Ritz-Carlton for $370 a night, with phones and televisions in every room in his suite...
...If a Martian were to land in a Manhattan playground, he would conclude that human beings are white as children and grow up to be black with Trinidadian accents...
...The millionaires think it would be neat to be a think-tank fellow and appear on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer...
...Status-Income-Disequilibrium sufferers include journalists at important media outlets, editors at publishing houses, TV news producers, foundation officers, museum curators, moderately successful classical-music performers, White House aides, military brass, politicians who aren't independently wealthy, and many others...
...He's earning $110,000 a year as a top editor at, say, Time magazine...
...One can envision the rare high-income/high-status people-William F Buckley, Martin Peretz, Lewis Lapham-getting together to form charitable organizations to benefit their deprived brethren...
...They, like everybody else, suffer from Bracket Amnesia...
...For SID sufferers who are politicians or leading public officials, the answer is LEEP, the Lifetime Earnings Equalization Plan...
...But then the business trip ends and it is back to earth...
...Everyone will praise the Marais district, and it will not be mentioned that the Monied person has an apartment in the Marais, while the Titled person stayed in a one-star hotel somewhere in the suburbs...
...How can we alleviate the suffering of those who suffer from Status-Income Disequilibrium...
...In most cities, people are perpetually $1,500 a month away from happiness...
...But I am concerned with the Titled Class...
...But the person who suffers from Status-Income Disequilibrium can scarcely spare an hour worrying about his reputation because he has to spend all his time worrying about money (when in fact all he wants from money is to have enough so he doesn't have to worry about it...
...When his wife wasn't working, she used to pick up Jessica from Dalton...
...Their daughter turned 10 last year and needed a separate bedroom from her brother...
...The Titleholder is at the tail end of the upper class...
...He'd kept his tablemates at the Freedom Forum's annual Free Expression Dinner in a state of conversational bliss, and when the meal was over everybody at his table was in such high spirits they decided to go down to the lounge for a few drinks...
...Under the federal plan I envision, anybody who could prove that five of his reasonably close friends earned seven times more than he, would be eligible for federal aid...
...there goes any chance of serving as Attorney General), and after throwing in the costs of various ballet (Max) and rock-climbing (Jessica) lessons, the family is left with an after-tax disposable income for food, laundry, subway tokens, clothes, and leisure of about $600 a month...
...Feeling expansive, he decided to pick up the tab, putting it on his expense account, and when the whole group stumbled outside to the corner of 61st Street and Park Avenue, he was seized by his high spirits and called out, "Does anybody want to share a cab...
...The schlumps she wouldn't even talk to in gym class are bond traders on Wall Street with summer houses in East Hampton...
...Ultimately, such a program would benefit the entire nation...
...Some try to pass for members of the Monied Class...
...I don't know about Zuckerman, but most people in the Monied Class who fantasize about becoming a public intellectual can't actually fathom what it would be like to make less than $300,000 a year...
...Historically, when we think of the Grand Titles, we think of Prince, Duke, Earl, and Baron...
...And she'd sit, a little uncomfortably, with the nannies on the benches that ring the playgrounds, trying to find common conversational ground...
...Whatever their income, they imagine that an extra $1,500 a month would give them everything they need...
...The SID kid has his party in his living room, with a picture of a donkey on the wall and a 69-cent blindfold you can peek through if you really want to...
...Their apartments are filled with long expanses of counter space, wall space, settee space, table space, and floor space, all of it luxuriously spare...
...The Regency Hotel has a little room called The Library, where the martinis are $11...
...This would once again be a country in which little boys and girls could dream of becoming the literary editor at Elle and still be secure in the knowledge that they will be able to do their work from a six-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park...
...It's not enough to have more money than most countries...
...He would preserve his high-status career, but he would not feel ashamed when he returned home at night...
...And they use their expense account to the max...
...But for journalists, writers, and politicos, the pain now is acute...
...The government would send out monthly mortgage stamps to pay the cost of any newly bought home valued at more than $1.1 million...
...Or titles that include an employer's name-the New York Times, the White House, Knopf-in which case it scarcely matters which position the individual holds...
...And it's just the same in their offices...
...Our composite editor is rich enough to send his kids to Dalton and Ethical Culture, but all the other parents make as much in a month as he makes in a year...
...He wants to be a pundit...
...A TV producer who went to Yale and Oxford is higher than an apartment-building owner who went to SUNY-Binghamton but lower than the owner of a hot restaurant who went to Brooklyn Community College...
...Under a cash program, some SID sufferers would lose the work ethic and simply try to scrape by on the federally provided $250,000 a year...
...And there are papers everywhere: manuscripts, memos, yellowed newspapers, magazine clippings...
...If he's in publishing, say, he spends his days thinking about market niches, the same thing those summer-house-owning executives at AT&T think about...
...The investment banker said she lived just a block and a half away, toward 5th Avenue...
...He opened it and was in his dining room...
...Only the federal government has that kind of money...
...The sad fact is, the rich tend not to think this way...
...If they were richer, the entire country would feel better about itself...
...All their lives they've mastered the art of having other people think them smart and wonderful...
...And they have secretaries to route the paper flow, and their secretaries have secretaries to file things away, so there is nothing left stacked up to cover the wide-open expanse of a Monied person's desk...
...The briefcases of the Monied Class are wafer thin, with barely enough space to squeeze in a legal pad-because their lives are so totally in control they don't have to schlep things around...
...News & World Report, and a goodly chunk of Manhattan...
...On the other hand, an editor at Esquire has to defer to a person who has made $300 million in the garbage-collection business...
...It explains why he can't face his accountant, who knows that out of his $175,000 annual income, he gave a grand total of $450 to charity...
...He will congratulate himself for the fact that he lives in an integrated neighborhood, though he couldn't afford the pearly-white neighborhoods along Park Avenue...
...Actually, we're walking distance, just up on 65th," he said, motioning up Park...
...Or of poor John Sununu, who ruled the world when he was White House chief of staff but had to feed, educate, and house eight children on $125,000 a year...
...It will take a lot of money to bring these people's incomes into line with their status...
...The people who live on Park and Madison have foyers, foyers so long you're tired by the time you reach the living room...
...It is not as if he is compensated for his meager $110,000 salary with the knowledge that he can spend his days amidst the Higher Things...
...Still, the rich feel a lack...
...They buy those blue shirts with white collars and, to go with them, bright paisley ties that make it seem like the wearer has 100 electrified sperm crawling up his chest...
...Our editor, a composite, was suffering from Status-Income Disequilibrium (SID...
...It's just that they are working in big-money industries and he's in a small-money industry...
...But a targeted in-kind benefit- mortgage stamps-would have the right effect...
...First, everyone will act as if money does not exist...
...At home this sort of SID sufferer will luxuriate in his poverty...
...The lawyer looked uncomfortably at his wife...
...For example, a person who has made $10 million in the garbage-collection business has to defer in conversation to an editor at Esquire...
...His wife, whom he met while they were studying at the Yale drama school, is a program officer at a boutique foundation that offers scholarships to Brooklyn high-school students...
...The media person is in business just like $600,000-a-year smoothies in Fortune 500 executive suites...
...The other kids in the class have birthday parties at Yankee Stadium (they've rented out a skybox) or at FAO Schwartz (they rented out the whole store for a Sunday morning...
...In fact, the distinction between normal Americans and SID sufferers is that it never occurs to the former to congratulate themselves on their populism every time they do the dishes...
...The SID sufferer has books jammed all around the living room, some dating back from college (The Marx-Engels Reader), and there are magazines and frayed copies of the New York Review of Books lying on the bed-stands...
...The loser who flunked out of Harvard because he spent all his time watching TV makes $1.2 million selling a single movie script...
...He'll drive out to Fort Lee, New Jersey, so he can do a taping for the cable channel CNBC...
...Members of the Titled Class are good at worrying about their reputations...
...The disparity is not to be borne...
...And he was just as amusing in the bar, filling the night with publishing tales...
...Or that they'd be so poor...
...This aid would not come in the form of a cash grant...
...But in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, where SID is found in its greatest concentrations, people are $250,000 a year away from happiness...
...They can travel luggage-free to London because, after all, they've got another wardrobe waiting for them in the flat there...
...First, they dress the part...
...At work they are aristocrats, Kings of the Meritocracy, schmoozing with Felix Rohatyn...
...you might see them wearing a tie adorned with the logo of a local sanitation department, a garbage truck driving over a rainbow...
...Suddenly he was feeling miserable...
...For their part, members of the Titled Class react in diverse ways to the pressures of Status-Income Disequilibrium...
...Until recently, a person who went into, say, the media understood that he or she would forever live a middle-class life...
...He's got a little cubicle at his newspaper or magazine, or a little office at his publishing house or his foundation...
...Most of all, he will congratulate himself on choosing a profession that doesn't offer the big financial rewards, for his decision not to devote his life to money grubbing...
...And at home, the kitchen of the SID sufferer has jars and coffeemakers jamming the available counter space, and pots hanging loosely from a rack on the wall...
...Because SID sufferers control the American media, government, and the terms of civic discourse, their anxieties dominate the national culture...
...The rich are the johns of the foundation dinner-party circuit...
...He walked over to his apartment building, which had a check-cashing place downstairs and a storefront operation offering low phone rates to El Salvador...
...For journalists, media types, and other SID sufferers, there is no easy solution at hand...
...Hotel dry-cleaning will be as nothing...
...The contrast is clear when it comes time for the annual class dinner...
...The Monied know that the middle classes can't afford any dress they fancy, or ski when they please, but this knowledge is an abstraction...
...And it's not as if he is less ambitious than the partners at Skadden Arps, or that he does less schmoozing than the muni-bond traders at Kidder Peabody...
...The elevator (with a bare lightbulb flickering overhead) took him upstairs to his scratched steel door...
...An investment banker went to Andover and Princeton, and a radio producer went to Central High and Rutgers...
...He does not mention to himself that in fact he lacks the quantitative skills it takes to be, say, an investment banker, and he is unable to focus on things that bore him, the way lawyers can...
...Their taste in ties and socks will tend toward the ironic...
...And the rich feel vulnerable because despite their vast resources they still rely on the publicity machine for their good reputations, which these professional dinner-party ironists control...
...You've got to be sensitive to the invisible social hierarchies...
...The recipient would still be responsible for paying tuition costs, ski- trip costs, wardrobe costs, and other essentials...
...When a Titleholder with a household income of $175,000 a year enters a room filled with Monied persons who earn $1.75 million a year, a few social rules will be observed...
...These conversations between those who are Titled and those with Money are fraught with peril...
...These organizations could give out prestigious awards to low-status billionaires...
...Second, the Titled people are, in effect, paid to be interesting...
...Once it becomes plausible to imagine yourself pulling in $800,000 a year, the lack of that money begins to hurt...
...On one end is the Monied Class, those with plenty of dough who can use it to acquire status...
...Furthermore, the rich used to be remote...
...Their bad mood depresses everybody...
...The Titled person will notice that the Monied Class spends a lot of time planning and talking about vacations, whereas all the Titled person wants to talk about is work...
...People who live in the canopy enjoy wide-open spaces...
...Everyone, including the Titled person near bankruptcy, will pretend it is possible to jet off to Paris for a weekend and the only barrier is finding the time...
...Which explains why other members of the Titled Class go the other way and aggressively demonstrate that they reject the luxuries the Monied Class enjoy...
...But the editor couldn't afford an apartment with a foyer...
...She'd try to arrange play dates with the other kids, but their nannies weren't willing to travel all the way uptown to 103rd Street, so they'd end up going to the playgrounds off Central Park West...
...You will see them wearing Timberland boots with their suits, a signal that they haven't joined the Money culture...
...It happens around birthday time...
...The host parents are inevitably executives at Goldman Sachs or CFOs at some media conglomerate...
...The sufferers of this malady have jobs that give them high status but low income...
...One pair of parents take it upon themselves to throw a dinner for all of the other parents of the kids in their daughter's second-grade class...
...Which explains why the editor hasn't bought a new tie in three years and why he wakes up at 4 in the morning wondering where next year's tuitions are going to come from...
...Jessica's tuition at Dalton is about $18,000, once you throw in the extras, and it costs at least $16,000 to send Max to the Ethical Culture School...
...He will rent a Mercedes, or hire a car and driver, and for once he will be able to slide through life like one of the elite, in the clean, elegant world he so richly deserves...
...That is, instead of making $125,000 a year for 20 years in public life and then $1.1 million for 10 years in private industry, the public figure would have his income equalized at $600,000 a year for the entire 30-year period...
...She makes $65,000...
...And at the back of the Titled person's mind there is the doubt: Do they really like me, or am I just another form of servant, one who provides amusement or publicity instead of making the beds...
...The student who graduated from Harvard cum laude makes $85,000 as a New York Times reporter covering the movie business...
...At home they are peasants, wondering if they can really afford to have orange juice every morning...
...The parking spot for the 1988 Camry is $275 a month, the part-time nanny who picks up Max from school costs about $12,000 a year (off-the-books cash...
...Or they could give six-bedroom homes to high-status/low-income types...
...They buy glasses with large-ish frames, in contrast to the tiny "artsy" frames of the rest of their media friends...
...They keep their shoes polished daily, so that the sheen almost matches that of their hard briefcases...
...But the needs are so great, I fear that only the federal government has sufficient resources to address them...
...In their wildest imagining they never dreamed they'd someday pull in $175,000 a year...
...If every day he could publish a memoir by a neurotic lesbian Holocaust survivor with her own syndicated radio program, he'd have his own imprint in a year...
...The life of a SID sufferer, by contrast, is cluttered...
...In this way, they believe, they can walk into a society restaurant like Mortimer's and nobody will think they are just a bunch of editors trying to pass as moguls...
...She'd wait outside on the sidewalk, she and 150 nannies...
...When a book comes in, he wonders first which market it will serve: the Jewish market, the gay market, the depressed women's market...
...Often, the child of a SID victim will get invited for play dates by classmates who live in the Dakota or on Central Park South, big, high-ceilinged places with servants' wings and dining rooms the size of tennis courts...
...The editor decided not to splurge on a cab after all...
...a room-service omelet will arrive every morning at 7:30 sharp...
...Like an asthma sufferer taking the cure at an Arizona resort, a SID sufferer can find temporary relief from his affliction while traveling on business...
...As soon as you reach one income bracket, you forget what life is like in the lower brackets (in the way women forget about the pain of childbirth...
...And it is not as if the Titleholder these days fills his mind with thoughts about truth and beauty, or poetic evocations of Spring...
...There never was any great opportunity to go into a more lucrative field...
...Eventually, the kids of a SID sufferer begin to notice the income difference between their family and all their classmates' families...
...Consider the plight of the army general, who can command the movements of 100,000 men during the week but stretches to afford a Honda Accord for weekend outings...
...Consider the situation of our composite editor...
...Look at Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News, the Atlantic, U.S...
...The affair is catered (Little Dorothy Caterers-with the slogan "We're not in Kansas anymore...
...They were lucky to get a fairly bright three-bedroom for $2,750 a month, even allowing for the dingy neighborhood and the cockroach-infested building...
...These are the apartments of those who live in the forest canopy, where everything is light and clear and odorless and most of all uncluttered...
...But now one need only look at Cokie Roberts or David Gergen to see that vast wealth is possible...
...And everybody else gets to come admire a dining-room table that can seat 26...
...The Titled Class has always resented and secretly envied the Monied Class...
...He caught a cross-town bus at 57th Street and then waited nervously near the token booth for the number 1 subway train at Columbus Circle...
...First of all, they have to pay for all the foundation dinners they attend, while the Titled people go free...
...A foul-smelling homeless person shouted something at him until the train finally came, taking him up to 103rd Street and Broadway...
...There are two sides to the status-income equation...
...And this would have a positive impact on the lives of American children everywhere...
...But in the age of meritocracy, the Grand Titles are Senior Fellow, Editor in Chief, Assistant to the Secretary...
...Or, if women, they'll scrounge together enough dough for a Chanel suit...
...He stepped over the threshold and found himself looking across his cluttered table into the kitchen and wondering where he'd left the cockroach spray...
...People in the Monied Class have big offices and luxurious wood surfaces...
...He'll note proudly that he is in touch with normal Americans, since he, unlike all the elites he works with, still cleans his own dishes, still scrubs his own toilet...
...But in the new media age, the radio producer also went to Andover and Princeton...
...They are paid to read and think and come up with interesting things to say (it's astonishing that so many do this job so badly...
...All day long the phone-message slips pile up on their desks-calls from famous people seeking favors-but at night they realize the tub needs scrubbing, so it's down on the hands and knees with the Ajax...
...They lunch on an expense account at The Palm, but dine at home on macaroni...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 33
