Outclassed: how your neighbors income might affect your happin... https://www.theguardian.com/global/2017/may/11/outclassed-nei...

Outclassed: how your neighbors income

might affect your happiness
Alissa Quart
Dont scoff: psychological and social science research supports that living amid the
wealthy even when you are upper middle class is bad for your mental health

Outclassed, our new column about inequality, will run twice a month

Middle class in a wealthy neighborhood: a recipe of resentment? Illustration: Rosie Roberts

America's unequal future is supported by

About this content

Thursday 11 May 2017 10.00BST

S
haun Tanner, a web developer and meteorologist, lives in San Jose, California, and
works in Alameda, over an hours commute each way. His profession and location
might indicate that Tanner is auent, part of the storied Silicon Valley tech boom.
But Tanners experience is quite dierent. He has a $3,000 monthly mortgage, less
than half of his monthly income. Yet week to week, he says, he still feels a crunch on
Fridays. Theres nothing left here, he says.

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Until last September, Tanner had to work three jobs to pay for his health insurance and
familys expenses as a meteorologist at Weather Underground, a rain-and-shine site, as
an independent contractor, and as an instructor at San Jose State University. Now, he is
down to working only two jobs, including laboring for what is called a weather drone
start-up. (Cool! Scary!) Nonetheless, Tanner is still economically pressured, still
commuting, and still heavily exerting himself to pay for three kids in after-school and
daycare, all aged 10 and under.

People see I work in the tech industry and they think I should be a multimillionaire,
Tanner explains. Hes not, needless to say. And living in the shadow of the tech industry
has been even worse for some of his friends, he tells me, most of whom dont have
ridiculous tech jobs but whose cost of living are nonetheless full of alienating
comparisons.

Mr and Ms Jones of the Bay Area ask: Am I doing as well as my neighbors? says
Tanner. Its getting worse.

Then theres Amy, who has worked in human resources for over 18 years for dierent
hi-tech Silicon Valley companies. She had struggled with the assumption that if you are
working in and around Silicon Valley you should be raking in six gures. But it wasnt
the case for her line of work. She and her husband spent over half of their monthly
income on their mortgage: childcare ate up another 30%.

Yet the couple were making $150,000 between the two of them. Anywhere else in the
country that would be a ton of money, she said. She also spent a large amount of time
commuting because she couldnt aord to live closer to her job. She literally drove my
kids out at 6am, to get them to daycare by 7, get in to the oce at 8.30, pick them up at 5
or 6 then wed commute back, then bath, and food, and bed. Id spend 15 minutes a day
relaxing with them. She herself would collapse into bed from the end of the day. As she
put it,:I didnt make enough to get the cleaning lady or the chef like my colleagues did
my colleagues didnt have time to clean for themselves or feed themselves, but they did
have money.

Her familys cost of living was so high that even though she grew up in Bay Area, she
migrated to the Sacramento area. She now works out of her home in an unfashionable
town, where she can spend time with her young children and is able to socialize with
new friends who live nearby.

People may sco at the concerns of Tanner and Amy and those like them, including the
many public schoolteachers I have interviewed in the San Francisco area who are now
forced to drive Uber to be able to pay their rent. And sure, we might dismiss their
complaints as the kvetching of the privileged. But we do so at the cost of
misunderstanding human psychology and physiology, as well as losing solidarity with
another group that is actually being harmed by inequality.

Try putting yourself in their place. The reality is that even upper-middle class life here
stands on weak foundations.

Psychological and social science research supports that living amid the wealthy even
when you are upper middle class is pretty bad for your mental health. In 2010, a study
by researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardi University found that money

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improves happiness only if it also improves peoples social rank. In other words, being
highly paid isnt enough: people want to see progress in their lives, to feel as if they are
moving up, and to be able to exhibit that ascension to people in their community and to
themselves. Glenn Firebaugh and Matthew B Schroeder have also written on this
phenomenon in a study entitled Does Your Neighbors Income Aect Your Happiness?

With respect to income and happiness, what matters most is how much income a
person has relative to his or her income comparison group, the two scholars wrote.

As Danah Boyd recently wrote, what is missing from this account is an understanding of
the local perception of wealth, poverty, and status. Like politics, all status is ultimately
local people compare themselves to those they live near. Americans overall may live
better than medieval aristos could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live
in the neighborhood next door, aunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private
schools.

Like Thorstein Veblen before them, academics like the British researchers I mentioned
earlier found that contentment is indeed relative its dependent on how you see
yourself in comparison to those you view as genuine peers. Even if you are middle class
according to national averages, if you dwell in the hyper-wealthy areas of this country
(all the richer thanks to inequality), you will likely nd yourself struggling materially and
emotionally. The fact that you know all too well that you should be grateful for what you
have only makes it worse.

Take the private school teacher in New York City I interviewed, with two stepkids and a
freelancer husband. She earns $90,000 a year. Her dad worked at a bank while her mom
stayed at home during her early childhood, but her parents had a good mortgage and
now live in a single-family home in Queens.

I cant imagine owning something worth what their home costs, she says. (Shes wary
of sharing her name because of her profession). And that matters to how her brain and
body handle stress, because home ownership is her personal point of reference for a
dignied existence.

To feel as though she is appropriately positioned and similar to her peers, she does
spend on little luxuries, ordering a glass of wine rather than just drinking water and
using a credit card more often to pay for, say, hair color or highlights. She adds, I think
of myself as poor bourgeois.

Now in her mid-40s, she would like to have a child but would never consider actually
doing so, as I have no resources. Part of the problem is her personal debt. Her credit
card debt, for instance, equals $27,000. This all began because for years, she was making
less and was unmarried.

I was living by myself, she says, choosing to live on the Upper West Side, an auent
area of Manhattan: even though the rentals in the area were unaordable, the costs
associated with moving were also prohibitive. I wasnt going to never buy clothes or
never go out or never go on vacation. Id just say screw it and made a decision to put it
on a credit card. This might seem objectively foolish to a cold-eyed nancial planner,
but to many of us, especially those of us with stressed brains aiming for the minimum of
relief and psychological comfort, these are not always luxuries.

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In New York City, where I also live, Boyd points out that people can complain about
earning power when they make hundreds of thousands of dollars. She writes: Peoples
understanding of prosperity is shaped by what they see around them. And this aects
their physical and mental health: its not just failure to count your blessings or the
dreadful discourse around gratitude.

Again, how your income stacks up against others in the immediate community is more
crucial in terms of satisfaction than income itself. This aects mental health but also,
according to another 2014 study, physical health outcomes as well. Michael Daly, now an
associate professor in behavioural science at the University of Stirling, and his colleagues
write that their data does demonstrate that social position rather than material
conditions may explain the impact of money on human health.

And yet another study of the power of rank rather than absolute income cited an
evolutionarily based, involuntary defeat syndrome where low social rank opens
people up to psychological disorders like depression.

Essentially, if you are surrounded by those who outrank you, it is likely to aect your
identity in insidious ways. Going in and out of a proverbial poor door a separate
entrance for income-restricted residents of mixed-income housing of your city every
day has its costs, even if the poor door woman would be considered auent in another
geography. And again, the toll remains hidden because people like the private school
teacher who are scally outranked are all too aware of not only others but also their own
privilege. She and Tanner can feel precarious even their paychecks should make them
solidly middle class or even privileged. This is very much due to the cost of real estate
in the San Francisco and New York City areas, with the median rent for an average
two-bedroom apartment running tenants $4,560 in the former.

It makes Tanner long to escape, to become a minimalist, to move to the forest, to live
o the land. I have those impulses, too. After all, the middle class, even in cities lled
with elites, were once still properly middlethey werent all trying to keep up with the
1% or celebrities, and they did have more certainty and stability that made up in some
way for their lower rank.

Now they we are stuck in the middle, as the song has it. The question remains of
where to go from here.

Outclassed: the secret life of inequality, our new column about class, will run twice a month

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Topics
Income inequality/America's unequal future
Inequality/Silicon Valley/comment

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