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Money and Class in America
In the United States, happiness and wealth are often regarded as synonymous. Consumerism, greed, and the insatiable desire for more is an American obsession. Following the native tradition of Twain, Veblen, and Mencken, the editor of Lapham’s Quarterly here examines our worship of Mammon.
Focusing on the wealthy sybarites of New York City, whom Lapham has been able to observe firsthand in their natural habitat, Money and Class in America is a caustic, and often hilarious, portrait of a segment of the American population who, in the thirty years since the book was originally written, have become only further removed—both in terms of wealth and social awareness—from everyone else.
Revised, and with a new introduction by What’s the Matter With Kansas author Thomas Frank, this skewering of America’s super-rich is perhaps still more pertinent today than when it first appeared.
Focusing on the wealthy sybarites of New York City, whom Lapham has been able to observe firsthand in their natural habitat, Money and Class in America is a caustic, and often hilarious, portrait of a segment of the American population who, in the thirty years since the book was originally written, have become only further removed—both in terms of wealth and social awareness—from everyone else.
Revised, and with a new introduction by What’s the Matter With Kansas author Thomas Frank, this skewering of America’s super-rich is perhaps still more pertinent today than when it first appeared.
354 pages, Paperback
Published October 2, 2018
26 people are currently reading
67 people want to read
About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
181 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 29, 2024
excellent
This book has given me wonderful insight into the equestrian class …
Very informative
Very entertaining
Very insightful
Very refreshing
Very enlightening
Very reassuring
I will read again ..
This book has given me wonderful insight into the equestrian class …
Very informative
Very entertaining
Very insightful
Very refreshing
Very enlightening
Very reassuring
I will read again ..
August 25, 2024
Dated in some of the specific references and dollar amounts quoted but very relevant to what is going on today.
July 23, 2020
I must admit I have a soft spot for Lapham's essays, and greatly admire his skill at the turning of phrases. And this book, while perhaps not as good as his work in say the last decade or two, is definitely no exception:
Or perhaps:
Money and Class in America is otherwise an energetic account of the American worship of Mammon that, while perhaps controversial in 1988 when this book was first published, is generally more accepted as a truism today. And though this book generally does not rise above the wryly descriptive (some memorable quotes below), Lapham does however have some interesting perspectives to share.
As for a couple of memorable quotes:
And also...
Across the whole of the American continent the talk of money is never quiet. Twenty-four hours a day it seeps through walls and shouts on the floors of the exchanges, whispers in darkened bedrooms and clatters in all-night restaurants, pleads and wheedles through telephone lines, takes up most of the space in the media, screams across kitchen tables, gloats in the windows of Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive, drifts through bus stations and convention halls, worries in elevators, makes crazy the would-be artists in the gloom of the avant-garde.
Or perhaps:
Failing a war, revolution or economic collapse, interests align themselves with the inertia of money. The difficulty does not lend itself to economic tinkering. Efforts at the redistribution of wealth invariably lead to the same injustices under different letter heads, and except in times of war or illness, moral awakening is as hard to come by as a winning number in the New Jersey lottery. It is not a question of taxes, interest rates, tariffs, investment policy or monetary reform. It is the prior question of an attitude toward money that is synonymous with religious devotion.
Money and Class in America is otherwise an energetic account of the American worship of Mammon that, while perhaps controversial in 1988 when this book was first published, is generally more accepted as a truism today. And though this book generally does not rise above the wryly descriptive (some memorable quotes below), Lapham does however have some interesting perspectives to share.
As for a couple of memorable quotes:
Americans worry about money's deportment because not only do we believe one's money is one's self but we also believe that an American is by definition always and forever innocent. The Puritans arriving in Massachusetts Bay thought they had regained the states of innocence lost to Satan by generations of corrupt and inattentive Europeans. Their heirs and assigns still hold to that presumption. Foreigners commit crimes against humanity. Americans make well-intentioned mistakes. Foreigners incite wars, manufacture cocaine, sponsor terrorists and welcome Communism. Americans cleanse the world of its impurities.
And also...
The abyss looms on all sides—in the trees beyond the croquet lawn, in the tall grass behind the hedge, in the bar downstairs from the grand ballroom, across the street under the treacherous neon light. Their awareness of the abyss makes them fearful of shadows. Dependent upon a magic they don't know how to replenish, they feel themselves threatened by enemies of infinite number: thieves, journalists, tax agents, blackmailers, debauched women, unscrupulous grocers Third World dictators, terrorists, Communists and populist sentiment in Detroit. They remain certain that nobody would help them in their distress, that nowhere in the bleak waste of the universe could they find any human hand willing to stay their fall into ruin and disgrace. Thus they huddle together like alarmed cattle in the enclaves of Fifth Avenue or Palm Beach or Beverly Hills—"wherever is," in F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase, "that people go and are rich together."
November 4, 2019
I am glad to have come across this book when trying to figure out who found Lapham’s Quarterly.
The main plus point of the book is Lapham’s style of writing. As a journalist, he writes in a witty manner and packs his sentences with many references. (“Money is the elephant always in the room, never to be addressed or seen but whose will is done on earth as it is in heaven.”) Being an insider of wealth and of the gilded circles, he has access to interesting personalities and funny anecdotes that could easily entertain any reader. Lapham makes some prescient observations about how society ties money to one’s competence, how we have been socialised to show deference to the rich and come to assume that money can solve the world’s problems. I found it educational to read his thoughts on Reagan, Kissinger and the press machine (Katherine Graham). His book can be a companion read to Anand Giridharadas’ book, and was useful in provoking reflections in my own life and my own relationship with money — quite likely inherited from being a citizen of Singapore.
My main disagreement with the book was how Lapham seemed to cherry pick examples about rich people and make grandiose statements to suit his thesis about how people’s reverence of money (and their denial of it) messes society and geopolitics up. I understand it’s easy to be cynical and write about a group in which one is an insider, but he notes some tendencies (e.g. self annihilation, buying into images) which I think can be generalised to the public, and not necessary the rich.
All in all, the book felt quite draggy and laden with unnecessary examples at times, but at other times one enjoys Lapham’s wit and penetration through smoke and mirrors. 3.5/5 for me.
Quotes:
Ambition, like leather jackets, was best left to the poor. Everybody who mattered already had arrived at all the places that mattered.
There is a difference between the ennui of people who own things and the ennui of people who fear the owners — but they shared an equivalent egoism. To be casual at prep school was everything — a manner that implied fluidity, grace, ease, absence of commitment, urbanity, lack of sentiment, indifference to the rules and courage under circumstances always ironic.
An Old World atmosphere that reflects the state of being rather than a state of becoming.
With a few notable exceptions, it is difficult to think of anything in the United States that cannot be bought or sold — the presidency, a television network, longer life, The New Yorker, the Baltimore Colts, a municipal judge, an ambassadorial post, Revlon, justice, social rank.
Year after year the editors of investment newsletters charge handsome fees for advice that is as worthless as the geopolitical advice published in academic quarterlies. Nobody minds very much because it is understood that learned gentlemen speak and write an unintelligible language not unlike church Latin. It doesn’t matter if they are prove to be wrong because it is understood that they are in the business of mumbling prayers. Their function is ceremonial.
No European associates wealth with personal merit or poverty with personal failure. But to the American what is important is not so much the possession of money but the power to earn it “as a proof of one’s manhood”.
No matter how many objects we acquire, or how much chocolate we consume as if it were chocolate or Kleenex, we become smaller.
The main plus point of the book is Lapham’s style of writing. As a journalist, he writes in a witty manner and packs his sentences with many references. (“Money is the elephant always in the room, never to be addressed or seen but whose will is done on earth as it is in heaven.”) Being an insider of wealth and of the gilded circles, he has access to interesting personalities and funny anecdotes that could easily entertain any reader. Lapham makes some prescient observations about how society ties money to one’s competence, how we have been socialised to show deference to the rich and come to assume that money can solve the world’s problems. I found it educational to read his thoughts on Reagan, Kissinger and the press machine (Katherine Graham). His book can be a companion read to Anand Giridharadas’ book, and was useful in provoking reflections in my own life and my own relationship with money — quite likely inherited from being a citizen of Singapore.
My main disagreement with the book was how Lapham seemed to cherry pick examples about rich people and make grandiose statements to suit his thesis about how people’s reverence of money (and their denial of it) messes society and geopolitics up. I understand it’s easy to be cynical and write about a group in which one is an insider, but he notes some tendencies (e.g. self annihilation, buying into images) which I think can be generalised to the public, and not necessary the rich.
All in all, the book felt quite draggy and laden with unnecessary examples at times, but at other times one enjoys Lapham’s wit and penetration through smoke and mirrors. 3.5/5 for me.
Quotes:
Ambition, like leather jackets, was best left to the poor. Everybody who mattered already had arrived at all the places that mattered.
There is a difference between the ennui of people who own things and the ennui of people who fear the owners — but they shared an equivalent egoism. To be casual at prep school was everything — a manner that implied fluidity, grace, ease, absence of commitment, urbanity, lack of sentiment, indifference to the rules and courage under circumstances always ironic.
An Old World atmosphere that reflects the state of being rather than a state of becoming.
With a few notable exceptions, it is difficult to think of anything in the United States that cannot be bought or sold — the presidency, a television network, longer life, The New Yorker, the Baltimore Colts, a municipal judge, an ambassadorial post, Revlon, justice, social rank.
Year after year the editors of investment newsletters charge handsome fees for advice that is as worthless as the geopolitical advice published in academic quarterlies. Nobody minds very much because it is understood that learned gentlemen speak and write an unintelligible language not unlike church Latin. It doesn’t matter if they are prove to be wrong because it is understood that they are in the business of mumbling prayers. Their function is ceremonial.
No European associates wealth with personal merit or poverty with personal failure. But to the American what is important is not so much the possession of money but the power to earn it “as a proof of one’s manhood”.
No matter how many objects we acquire, or how much chocolate we consume as if it were chocolate or Kleenex, we become smaller.
September 2, 2019
It may have been published 30 years ago, but the words written here are more true than ever. If there is a class of society that needs to be spotlighted and torn down a few notches, it is the ultra wealthy. It is their greed and those that enable them that have caused a hollowing out of the American middle class.
Here, we learn about the habits of rich. See and be seen. D. J. Trump is here, as he attempts to hobnob with the upper crust of New York. This is a whole group of people, small their number, but outsized in their influence that exist outside of normal American society. Money makes people do funny things and this book puts a bright red bow on that statement.
Join this book with _Winners Take All_ to get a sense of how the rich look down their noses at the majority of society. The stories here would be hilarious if they were not so true.
Here, we learn about the habits of rich. See and be seen. D. J. Trump is here, as he attempts to hobnob with the upper crust of New York. This is a whole group of people, small their number, but outsized in their influence that exist outside of normal American society. Money makes people do funny things and this book puts a bright red bow on that statement.
Join this book with _Winners Take All_ to get a sense of how the rich look down their noses at the majority of society. The stories here would be hilarious if they were not so true.
February 6, 2022
Insightful, funny, and surprisingly literary.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews