Rich Girl Founda!
Some of the wealthiest people in Manhattan, Manhattan, Manhattan.
I enunciate, okay?
Welcome back Rich Girls and Boys to the Rich Girl Roundup weekly discussion of the Money with Katie Show.
I'm your host, Katie Gatti Tossan, and every Monday morning we're going to dig into a money dialogue.
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All right, y'all. Before we get into this week's topic, this week's upcoming main episode on Wednesday is about the concept of, quote, romanticizing your life, how to live a luxurious, indulgent life, but, you know, without breaking the bank, without sacrificing our financial goals.
How can we really enjoy the journey? So we're going to be taking some cues from our friends across the pond in Europe and their approach to leisure for this one, and I think it's going to be really fun.
All right, on to the roundup. Hanna, I know you're feeling a little bit dicey about this topic.
So do you want to introduce it for us?
Sure. I think it's a bit of a slippery slope, and there's lots of room for nuance here.
But this week's conversation was actually inspired from a listener email that we got. It was a thread with listener Jamie F.
And essentially a boil down to what does deserving this look like?
How does the idea of having, quote, unquote, earned it play into our perceptions of other people's wealth versus those who we deem unworthy of their success or financial stability?
And this feels like a conversation that is ripe for pissing people off.
Yes, a lot of like potential uncertainty.
It also kind of relates to the critical feedback episode we did about self-made millionaires.
It talks a little bit about privilege and what it means to come from nothing.
So I actually went to Google for a lot of what I wanted to talk about.
And it's like, how can I protect myself from angry listener emails?
No, but also I think that it is, it's very personal, right?
Like it all comes down to what do you think is fair or deserving or whatever?
And so it is very subjective, in my opinion.
And so Katie, I'll start with you. I think you were talking about a book you had read recently that like really illuminated some of this conversation for you.
Yeah. Well, it's funny that you just said the word fair. Like I keyed in on that because I had the same thought when I was mulling it over.
I think the reason this question feels so contentious and the reason that the concept of deserving this and having earned what you have is so touchy or really strikes a nerve for people one way or the other is because it really gets at the heart of fairness.
And who gets what and why, which is really an economic question.
And I think that capitalism in general as a system prescribes a certain set of norms about who gets what and why and what work is valuable and what is not.
So you're saying on a money show that we're going to blame capitalism for this one?
No, no, no, no, no, kidding. Let's actually dig into this and go a step further.
Because the, I think you would see this in any situation where things are not equal.
You would start to get to the heart of this question of who deserves what and this book I was reading, which was why this was just so well timed.
I added it to the newsletter. So if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, go ahead.
Subscribe. Yeah, it was called like uneasy street, right? Yes.
It was in our rich girl roundup one week of I always put the books I'm reading in there.
And I thought it was so fascinating. So the concept of uneasy street, this woman, she interviews some of the wealthiest people in Manhattan.
Manhattan. Manhattan. She breaks them down. I enunciate.
Okay. She breaks them down into what she calls earners and inheritors.
So she looks at people who have either earned millions of dollars through their labor and who did not inherit money and people who inherited millions of dollars.
What a fascinating premise. Some of the people were in both camps, some inherited millions of dollars, but also had very high paying jobs.
And it was so fascinating because she kept highlighting how the concept of deservingness would come up.
They were very quick to be like, I've worked really hard to have what I have.
And anytime she would kind of press them and be like, well, you know, I saw your housekeeper in the other room.
I see your nanny in the other room. They're working really hard.
Like, do you think they're working hard? Do they not deserve what you have?
And that it would kind of like make the person squirm a little bit and be a little bit uncomfortable because they'd be confronting like, well, no, I think they are working hard.
But I don't know. Like, I just, I've worked really hard. Like, that was always the way the conversation would play out every time.
And I've noticed this in my own life where I will get defensive sometimes.
It's like, well, I worked really hard for that money. I earned the money that I spent on that.
I don't have a cohesive, this is what it means or this is not what it means.
But I do think that it's really interesting when you dig into the moral implications around having resources and whether or not you have quote unquote.
Fairly earned them. So that actually tracks exactly with what I found on Google.
It was really interesting. I looked at the search who deserves their wealth.
And there were pieces from Forbes insider, which disclosure insider.
I believe owns morning grew correct a whole bunch of different places and they all had totally different op-eds on the topic of who deserves to be rich.
And whether they interviewed people who are rich. And so I did what a millennial would do. I went to Reddit.
And I went on Reddit and I looked at how do people define earning it?
It's interesting because it relates a lot to what you said. There was this implication of having to suffer.
Like, there was this, like, I have toiled. I have gone through something hard to achieve this income.
And that was what was the, like, delineation. But to your point, I would argue that probably a housekeeper is working laboriously to earn their income in a way that I'm not doing at my, you know, nine to five desk computer job writing emails.
So I also think that there's an element of this question of maybe who is unworthy of the success or how do we define being unworthy?
Is it because they were lucky? Was it because of their privilege? Was it because their life was handed to them on a silver platter, like some of the examples that were the interviews in that book that sounds like you're saying, you know, I think for me to I'm first generation American.
And I know that I have had to work harder than some of my friends for their successes because they went to high school.
I got a summer internship at an amazing company because their father set them up with one. My parents did not have connections like that anything that I've done in that way. Yes, I had a lot of other privileges, but that was all from me.
So I think that there's not just the fairness aspect, but like, where do we think things are unworthy?
It's a good question to flip it. I almost think then you could press it even further and go, is worthiness even real? Does anyone deserve anything?
It kind of gets that idea that we talked about a couple months ago about the role of luck and success and how yeah, you have to work really hard. I think it was that self made millionaire episode where it's like hard work is just one element of success. There is luck, there is timing, there is connections.
And so I think when you start to dig into that morass of like what it really takes to quote unquote make it or to make it to the level that you have tens of millions of dollars.
Even being born in a certain era gave you a better shot statistically of becoming a millionaire than being born at a different period of time.
You can even see this in stock market returns. Nick Majorly did an amazing piece that will link in the show notes for this episode about this where the time that you started investing and the time that you retired based on that 30 year window in the stock market.
You could have a radically different outcomes and that's nothing but luck, right timing and luck. I'd wonder if the wise Yoda answer is that well deserving this is just a social construct that it's not.
Real and it's really it's something that you almost can't measure I wrote in my prep notes to like on the flip side of that does that mean certain people deserve to be poor like obviously I don't think that we're saying that either so it is right.
Yeah, I love that kind of reframing thanks Yoda slash Katie.
I'm like I was like the stoic philosopher.
I also saw kind of this trend online and it's something that we've talked about in the self made millionaire episode as well is like when do things shift from earning it to no longer earning it to for example like a Jeff basis there.
There is no way that someone like a billionaire can say I have earned this all up by myself because you kind of do have to exploit other people in order to make that kind of money.
What do you think on kind of that shift from you did earn it at one point to that I think is where the way our capitalist system is currently structured.
Throws a real wrench in chair was that hard work worth hundreds of billions of dot well no probably like at what point does it become divorced from your personal labor and like the amount that you still benefit I think it gets at that kind of owner versus labor thing where capital ownership is far more lucrative than labor.
And you can make way more money owning something than laboring for something but theoretically owning something is a lot less work than laboring for it right that's where capitalism kind of divorces from compensation and so we think that that's linear.
But I don't think that that's true I think that when you own assets you can make a very disproportionate income as the owner of that capital then someone who's maybe busting their last 12 hours a day to make that capital worth something.
I think that there's also like a relative reframe right like how are we even defining success oh see I was just thinking about this question from a wealth deserving this not like.
And that's why this is money with Katie looking at the finances only I think that like the success of do you have a job that you love do you have the family lifestyle that you want but you're not raking and millions like I think that the context of success is also important.
I guess what I'm saying is that the whole question every word needs to be picked apart to like very specifically define for us to find an answer probably in this rich go round up we pose more questions than any sort of answer but I think that it's worth dissecting a little bit more than just kind of taking a face value.
That's interesting the thing is I do wonder though would someone look at someone who has a happy family and immediate income and be like they didn't earn that whereas I think you're far more likely to take exception to someone who's earning a lot or has a lot like I think money tends to be a more it exacerbates how you feel about a lot of things and it affects your life in a lot of different ways.
So yes, I do think because it is it's very subjective like the way I feel about money is going to be different than the way that someone who had all those ends in college that I'm comparing myself to is going to feel about money versus like if you go for a job and you don't get picked it's easy to be like well that person got this and that's why they got this role.
This is the bracelet I was talking about.
I think where I land with this one is that the kind of hard pill to swallow truth is that life isn't fair and that that unfairness extends to some people getting a lot of resources and some getting not as many.
But that I think it highlights why good policy is so important because you don't want policy that exacerbates that or compounds that but rather can help level the playing field of opportunity if you will so that someone's battle that might already be relatively uphill isn't made steeper.
I mean it's basically looking at equality versus equity or justice it's basically saying like does everybody get the same thing across the board and that's good for everybody or do some people need more so that they can be at the same level as everybody else.
So you just mentioned like equity versus equality do you think that you should be able to work harder to make more money or do you think that if you are working harder than someone else you should be able to make more money than they are.
I think I know how you feel about this but I'm curious I want to hear what you think I would say so I think your first gut response would be like no I think equity is better I think everyone should have the same but I think in practice if you were really pressed I think you would say that if you're working harder than someone else you should be able to make more and that you should be able to translate harder worker longer hours worked for more income.
The irony is that I actually had it backwards where I was like well I work really hard like I went into the gut mode of like well I did this but then I thought about and I was like well.
You know that would be assuming that other people do not work hard I do think that there are certain instances where if you are in the same role as someone else and the quality of your work is different and the outcomes of your worker different and you can like really look at that then yes.
But I don't think it's fair for me to say I deserve more than so and so down the street was a completely different job their idea of labor could be completely different in the way that they make income.
Okay that's interesting that I had it backwards I don't think there's a right answer because I think I've made the case in my own role and you and I talked about this like if I'm working 40 hours a week but I'm able to get X amount of stuff done and the quality is still the same even though you and I negotiated on X salad is I mean I shouldn't ask for more.
Yeah I mean I think that is almost the practical manifestation of the question is what do I deserve what does my labor quote unquote earn and what what is my value how do you quantify that and so I think it gets slippery at the macro level which is what we're talking about where you're looking at everyone in society and who gets what but I think the question is equally interesting at that micro level.
How do you quantify that yeah I've heard this quote like where you are born should not dictate how like if you are going to live and it was more about like the mortality crisis around the world but I think that that statement still kind of stands that like a lot of these circumstances that are not in your control.
Do affect your life for the rest of your life yeah and that's a much wider question but I guess what I'm saying is I don't think there's a clear answer just more questions to consider.
That's what I really liked about this question and why I wanted to do it because I was like we're going to have a fun interesting conversation that I think will yeah just open up more dialogue and so yeah if you're listening to this and you were either like vehemently agreeing or disagreeing do me a favor pose this question to a friend or loved one have the conversation with them and then report back to us where you guys land and what y'all think and if you think we missed anything or if there was any anywhere we took the conversation today that you think that.
You think that there was a gaping hole or a really flagging logical flaw and we'd love to hear from you email us at money with Katie at morning brew calm I think this is one we're depending on what we hear we might do a follow up just because I think that this is such a fundamental social value element of wealth building and you know deserving this is just such a juicy topic so that is all for this week's rich girl round up and we will see you on Wednesday to talk about living it up.
Without breaking the bank.