You have to draw the line somewhere. That seems to be what Jennifer Risher thought when she decided that her children would no longer travel on private jets when they took family vacations. Risher, the author of We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth, was one of the earliest employees at Microsoft, where she met her husband, David, who went on to become a vice president at Amazon before retiring in 2001. “The irony of giving up private jets to keep Emily and Ali grounded in the wider, wilder world was not completely lost on me,” she writes. But “for their sanity and awareness of normal life I wanted [them] to experience getting to the airport on time, getting through security, and waiting in line with everyone else.”
It is not easy to be both wealthy and woke these days. For people like the Rishers, who come from modest means and attained eat-the-rich liberal arts educations before making it big in the tech industry, it is a confusing time. In a previous era, perhaps, they could have learned to live with their wealth by giving some of it away. But today, it seems that personal wealth itself is a sign of evil. Left-wing tastemakers dismiss private philanthropy with a wave of the hand: If you really cared about the less fortunate, they argue, you would dispense with making money and work instead for “structural change.”
The Rishers actually did get out of the money-making business relatively early in life. But it’s hard to escape the onslaught of popular opinion. And so We Need to Talk is first and foremost an act of self-defense. Risher did not grow up wealthy, she tells us — she thinks of her own upbringing as solidly middle class. (But then again, who doesn’t?) Though her family lived abroad at one point, she has distinct memories of her grandmother sneaking saltines off of restaurant tables and stashing them in her purse. At one point, her father even turned down a promotion because it would have required them to move to a harder-to-afford and more competitive area.
So when she and her husband found themselves with stock options worth tens of millions of dollars, Risher was at a loss. “Surrounded by adults who equated savings with being good, I never considered spending my money.” Whether by taking public transportation to the airport or staying in cheaper hotels or looking at a fixer-upper house (even though she had no interest or talent for home improvements), Risher tried to avoid any spending she deemed unnecessary or buying anything that might appear too showy — “tried” being the operative word. She did, for instance, realize she wanted a bigger diamond on her engagement ring. “I was both disgusted and intrigued, ashamed of my greed and newfound interest in sparkle,” she recalls shortly after the proposal. And the more she learned about diamonds, the more dissatisfied she became with the one David picked out for her. She upgraded at least twice.
As tiresome as Risher’s rounds of guilt and self-recriminations can be, they represent a widespread anxiety among adults who are far richer than their parents. They feel guilty about it. They try to assure themselves that their children won’t be spoiled, that their families will be grounded in the same values they grew up with. But ultimately, they succumb to the pleasures of wealth. At first, the changes are small — eating out or ordering in more often. But then, the real expenses start coming in.
Take hired help. At one point, Risher has an infant and a toddler at home, and her husband isn’t coming home until both are in bed. She describes herself as feeling “wiped out.” When her husband suggests that they get a nanny, she practically explodes. “The rules in my head held me back, dictating that good mothers didn’t let other people raise their children,” she writes. But she gets over this hang-up too, mostly by paying the nanny a lot more than the going rate and offering her regular performance reviews. If Risher treats the woman as a professional, she reasons, there’s less to feel guilty about. When she first hires a housekeeper, she tells a friend that she feels she should be doing the cleaning herself but then admits she doesn’t really want to. So she stays as far away from the woman as possible. “It just feels strange. She could be my mom,” Risher confides.
Risher correctly diagnoses the discomfort that we may feel with hiring people to do things that we have been raised to think we should do ourselves. It can feel weird to sit up on a kind of throne and have people paint our toenails or shine our shoes. And she is right that there is a “challenge to navigating relationships” that are neither purely business nor just personal, like with the people who care for our children.
But there is something more fundamental at work here. Like many of our most successful businessmen (Michael Bloomberg comes to mind), Risher cannot muster a defense of the system that has brought her family such success. She wants us all to start talking about wealth but only in order to “take the power away from money.” She worries that when rich people “stay quiet, we [are] allowing society to continue glorifying and demonizing wealth, which only perpetuates divides.”
This is absurd. First of all, you can’t take the power away from money. The solution is to see that more money flows to more people in the free market. Second, poor and middle-class people are not the ones who have trouble talking about money. They talk about it all the time. It’s only the rich for whom talking about money is a source of embarrassment.
Risher doesn’t claim to understand much about money or the economy more generally. “I’m not an economist or a politician, but given all this wealth, no one in our country should be going hungry or without healthcare. Everyone deserves access to housing and a good education. I support the idea of wealth redistribution and believe the rich need to pay higher taxes.” She even says that it “sounds reasonable to say billionaires shouldn’t exist.” But since that sounds kind of mean, she concludes that “we need to let go of the anger and resentment that divides us.”
Risher herself doesn’t seem to understand the obligations that come with being rich. When her daughter asks her why she doesn’t give money to a beggar on the street, she tells her it’s better to give to organizations that will help him. But unsatisfied with that answer, she and her husband begin giving away $100 here and there in “random acts of kindness” — in tips to baristas and the folks helping them with Christmas trees.
Good for them. People have found worse ways to spend money. Eventually, she and her husband decided to give more systematically to causes that suit their sensibilities, such as NPR, United Way, and Planned Parenthood. But if we want to preserve a system in which good jobs are available for people of varying skill levels and the ability to achieve economic self-sufficiency is not dependent on the whims of rich people carrying around $100 bills, then capitalism is going to need some more articulate defenders than Jennifer Risher.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
