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.”