Recently there has been a whole lot of hullabaloo on whether or not Kylie Jenner is a self-made soon to be billionaire. Full disclosure, I know next to nothing about this young woman. I know that she has been on a popular television show for the last ten years. That her background is one of wealth and fame. And that her mother seems to be a damned marketing genius. So, what does it mean when they call Kylie Jenner self-made?
The dictionary of Google describes being self-made as “having become successful or rich by one’s own efforts.” However, as we (hopefully) all know, Google is about what is most popular- not what is most correct. The Cambridge Dictionary definition is “rich and successful as a result of your own work and not because of family money.” This one is where the hubbub begins.
Is Paris Hilton “self-made”? She started out as an heiress to millions upon millions of dollars. It is that lifestyle that she marketed turning herself into a brand that in of itself is worth millions. It would be hard to say that she could have done that without her family’s money. What about Bill Gates? There are very few who would argue against his being a self-made man. But he is the son of a millionaire. And regardless of whether or not his family financially supported his company they definitely financially supported him. His family’s wealth provided access to an education at elite and exclusive schools and allowed him the benefit of a comfortable landing in case of failure. Because of his family he was able to make contacts he may not have without his background of wealth and privilege.
The pathway to American success is a difficult one. Even for someone in the upper class upward mobility is not automatic. Amassing hundreds of millions, or even a billions, of dollars even for someone starting with millions is not necessarily easy. Think of the pathway to economic success as a staircase. For an upper middle class/upper class man – one of the nineteen percent – his staircase of twenty-five hundred stairs is a gentle incline of wide and shallow stairs. Pretty much his only responsibility is climbing that staircase. It is one he is groomed to climb, from his nanny, to his prep school, to the Ivy League university that his father and grandfather went to. Friends and family on the staircase will be holding out hands in support, helping to move him forward. Still, we are talking about twenty-five hundred stairs. There are a few that won’t make it.
However, I think we can all agree that the farther you are from the top the more difficult it is for you to get there. Continuing the analogy, for someone from the middle class to get to the next level the staircase becomes steep, narrow, and harrowing- almost straight up, of five thousand steps. That’s a lot of darned stairs. To get to the top of that staircase is going to take focus, training, and hard work. Even with the benefit of a solid education and home life there will be times when she trips and falls. She’ll have to make sacrifices, serious sacrifices, like having a life outside of her goals. There will the temptation to stop and decide the view is just fine from here! Not many will make it.
The working class don’t even get a staircase. It starts out as a ladder of seventy-five hundred rungs. Even if the ladder is set on a steady foundation the thing is the ladder itself is not well put together. Parts of the ladder are slick, others rickety. Anyone climbing it is going to end up with splinters, will slide down a rung for every two achieved, step on the occasional nail, and sometimes the darned thing will just break. To move forward he’ll have to hang on to his place while fixing the ladder. It’s terrifying, back breaking work. When he gets to the top of the ladder he’s still looking at another 7500 stairs to get all the way to the top tier. Very few will make it. Many will fail.
The poor schmuck from the lower class is looking at an almost sheer rock cliff, fifteen hundred feet high. A very lucky person may have a rope and chisel in the form of a supportive family or caring mentor. The rock is sharp. The climb will be bloody. It will be punishing. It will drive him ever so slightly insane. All of this just to reach the ladder.
Oh, and the 1%? They own the pathway.
Back to Kylie Jenner. From the little I know about her I think it is safe to say that she has amassed her fortune by her own efforts. Using her social media platform she has leveraged her fame into a brand worth almost a billion dollars. At the young age of twenty-two years old. That is bloody amazing and should be lauded. Did she do it without family money? No, she didn’t. Almost no one does and it is only getting harder making something that was always improbable damned near impossible. I don’t know if self-made is a myth, but it’s pretty damned close to one. It is the rarity of such a person, particularly the obstacles to social mobility that our society has put into place, that we should be focusing on.
Trends in income inequality are clear. The hard gap between the one percent and the rest of us is just the start. The whole top twenty percent is pulling away from the rest of society forming what is a defacto aristocracy. New York Times contributor Tom Edsall writes in How the Other Fifth Lives, “The self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is…creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.” Reardon and Bischoff of the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis write in their report The Continuing Increase in Income Segregation, 2007-2012, “Segregation of affluence not only concentrates income and wealth in a small number of communities, but also concentrates social capital and political power.”
Why does this matter? Efforts to alleviate inequity by restructuring our society have continuously run into a solid wall of rationalized, self-satisfied, self-righteous, upper middle class opposition. The pushback on loosening occupational licensing laws – which have grown too large in both scope and scale, freeing up housing markets, or reforming school admissions have mostly come from upper middle class NIMBY’s who would probably self-describe as liberals. Like when this roomful of NYC parents shows their outrage at a plan to diversify their neighborhood’s schools. The separation of the upper middle class is a sociological concern but an economic and political problem. When status becomes tied to inheritance, inequality hardens into established hierarchy, and the transformation of our society to one of patricians and plebeians will be complete.