Judy Garland - A Gay Cultural Icon
A recent ABDPBT Personal Finance post invited readers to comment on their 2010 business goals, and I hastily commented that one of mine is to start a new series on the history of American money and values, then corrected that to read history of American money & moral values. The history of American money values is more like it. Not being an historian, sociologist or any other kind of academic qualified to conduct research on the history of anything, let alone the history of American money values, I will have to construct a crude model of how Americans get their money values based on what I think I know, then we’ll see how well it holds up.
The model assumes these are the primary factors influencing the formation of American money values:
- Max Weber’s social construct of an ethnic group,
- perception of and attitude toward one’s socio-economic class,
- level of formal education,
- preferred political theory and attitude toward political discourse,
- attitude toward intellectualism, i.e., pro vs. anti-intellectual
Note: The idea of ethnic group includes race, religion and culture.
What does any of this have to do with Lady Gaga?
If you happened to read Anna’s very funny post about Lady Gaga you either thought it was hilarious because you know all about this gay cult icon as she put it or you were one of the troll commentors, or, like me, you laughed despite not having ever heard of Lady Gaga before. Fast forward to Christmas vacation, me lounging around and catching up on several months of reading. I encountered not one but two articles mentioning Gaga: the April 17, 2009 New Yorker Ladies Wild: How Not Dumb is Gaga? tells us “she is as smart as she repeatedly claims to be” and the Sunday, December 27 New York Times Lady Gaga Is As Modern as A Video Gamer’s Creation describes her as a real-life avatar. The video Bad Romance reinforces the avatar idea; the music sounds like 80s dance music.
So, according to the Gaga wiki entry and the above model, Lady Gaga’s money values were probably influenced by her Catholic Italian-American ethnic group, perception of herself as upper-class, formal music school training, liberal politics and comfort with publicly speaking about her political views, and her pro-intellectual attitude.
Of course we can’t know exactly how these factors influenced her money values (unless she happens to comment on this post), but over time, as we look at examples of real Americans and Debits Of Our Lives soap opera characters whose values and influences are known, it should be possible to assemble an historical framework pointing to how these influences tend to shape money values. For example, we should be able identify factors that help explain why Heather’s kids Jack and Sarah are financially illiterate and why Thomas Jefferson was a shopaholic and died broke whereas John Adams, who lived modestly, was able to leave a small estate to his heirs per David McCullough’s book John Adams. Subsequent posts in this series will explore the influencing factors, e.g., how different ethnic groups teach kids about money, now and in the past, and look at how these factors have influenced real and fictional Americans.
Remember that a model cannot predict specific outcomes: the role of the individual in the development of his or her money values cannot be overstated. For example, it’s quite possible that none of Thomas Jefferson’s influencing factors support spending beyond one’s means!
The first three factors of the model are fairly typical: it’s not difficult to find scholarly papers analyzing how ethnic group, class and education level impact various aspects of American well-being. I added the factors of political preference and attitude toward intellectualism based on personal experience.
Politics come into play in that limited-government conservatives vs. liberal progressives have polar opposite views regarding the role of government in providing financial assistance and security to individuals. Still in vacation mode, I read all of Charles R. Kesler’s well written and logically constructed argument The Conservative Challenge and offer the link here as a good example of the limited-government point of view. As a progressive liberal, I can’t help commenting in response to Kesler’s reference to Obama’s “gauzy” campaign slogans that Reagan used similar vague slogans to charm the people, and in response to his point that liberalism has no clearly defined goal of reform, no “terminus ad quem” that as I see it, conservatives don’t either! Case in point, how do conservatives answer the question of how small should government be? How low should taxes be?
My Dad liked to say, “well, let’s just suppose we go ahead and condemn the poor, shall we condemn their children too?” As much as I support the concept of personal responsibility and agree that big bloated government is a problem, I can’t get past the need for a minimal social safety net. However, I have seen the availability of government programs affect people’s values; a feeling of entitlement is not uncommon within my generation.
The factor of intellectualism is a big one in my point of view. Both conservatives and liberals have used anti-intellectualism, or populism, at different times in American history to win the support of ordinary people for their party’s agenda. But in an increasingly complex economy that requires significant effort on the part of individuals to understand and manage their personal finances, is it really a good idea to promote anti-intellectualism? A recent post at Bad Money Advice points to the danger of the “widespread attitude that it is unreasonable to expect Americans to understand personal finance as they should.”
So yes, I’m deliberately adding the factors of politics and intellectualism and confess to a bias regarding how each affects money values, and no, I don’t have a name yet for this series!
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This is a really meaty post! I do think all of these things feed into how your money values are formed, and I find the intellectual question the most intriguing because it is something that really comes up in academia. There is a kind of chicness to being poor in academia, like you lose street cred if you have any money. I remember one of my classmates was married to a wealthy developer, but I didn’t find this out until years later, because she hid it and would park her very expensive car far away from everyone else, so they wouldn’t see what she was driving.
This is totally random, but your post made me think of it.
@abdpbt that was my experience too attending college in 1976-1983. A pro-intellectual attitude in and of itself doesn’t indicate whether one is comfortable with how money works and with the idea of accumulating wealth. You need to know the political preference of said intellectual. In my experience, academics leaned toward socialism. What’s interesting is that this is an example of using intellectualism instead of anti-intellectualism to avoid learning about and managing one’s money!
A very thought provoking post. I love it! It does boil down to how and where one was brought up, basically ethnicity and social class. If your culture holds savings and frugality as a high standard, then you may be more likely to save and be frugal. *Note I said may – every individual within a group can vary. If you’re raised where you must keep up with the Jones’s and obtain that American Dream no matter how much debt you accrue, then one (or many) within that group may end up deep in debt and no one but them knows.
And this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “American’s or people are bad at math.” I saw this stated in a recent article on MSN and the interviewer used this as a scapegoat for our country’s debt problems. Not a good excuse!
@Little House I agree, but what I find interesting in my experience is that certain groups, mostly at middle to upper class levels, are fundamentally comfortable with money, i.e., how money works, how to manage it, how to gradually accumulate wealth. These same groups aspire to wealth or the American Dream as you call it, but do so deliberately according to a solid plan.
It is an interesting question, but I do not think you can accurately find a way to correlate how and/or why people form their money values.
For example, there are fiscal conservatives who are unable to control their own household spending, just as their are free-spending libs who are very good at controlling their own personal finances.
Even more to the point, surely there are siblings from the same family that have wildly disparate behaviors with respect to how they handle their finances. I am already watching this with my own two kids; their current behavior is such that my 10-year-old daughter is a saver and attentive to her income/outgo while my 12 year-old son exhibits 0.0 interest in saving even a dime.
I’ve actually read articles in science magazines that suggest the way we handle our finances is actually more a factor of how our brains our wired at birth. Maybe so. Then again, I’m sure there is also a “secret sauce” that plays a bit of a role too – an amalgam of life experience that also helps shape our money values over time.
That being said, Susan, I think this will be a very interesting series and I look forward to reading more on the subject!
Best,
Len
Len Penzo dot Com
@Len I agree that it’s a tricky business to find correlations, but you can say the same thing about parenting. No one has the secret recipe for how to raise a child, but we try to be good parents anyway, and that involves making judgments. I think we can take a look at factors that influence our money values and draw some conclusions about which ones tend to support or undermine competence with personal finances.