Mona Chalabi spent five years following Americans living paycheck to paycheck, as well as those earning top wages. Her new book, Ten Lives, explores why financial security can feel so elusive.
President George Washington is displayed on a U.S. $1 bill. LM Otero/AP hide caption
LM Otero/AP
How much money would it take for you to feel financially secure? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mona Chalabi spent five years following 10 Americans, from those living paycheck to paycheck to those earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, in an effort to answer that question. Her new book,
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"It's called 10 Lives because I specifically didn't just want to focus on the 1%," Chalabi says. "Instead I wanted to talk about how the 99% of us aren't all in it together, and the kind of power differentials between us."
Chalabi says almost everyone she profiled in the book was deeply worried about their financial future, even those who earn plenty of money.
"Across the board, everyone just seemed to be expressing this feeling of panic that I think is really, really particular to U.S. capitalism, which is an incredibly precarious and cruel system where you are one crisis away from experiencing a real economic shock," she says.
Chalabi also noticed that many of the people she profiled considered themselves middle class, regardless of what their actual income was. She says that disconnect between actual wealth and a sense of class has consequences — not just for how we see ourselves, but also in how we judge everybody else.
"To be poor in this country is to encounter an enormous, enormous array of obstacles, including assumptions about your intelligence [and] your educational level," she says. "And so it's actually quite rational sometimes for people to try to present themselves as middle class, maybe even to try and signal wealth with the clothes that they buy or the cars that they drive. I don't think it's simply aspirational. I also think it is them trying to avoid the discrimination that they might face if their real income level were disclosed."
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If you really want to understand somebody's economic security, you need to understand who they can turn to when times get hard, and obviously a household is an imperfect measure of that. People sometimes even live with spouses that they can't necessarily lean on. ... But one of the things that came out time and time and time again from the book is how much money your parents have is so profound in shaping your economic security. …
Class is about more than the number that is printed on your pay slip or the number that's in your bank balance. Our class identities are very often tied to our households that we were in growing up. They're tied to the professions that our parents had. ... Most people who are born in poverty in this country do not make it out.
There was this TikTok trend that I saw a while ago with people talking about how they were looking for a partner who was 6'5", blue eyes and working in finance, which has never been any partner of mine. I grew up with a particular model of feminism that was about being able to support yourself, not relying on a man. But I also think that for my generation, there was this ... understanding of romance that it's somehow supposed to be post-materialist, that you're not really supposed to talk about wanting a partner from a particular set of economic circumstances. …
[There] was a study that was published by the National Bureau for Economic Research. And they compared 1960 to 2005 and what they found was that it's not necessarily that people are seeking out partners in the same income bracket, but people very often seek out partners with a similar educational background, and education has a huge impact on income. So they actually found that over that period from 1960 to 2005, the trend has gotten even stronger. So we are much more likely now to date someone with a similar educational backgrounds to ours. And the reason why this is important to scrutinize is because I would say who we date, along with how much money we inherit, are probably two of the biggest factors that affect the level of inequality overall in this country.
I felt the people that I was speaking to had a right to understand my economic privilege, my vantage point as I'm asking them these deeply personal questions. And as you know, as journalists, we typically do not pay people for their time for interviewing them. … But that's a very different kind of equation when you are asking people to share these vulnerable parts of their lives, and especially when I am profiting from those stories.
At the start of every interview with everybody that I spoke to, I told them a number of things. I said, one, I will be paying you $40 per hour for your time. If that feels uncomfortable for you, let's talk about it. I said that anything that I asked them as a journalist, they had the right to ask me back. So if I asked them how much money they made, they had the right to ask me that exact same question.
The accent thing is huge. ... When I'm back in the U.K., people can get a pretty good read, honestly, on my class by my voice. And what's fascinating is that as an immigrant, Americans don't really understand these nuances in the British accent. And so I'm just read as posh here. And I think that has conferred me, actually, these huge class benefits. I think that my accent in the U.S. has been really powerful in counterbalancing some of the obstacles I might have faced because of my race and gender. Because with this voice, it is assumed that I am educated, that I'm cultured. Not sure how true any of these things are, but there's just this assumption that I think is very beneficial in a corporate environment.
Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
