'Squeezed' Explores Why America Is Getting Too Expensive For The Middle Class

[Ong88]

https://www.npr.org/templates/transc...ryId=623367320


'Squeezed' Explores Why America Is Getting Too Expensive For The Middle Class


Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. If you're middle class and feel like you're having a hard time staying middle class, you are not alone. In fact, you're the kind of person my guest, Alissa Quart, writes about in her new book "Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America." She reports on how the costs of housing, child care, health care and more have far outpaced salaries and how that's changing the lives of middle-class Americans, as well as life in American cities. Quart is the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Alissa Quart, welcome to FRESH AIR. So the mantra of your book is it's not your fault. And that's something you had to convince yourself of. Tell us what you felt guilty about that exemplifies what you think others feel guilty about too in terms of being able to maintain themselves in the middle class and provide for their child or children.

ALISSA QUART: So when I got pregnant with my daughter, both my husband and I were freelancers, and we didn't have that much security. We had savings. We were better off than many people, but we didn't have, you know, pensions and all the things that people used to have. And very quickly, we were going through our savings, and I did feel a lot of shame about that. I said, you know, what could I have done differently? Both of us being journalists was probably not the best choice, I thought. So that started to feel to me like a kind of stigma that I have had to work to get over. And part of the book was me communicating with a lot of other people who also felt that shame and stigma.

GROSS: You write middle class life is now 30 percent more expensive than it was 20 years ago. And in some cases, the cost of daily life has doubled. What do you define as middle class for that statistic?

QUART: Yeah. So I'm defining it according to a 2016 Pew survey with a yearly - those with a yearly household income for a family of three ranging from $42,000 to $125,000. And in 2014, that was 51 percent of U.S. households. I mean, I go up the scale in one of the chapters, and I go down the scale in two chapters. So I'm trying to show mostly people who are making that much but then also how even when you make more than that in, you know, Palo Alto and San Francisco and New York, it doesn't feel like you're upper-middle class. It feels like you're middle class. And if you make less than that and you're trying to get into the middle class, you can't accomplish that either.

GROSS: So what do you think are the main expenses that have gone up for American families?

QUART: Expenses that have gone up starts with housing and the cost of real estate, of homeownership. And then, it continues on with health care, which is, as everybody knows, astronomical and then schooling. A public university cost double what it did in 1996. And that's not a fancy private school. So I think that's kind of very telling, and a lot of the people I spoke to were sort of weighted down by educational debt. If we think about what it means to be a professional, it often means having, you know, at least college and then potentially graduate school. So a lot of what these people were struggling with was, like, $140,000 in law school bills and that kind of thing.

GROSS: You didn't have a child until you were 38. How much did the cost of having a child figure into waiting that long?

QUART: You know, I'll be honest. I think for me some of it was that, but most of it was other sorts of things that I actually talk about in the book as well. And we also know that, you know, mothers are estimated to make - there was a survey of employers who were thinking of hiring mothers versus childless women, and they wanted to offer the mothers $11,000 less per year. And you're supposed to make 7 percent less per child. So, I mean, it wasn't even necessarily the money that we had but what I knew it could potentially do to my earning power.

GROSS: So those surveys that show that women with children make less money, what's the explanation for that?

QUART: I think it's, you know, employers' prejudice that, you know, there's a lot of sense that, oh, they're going to be less productive. We have such limited maternity leave. Paid family leave is - something like 13 to 14 percent of Americans have paid family leave in their jobs, so that's very small. And, you know, I think these employers feel like, oh, once I hire somebody who has a kid, this is going to be a cascade of latenesses and absences - things that are really often untrue and just bias. I mean, in fact, there was a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis survey that found moms were more productive in their jobs than women without children. And they got those numbers by surveying 10,000 academics.

GROSS: Were you still a freelance journalist when you had your child?

QUART: Yeah, I was a freelance journalist. And, you know, part of the thing in our industry in journalism is that since 2004, newspapers have lost 50 percent of their jobs. So, you know, it was a real concern. Everyone I knew was suddenly earning after, say, 2006 or '07 less per word than they did in the '90s and - you know, I mean, except for the 1 percent, top 1 percent of journalists, that was kind of the case. And I knew that on top of having - being a contingent worker - right? - which makes us more vulnerable being freelance, my own industry was really under siege.

GROSS: So let's talk about child care, and child care is so expensive. I'm talking about, you know, day care. And working women - I think the number of working women that we have in our society today, it's a relatively new phenomenon. And I don't think our society has adjusted to it yet in terms of having an infrastructure that makes it possible for two parents to work and be able to afford child care. Child care is just so expensive. What are some of the figures for the cost of day care that you've come up with, both as a parent and as a researcher for this book?

QUART: Yeah. So right now, two-thirds of women with kids under 6 are working. So that is a huge number. And those are kids who are often too young to be in kindergarten or even preschool. So that means that they're going to be needing day care, which at this point can cost - a lot of the people I spoke to were paying 20 to 30 percent of their income on their children's day care. Now, like, this is - varies from state to state. So the Economic Policy Institute said the annual average cost of infant care in New York state is $14,000. So a New York family with one child pays 21 percent of their income on child care on average, and for two kids, that rises to 38.7 percent.

GROSS: So, you know, you write in your book that teachers, both, like, teachers in public schools and college teachers, especially adjunct professors, are having a hard time making ends meet. So let's start with schoolteachers. Give us an example of one of the people who you interviewed who's struggling who's a schoolteacher.

QUART: So yeah - so I spoke to Matt Barry, who lived in San Jose, Calif., and he was a schoolteacher. He and his wife both teach. They earned $69,000, a combined salary, which, if we do the math, is - should have supplied them with a comfortable family life. But on the side, Matt was driving Uber, and he was - had to do so because of the cost of living in places like San Jose. I don't know if you saw, but there was just numbers released about how much it costs to live there, and it's one of the most expensive places in America right now. A starter home costs $680,000. And he wasn't the only one. I also spoke to people in North Dakota where there had been an oil boom. So suddenly, the cost of living was much higher, the rent - renting apartments and so forth. And they had made $32,000 starting salaries. And I spoke to somebody who GoFunded her teacher training program. Her name was Rebecca Maloney. And I talked to other teachers who, when we got off the phone, they went off and painted houses after the school bell. So that - you know, a lot of people are doing additional jobs.

GROSS: That's kind of bad for society because, from having taught very briefly myself, I know that evenings are usually spent grading papers, planning lessons, maybe making phone calls to parents. So if you don't have evenings to do that kind of work, when are you going to do it?

QUART: No, exactly. And this was - also there was the paradox that some of these people were driving the parents of their students. So it just created...

GROSS: Oh, like while working with Uber or Lyft.

QUART: Yeah, and driving the parents of their students. So it just kind of created this bizarre sort of secondary service economy.

GROSS: You write that teachers as Uber drivers was a thing for a while.

QUART: Yeah. And they, Uber, had a campaign. I think it was Uber teachers driving our future, or something like that. And that was in 2014 or '15. And they also had one for nurses. And so, I mean, I wrote about this. I feel like for a company like Uber, and generally gig economy companies in general, the middle class is a really valuable signifier, right? It's a symbolic category. They're like, OK, it's going to make us look better to have middle-class people driving for us. But the teachers themselves are being underpaid and neglected and not having adequate housing. I personally think that we should try to provide teacher-specific housing in these really affluent communities because that would really help offset the costs.

GROSS: You also write about adjunct professors. Would you explain what an adjunct is?

QUART: An adjunct professor is somebody who works basically as a freelance professor. They work contingently. They don't have tenure. They teach individual classes, sometimes for many different universities or colleges.

GROSS: And you write that adjuncts make up 40 percent of the teachers at American colleges and universities. I didn't realize the statistic was that high. What does it mean financially for adjuncts who get paid by the class as opposed to a full-time salary?

QUART: Yeah. Well, I spoke to adjuncts who made $1,700 a class or $3,000 a class, and so then they were teaching three or four courses a semester and then they were sometimes barely making $24,000. They were close to the poverty line. And that was typical.

GROSS: So why is it that college costs have gone up so high, yet 40 percent of the teachers at American colleges and universities are adjuncts and aren't getting paid very much?

QUART: Well, yeah. It's because college and university administrative positions have risen. It's kind of the corporatization of the university system. They've grown by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009. And that's 10 times the rate of the growth of tenured faculty positions. So, I mean, I think it's important for people listening to this, like, when you're sending your kid to college or university, I feel like these universities should say how many adjuncts are teaching there and what they're paying them. That should be almost part of the U.S. News & World Report rating system.

GROSS: Yeah. Does the high salaries of top administrators really explain what adjuncts are getting paid? Because to pay a few salaries a lot of money when you have, like, you know, thousands of kids, of students, in your university, it's not hard to make up those salaries. I'm not trying to justify or not justify those salaries one way or another, but I'm not sure that that fully explains the low pay of adjuncts.

QUART: I mean, some of it is that a lot of labor has become contingent in general. It's not unionized. You know, universities can be quasi-businesses, right? Some of them are outright businesses. And so they know that the market will bear them hiring adjuncts rather than tenure-track professors.

GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Alissa Quart, and she's the author of the new book, "Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Alissa Quart, author of the new book, "Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America." She's also the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

So you spoke to people who - because housing prices are so high and because child care prices are so high - you spoke to people who are coming up with alternative living arrangements to deal both with the child care price issue and the housing price issue. Share with us some of those alternative housing plans that you've seen.

QUART: So yeah, so I feel like one of the things that made this project less depressing was that it pointed to solutions. And some of those solutions were really big. They involve us voting differently. They involve trying to create maternity leave across the board and universal pre-K and 3-K for schoolchildren. But they also are these sort of smaller, more bespoke solutions, and those included things like co-parenting - people who are not in a romantic situation living together and sharing cooking duties and, you know, drop-off duties for their kids for economic and also for psychological reasons.

GROSS: And you found alternative living arrangements, too, for people just wanting to share their rent. And we're not talking about people in college, or just out of college or just starting out on their own who want roommates.

QUART: Yeah. These were not kids. These were people in their 30s and 40s who sometimes had done this multiple times. They live with a roommate with a kid, and they would cook meals together. And one of the characters told me about, you know, parents were mostly first-generation immigrants, and they would buy, you know, healthy food from their home countries and they would cook it for all the kids, and then the kids would all play together. And they shared the same values around parenting. They were somewhat strict. But they were not romantically involved, but they all lived on different floors of a single house.

GROSS: You write that crowdfunding is now an essential part of America's safety net. Would you elaborate on that for us?

QUART: Yeah. So I wrote a piece in The Times about six months ago about something I call the dystopic social net. And what I mean by that is GoFundMe or other kinds of philanthropies that are coming into the fray to support us when we should be supported by the federal government or local government. And this includes fundraising for day care, which I actually interviewed people for "Squeezed" who did this, or for IVF. They do it on these crowdfunding sites. Or fundraising for school lunches, which whole school districts do. And I talked to people in Montana where the school district was now doing this. There's a whole school district area of GoFundMe. I don't know if you know that, but...

GROSS: I did not know that.

QUART: Yeah. For a range of things, from school lunches to notebooks and pencils. It's very distressing.

GROSS: So unemployment numbers are down now. So statistically, things are looking really good. So how does that figure into your larger theme of how difficult it is to stay middle-class?

QUART: Well, I think we're looking - there's a difference between long term and short term, and some of those changes in the numbers are short term, but some of the problems that we have are long term. And as I write about in my book, I mean, we're looking at automation, record amount of automation of formerly middle-class jobs by 2026, if the World Economic Forum is to be believed. And so I think that's one of the threats that is not being accounted for. I also do wonder with these numbers of - employment numbers how many of the people whose job picture looks rosier are working multiple jobs and how much job security those jobs have because many of the people I spoke to, as I said, are contingent or had a lot of job instability. They didn't have pensions, and they didn't have any kind of future career trajectory from the jobs they had.

GROSS: And a lot of people say that many of those new jobs are fairly low-wage.

QUART: Yeah. They're low-wage jobs. And, you know, sometimes they're in sectors that are actually going down, like retail work, which is eventually, again, going to be automated.

GROSS: So you are now the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. What is it? Tell us about it.

QUART: So it was founded originally by Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote "Nickel And Dimed." And I sort of co-founded its current incarnation with her four or five years ago at this point. And we give grants to writers, photographers, documentarians. We publish their work. We develop their work and publish it and co-publish with a range of places from The New York Times to WNYC to Showtime. We had a film on Showtime. And a quarter of our grant recipients are lower-income, and three quarters are sort of middle-income journalists. But it dovetails very much with what this book is about because a lot of the people that I was encountering in the course of my editing were struggling middle-class or fallen middle-class. They had gotten six-figure advances in the '90s. They had worked at newspapers. And now they were driving Uber or, you know, just living - one of them was, you know, practically homeless. And then we would support their work or I would support their work, and they'd be getting, you know, an amount for - per word from us, and that would, you know, boost them and get them back on their feet.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

QUART: Oh, you're welcome.

GROSS: Alissa Quart is the author of the new book "Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America." She's the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEM THAT GOT")

RAY CHARLES: (Singing) I've gotten down to my last pair of shoes. Can't even win a nickel bet because them that's got are them that gets. And I ain't got nothing yet. I'm sneaking in and out...

GROSS: After we take a short break, we'll hear from Frank Newsome, who sings hymns a cappella in a style that's one of America's oldest musical traditions. He's a former coal miner who now has black lung disease. His album of hymns has just been widely released. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEM THAT GOT")

CHARLES: (Singing) That old saying, them that's got are them that gets, is something I can't see. If you got to have something before you can get something, how do you get your first is still a mystery to me. I see folk with long cars and fine clothes. That's why they're called the smarter set because they managed to get what only them that's got supposed to get, and I ain't got nothing yet.

[globalcookie]

Long read... and seems like it's hitting us in some ways. We have part time teachers who are no longer earning what they used to, and works part time as tutors (or who knows, PHV). We also have many in and out of jobs, or harder to get jobs, etc. Automation has hit in a hard and fast way too. The wave is coming fast.

[Ong88]

YouTube Video

Long read version is here :


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ocracy/559130/

"The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy
The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem."

[richardg]

Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

====================



It is in fact the top 0.1 percent who have been the big winners in the growing concentration of wealth over the past half century. According to the UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the 160,000 or so households in that group held 22 percent of America’s wealth in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1963. If you’re looking for the kind of money that can buy elections, you’ll find it inside the top 0.1 percent alone.

Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose.

[millenium]

Originally Posted by Ong88

Long read version is here :


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ocracy/559130/

"The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy
The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem."

Got summary version?

[Ong88]

https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/l...th-the-joneses


Is being deprived of easy access to tuition and enrichment classes such a crippling disadvantage for students from low-income families? (No-win choices for the poor when resources are limited, by Mr Kevin See Yao Hui; July 5)

Are there not more resourceful and economical ways to help them develop their talents vis-a-vis their arguably stressed-out counterparts from mollycoddled backgrounds?

Nothing ought to repulse Singaporeans more than anecdotes of low-income families who spend their social hand-outs on premium electronic gadgets and TV/broadband packages to keep up with the Joneses, when some of their better-off fellow citizens have no issues living with basic forms of entertainment such as free-to-air TV (Social workers also tackle structural conditions that lead to poverty, by Dr Ng Kok Hoe; June 27)

Ditto those "bleeding-heart" social workers/sociologists who appear to be in their element painting low-income families as victims of the system, and inadvertently reinforcing the already "crutch" mentality inherent in some.

There is no such thing as comprehensive equality in this world, even as we strive to address the inequalities and injustices wrought by human prejudices.

Since time immemorial, one's survival strategies - including overcoming one's perceived comparative disadvantage - is, to some extent, a function of one's resources.


Rich or poor, we all have to learn to live within our means .

It is more so if one is reliant on social assistance.

Self-reliance must remain the underlying principle of Singapore's social safety net to maintain a modicum of individual discipline and responsibility in this country.

Banish that, and some of the worst excesses of human nature will come to the fore, as seen to some extent in the abuses of our well-intentioned universal healthcare insurance system.

In fact, with resources set to become more contestable, it is imperative for the authorities to allocate these wisely, according to a clear set of priorities - regardless of race or religion.

Toh Cheng Seong

[Ong88]

Await the day this Toh Cheng Seong hits the poorhouse.

Totally fugged elite arse

[Ong88]

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2...ove-with-money


Generation wealth: how the modern world fell in love with money



Lauren Greenfield has spent years photographing the world’s richest people. Now she’s made a documentary on society’s obsession with extreme wealth – and its cost to us all

by Rupert Neate

Documentary photographer Lauren Greenfield was trying to form trusting relationships with members of a Mayan tribe in Mexico in the early 1990s when she picked up a discarded copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Before she’d finished the cult novel – which charts the parties, drug taking and sex lives of rich college kids in Los Angeles – Greenfield had decided to swap photography subjects from the Maya of Chiapas to the rich kids of her home town.

A quarter of a century later, Greenfield has amassed 500,000 images of the often absurd lives of the wealthy. The highlights – including a picture of go-go dancers hired for a 13-year-old’s bar mitzvah – are published by Phaidon in a £60 2.5kg tome called Generation Wealth. An accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary film is released in the UK next week.

The value system changed completely. It wasn’t about who you are, but about what you are worth
Greenfield introduces us to characters all motivated by the accumulation of wealth. “No matter how much people had, they still wanted more,” Greenfield says of her subjects. We meet Florian Homm, a hedge fund manager living in self-imposed exile in Germany to avoid extradition to the US where he has been sentenced to 225 years in jail. Smoking cigars and dripping in gold, Homm, who became known as “the antichrist of finance” for ripping off his investors for hundreds of millions of dollars, tells Greenfield that morality changed in the 80s. “The value system changed completely. It wasn’t about who you are, but about what you are worth… Morals are completely non-productive in that value system.”

Money to burn: Florian Homm, sentenced to 225 years in jail in the US.
Money to burn: Florian Homm, sentenced to 225 years in jail in the US. Photograph: Lauren Greenfield
As his hedge fund was imploding during the financial crisis of 2008, Homm, now 58, fled the €5m Majorcan villa he shared with a 27-year-old Russian lingerie model. With $500,000 stashed in his underwear and a humidor in hand, Homm boarded a plane to Colombia and disappeared for five years. We learn that he used his fortune to buy his son, then 15, the services of a Dutch prostitute. Homm was later arrested at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

One of the photos that best sums up Greenfield’s work is of the DJ, rapper and producer Lil Jon flashing a smile showing $50,000 worth of diamond and platinum dental work. There’s also the former porn star Kacey Jordan, who received $30,000 to attend a sex party at Charlie Sheen’s home. Jordan tells Greenfield of seeking greater wealth through extreme sex, which may have made her temporarily wealthier but didn’t make her happy. She made numerous suicide attempts, and ends the film in the same dead-end job she had before starting porn.

Mouth full of bling: Lil Jon’s diamond dentistry.
Mouth full of bling: Lil Jon’s diamond dentistry. Photograph: Lauren Greenfield
Then there’s Eden Wood, six, a beauty pageant princess and star of reality TV show Toddlers & Tiaras, who tells Greenfield “My favourite princess is me” and says beauty means “that I get money, and I’ll be a superstar.”

Greenfield says the intimacy she shares with her subjects at their most vulnerable led her to consider the impact her obsession with their lives has had on her own family, and turns the camera on her sons, mother and husband. Her 16-year-old son Noah tells her: “I got used to growing up without you around. The damage has been done.”

The stories Greenfield tells about rich families detached from the world around them, living in bubbles separated from reality by armies of nannies and household staff, chime with my own experiences covering the super-rich as wealth correspondent for the Observer and the Guardian. From Knightsbridge to Monaco, the Upper West Side and the Hamptons, the wealthiest people in society are richer than they’ve ever been before. More of them have five, six, seven or even a dozen homes in the world’s most desirable locations and it is not unusual for them to fly their nannies, tutors and security details between them on private jets. Their houses may cost as much as the £135m a Ukrainian billionaire paid for a penthouse in One Hyde Park, but that doesn’t mean they’ll spend much time there.

You have to have £20m to live on The Boltons, no real people live here. You have to be an Arab prince, or an oligarch
The Boltons, a street of grand Victorian mansions in South Kensington, has been an address that only the very well-heeled can afford since the 19th century. But the influx of wealthy Russian and Middle Eastern families to London means prices have gone beyond the reach of all but the very richest of Brits. The average house price is a fraction under £20m – 88 times the UK average – making it the third most expensive street in the country (after London’s Kensington Palace Gardens and Grosvenor Crescent). Over cups of tea and strawberries and cream at the annual church fête held in a private garden square overlooked by the mansions this summer, locals tell me of a disconnected community. “We must be standing on some of the most expensive real estate in the world,” says David, a long-standing member of the congregation, who lives a few streets away. “But you won’t find any of the owners at our fête. You probably won’t find any of them at home from one month to the next.”

Portrait of the artist: Lauren Greenfield (right) at work on her massive project.
Portrait of the artist: Lauren Greenfield (right) at work on her massive project. Photograph: Lauren Greenfield
A growing number of academics warn that the widening gulf between the richest 1% and everyone else could lead to a backlash. The richest 0.1% of the world’s population has increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50% – or 3.8 billion people – since 1980, according to the The report, by the French economist Thomas Piketty and 100 other researchers, also found that the richest 1% of the global population “captured” 27% of the world’s wealth growth between 1980 and 2016. Piketty warns that inequality has ballooned to “extreme levels” in many countries, and will only get worse unless governments take co-ordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance.

A four- storey, nine-bedroom house complete with cinema, indoor swimming pool and Japanese garden sold for £51m in 2015 to an offshore company. The stamp duty alone set back the unknown buyer £7.6m. The owner is paying £220,000 a year in extra tax in order to keep their identity a secret.

Greenfield says the true absurdity of extreme wealth hit her when she was documenting the lives of the Siegel family, who were attempting to build the biggest private home in America, for her film The Queen of Versailles. When “timeshare king” David Siegel loses billions in the 2008 financial crisis, the family are forced to travel by commercial jet and one of the children turns and asks, “Mommy, what are all these people doing on our plane?” Greenfield met the Siegels after striking up a friendship with Donatella Versace, whom she met via her work documenting the lives of rich kids in LA. She went back to Crossroads, the $38,000-a-year private school in Santa Monica she’d attended alongside Hollywood’s rich and famous offspring. Greenfield says her position as an “insider and outsider” – she went to the school herself, but her parents (both academics) couldn’t afford to kit her out with the designer bling the other kids had – gave her “exceptional access to the world of the wealthy in LA”.

Bags full of it: at a private opening at a Versace store in Beverly Hills.
Bags full of it: at a private opening at a Versace store in Beverly Hills. Photograph: Lauren Greenfield
Greenfield never wanted to become an expert on the rich or pass judgement on their lives or spending. “I wanted to be a guide, to take the viewer on a journey and to help them understand the shift in society.” She admits weeping a few times while putting the book and film together.

We meet for lunch at London’s five-star May Fair Hotel, surrounded by fellow diners who could easily be her subjects. “The photos are evidence of a sea change in our values over the last 25 years,” she says. “I felt like we had gone from the American dream of opportunity for all to a desire for ever more wealth, in the currency of money, fame, beauty or youth.” She says it’s not just an issue that effects the wealthy, but everyone in society. “We’re all complicit in generation wealth.”

Greenfield interviewed several experts for the film, but just one survived the cut. Former New York Times journalist and leftwing activist Chris Hedges is quoted as saying “Wealth is whatever gives us value” and warns that “Societies accrue their greatest wealth at the moment they face death.” This last remark might trouble Americans in particular: last year Professor Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, made a statement accusing Donald Trump and the Republican party of consciously distorting the shape of American society in a “bid to become the most unequal society in the world”.

Alston, who acts as a watchdog on extreme poverty, said Trump’s administration had passed tax laws that “overwhelmingly benefitted the wealthy and worsened inequality”. He said Trump’s policies “seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege"

But Greenfield says the chasm between rich and poor was widening well before the reality TV star’s 2016 election. “The American dream – that everyone has equal opportunity – became a fiction long before Trump,” she says. “Americans don’t hate the rich, as they imagine they could become the rich. They don’t want high taxes as they think they could become rich and won’t want to pay them. But what they dream of is an increasingly unbelievable fantasy.”

She says that while examining her photos it became clear to her that “We have left behind the American dream of my dad’s generation where there was the possibility of social mobility and the belief that anyone could make it. The things that were valued then – discipline, hard work and frugality – are not so important now. We have a culture that prizes celebrity, bling and narcissism.” Trump, she says, “is the apotheosis of generation wealth. With Trump you have wealth and celebrity achieving the ultimate goal. Trump is the natural evolution of the values of our culture.”

Fur enough: Elizabeth, 15, daughter of a Russian shipping magnate, dressed to appear in the Tatler Debutante Ball in Moscow, with a temporary Chanel tattoo.
Fur enough: Elizabeth, 15, daughter of a Russian shipping magnate, dressed to appear in the Tatler Debutante Ball in Moscow, with a temporary Chanel tattoo. Photograph: Lauren Greenfield
When Greenfield started the photography series – which includes portraits of a 12-year-old Kim Kardashian – getting permission from parents to document their kids’ lifestyles sometimes proved difficult. “The parents wanted to be a little discreet – they indulged in the lifestyle but didn’t necessarily want to be seen doing it, but that has changed,” she says. “I went back again in 2007 and the parents’ attitudes had completely changed. A lot of times parents would be present at the interviews and they would be proud, saying: ‘Our kids are just like Paris Hilton.’”

“‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ has become ‘keeping up with the Kardashians’,” she says as we tuck into seared tuna with caponata and gambas al pil pil. “Instead of wanting the slightly better house down the street, you want the mansion that Kim has. Reality TV and social media has made the lives of the wealthy more accessible, and it has made people hungrier for it.” The children Greenfield met were sometimes more aware of the potential damage created by free flowing cash than their parents. She recalls a 13-year-old called Adam who told her: “Money ruins kids, money has ruined me”.

Greenfield went to Adam’s bar mitzvah and was “blown away” by the scale of the production, including the go-go dancer. “Kids in his circle had to be seen to spend £50,000 on their bar mitzvah or they’re shit out of luck,” she says. Hanging out with Adam affected her more than most of her subjects, because even at 13 he was perceptive enough to know that something had gone wrong. She describes herself as friends with many of her original subjects, including Adam. But he wouldn’t allow her and the cameras back for her latest film.

Neither would David Siegel, 83, the real estate mogul she shadowed in The Queen of Versailles. “He hates the way the film ended when he loses the houses,” Greenfield says. “I don’t think David will ever let me back.” But Siegel’s third wife, Jackie, 52, is still friends with Greenfield and attended the premiere of The Queen of Versailles. “She thinks it’s the best thing she ever did,” Greenfield says. Early on, Jackie, a former Mrs Florida beauty pageant winner, told Greenfield: “You can never be too rich or have big enough boobs.” Jackie’s breasts, which have been augmented four times, fill the frame of one photo.

There has been a sea change. We’re all complicit in generation wealth
At the end of the film, Greenfield says the Siegels appeared to have learnt that wealth is not as important as health and happiness. But, having recovered from the financial crisis, the Siegels bought back the house and extended their ambitious plans. The house built on a man-made hill in a gated community in Orlando will have 14 bedrooms, 32 bathrooms, a 30-car garage, bowling alley, five swimming pools (three indoor, two outdoor), a two-storey cinema and a ballroom with capacity for 500 guests. The much delayed house is set to be finally habitable next year.

“They had this realisation that it was family that mattered,” Greenfield says. “Yet they are back at the house building bigger and better. I wonder, did we really learn anything from the financial crash, or did we just go back to the way it had always been? In the US and the UK we fixed a broken system and now the real estate market is even more on fire, the stock market is up and Trump is the president and tax laws are making things even more unequal.”

Numerous official reports detail the widening gap between rich and poor. UBS, the Swiss bank which prides itself on advising more uber-wealthy families than any other bank, published research showing that the super-rich hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the time of the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the 20th century. There are now 1,542 billionaires across the world, more than ever before. The richest 500 people alive increased their wealth by 23% last year, taking their combined fortunes to $5.3tn – more than twice the gross domestic product of the UK.

Josef Stadler, the lead author of UBS’s report, says his billionaire clients are aware of the widening gulf between rich and poor and fear that hard-pressed people might rise up and take direct action. “We’re at an inflection point,” he says. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The question is, to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

He says the “$1bn question” is how society will react to the concentration of so much money in the hands of so few. Anger at so-called robber baron families who built up vast fortunes from monopolies in US rail, oil, steel and banking in the late 19th century, an era of rapid industrialisation and growing inequality in America that became known as the Gilded Age, led to President Roosevelt breaking up companies and trusts and increasing taxes on the wealthy in the early 1900s. “Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age?” Stadler asked.

Looking back on her work, Greenfield recalls being startled by ostentatious displays of wealth but says what might have been shocking then is day-to-day reality now. In her first few days visiting Crossroads, three boys asked her what she was doing by the school gates every day. When she told them she was working on a documentary about growing up in LA, they told her it was “all about money” and pulled cash out of their pockets, posing for the camera.

“It wasn’t until I developed the film that I saw that these 13-year-olds were waving $100 bills.”

Generation Wealth is in cinemas from 17 July