Can prep schools fight the US class war?

New York

THIS month, Princeton University Press month published a book called Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, by a sociologist, Rachel Sherman, who researched the spending habits of 50 well-to-do parents in New York City, and diagnosed a pervasive problem of reticence around wealth.

Sherman uses her encounters with people who agreed to speak with her, in many cases about their fears of seeming showy, to conclude that there is too much silence around money and that all of this alleged hush and professed shame ultimately slow our efforts to mitigate inequality.

Given that Americans have segued from the era of the Rich Kids of Instagram to a moment in which the rich wives of Cabinet secretaries use social media to tell us that they are wearing Hermès and that they are better, it is a difficult time to argue that modesty is really what is complicating…