The case for sharing your salary

Adrian Ma (0:01)

NPR. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma.

Ricky Mulvey (0:08)

And I'm Ricky Mulvey.

Adrian Ma (0:10)

And Ricky, if I asked you what class you consider yourself, like are you upper class, working class, or middle class, what would you say?

Ricky Mulvey (0:18)

I'd say I'm a part of podcasting Small But Mighty Middle Class. How about you?

Adrian Ma (0:23)

Small But Mighty, that is us. I also consider myself middle class, and maybe that's not a very original answer because according to a Gallup survey, 54 percent of Americans consider themselves middle class. Let me ask you this, Ricky, how much money do you make?

Ricky Mulvey (0:39)

It's a pretty personal question for a very public podcast is what I would say.

Adrian Ma (0:44)

Don't worry, it's just me, you, and our listeners here.

Ricky Mulvey (0:48)

I make somewhere between $10 and $10 million is what I would say, just to give you a fair range estimation.

Adrian Ma (0:55)

Well, thank you for narrowing that down for me.

I think you might detect just a slight change in the air when I suddenly ask that question because frankly, in our culture, talking about income is taboo. We worry what others will think of us if they really knew how high or low on the income ladder we sit. But Pulitzer Prize winning data journalist, Mona Chalabi thinks that we should all be more open about this.

Mona Chalabi (1:21)

I think that money should figure much more prominently in intersectional identities. So someone like me might sit here and say, you know, as an immigrant, an Arab, CIS, hetero, Muslim woman, but like, okay, how much money do you have? Because I would argue that actually my money has potentially shaped my outcomes in life far more than any of those other labels.

Ricky Mulvey (1:48)

This is why our personal relationship with money is the subject of Mona's upcoming book. It's called Ten Lives, How What We Have Shapes Who We Are.

In her book, she uses interviews, statistics, and a ton of hand-drawn charts to paint a detailed portrait of class in America.

Adrian Ma (2:03)

After the break, my conversation with Mona. She tells us what she learned from asking 10 strangers all about their financial hopes and fears.

She argues why we could all talk a little more frankly about our own money situation.

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Adrian Ma (3:21)

The idea for a book about class in America came to Mona during the early pandemic.

Mona Chalabi (3:26)

Two things happened at the start of COVID. One was that I started to anticipate that an economic crisis might happen, and I thought it would be worth writing a book about that. Then the other thing was that something weird happened in publishing where people got very nice book deals. So I also wrote this book because I was paid a lot of money to write this book, which I know is quite uncomfortable for people to talk about. You want to believe that writers are motivated by higher ideals.

But yeah, that definitely played a role.

Adrian Ma (3:57)

Mona says she was motivated by getting paid $850,000 to write the book, which she considers, to paraphrase her term, a buttload of money.

And this sort of sets the tone for her reporting that she lays out in the book. Over the last few years, Mona followed ten Americans with very different jobs. For instance, one is a man who makes over half a million dollars a year working in finance. Another makes 30k a year working in an Amazon warehouse.

And each of the ten, they come from a different income decile. Which is to say, you've got Tiffany, whose income puts her in the bottom 10 percent income-wise. And then if you go up the ladder a little bit, you've got Christina, who's around the 50th percentile. And at the top, you've got somebody like Jacob, who's in the top 10 percent. What did you mean to accomplish by structuring the book this way?