Totally Spent → Hinokipokey → The DEIs of March

Hey Neighbor. True story. Friend is describing the $150,000 shower she just had installed in her bathroom. "It’s only big enough for six people, for a sixsome,” she humblebrags. Then she pauses and considers the math. It checks out.

“Over six is an orgy and over 20 is a sex party.”

➺ Thanks to an anonymous reader for the anecdote above. If you’ve heard something ludicrously Upper Middle recently please share. We live for this shit.

➺ Have a friend you think might enjoy this newsletter? Tell them about it. Or share it with your pearl clutching-est friend just for kicks.

➺ It’s croquet season, which means it’s also getting chased by kids with oversized hammers season.

➺ If you no longer wish to subscribe, opt out. Godspeed.

Upper Middle’s 2025 “Self-Assessment” Survey is our attempt to find out how members of the oat milk elite think they’re doing in their personal and professional lives (compared to their expectations). Data will be shared with survey participants and, as always, with members.

STATUS ❧ Intrusive Thinkers

The answer, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, turns out to be less basic than the question. Pan argues that what changed was the nature of an ongoing negotiation between working people (very much including directors, VPs, and white-collar climbers), business leaders, and shareholders. Specifically, she argues that corporate social justice initiatives were used by those in power to distract from soaring income inequality and break apart emerging alliances among the rank and file and the professional managerial class.

Upper Middle spoke to Pan via phone. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write that, contrary to popular belief, corporate social justice efforts weren’t a kneejerk response to the “enwokening” and demonstrations in 2020. Why was the Business Roundtable and McKinsey – not exactly progressive institutions – pushing anti-racism so hard so early?

A lot of companies, especially in tech and white-collar sectors, were seeing signs of collective discontent. They didn’t want their workforces organizing and they didn’t want regulation. They made the strategic HR decision to bring in DEI consultants – many employed by law firms specializing in union-busting. There’s documentation showing companies choosing DEI frameworks over collective bargaining because DEI acknowledges discontent without ceding control.

Many anti-woke types dismiss these efforts as virtue signaling. You argue that something big and real did happen, just not what was advertised in company-wide emails. What happened?

McKinsey estimates that $340 billion was spent by the corporate and financial sectors on racial equity causes in the wake of the protests. That’s a staggering number. And if you look at hiring patterns, 94% of new hires in the S&P 500 between 2020 and 2021 were people of color. That’s not performative. That’s structural.

But what does it tell us? To me, it says that corporate anti-racism doesn’t threaten the economic order at all. In fact, it stabilizes it. Wages haven’t gone up. Job security hasn’t improved. But now there’s a committee on inclusive language.^[1]

In the book, you use the word “mystification” to describe the managerial function of corporate anti-racism. What exactly do you mean by that?

When I say ‘mystification,’ I mean redirecting attention away from who has power and why. In the 20th century, race was used by elites for that purpose. The working people were divided. Fast-forward to today and, of course, racism hasn’t vanished, but anti-racism in its corporate form functions in an eerily similar way. Encouraging people to identify along racial lines diverts attention from them from focusing on shared similar material conditions.

It seems like Upper Middle professionals are particularly susceptible to this kind of misdirection….

There’s no question the professional-managerial class prefers framing inequality in terms of race than class. If you make inequality about race and structural racism, you get to be part of the solution without confronting your own proximity to the problem. You don’t have to get a new job. 

Bank of America, which foreclosed on entire Black and brown neighborhoods in 2008, invested a lot of money in social justice initiatives. Talking about ‘structural racism’ allows those same execs to act as though they’re part of the solution.

It’s important to reiterate that you didn’t write an anti-DEI screed. The book assumes good faith on the part of most DEI practitioners and their corporate supporters. The books is really more about the limits of “access to opportunity” as a metric for justice. How do you think about equity?

​​I often return to something Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels say, which is that if your political horizon is limited to ‘equity,’ you’re okay with a world where the top 1% controls almost everything—as long as that 1% is demographically proportionate. When you decouple equity from redistribution, you’re left with a system where the same number of people are exploited, but now it’s multicultural exploitation. That’s not justice. That’s rebranding.

➺ ChatGPT, like every mid-aughts intern, is too obsequious to be useful. ➺ The job market for recent grads is so bad we’re gonna get liberal arts gangs. ➺ How Colin Jost gains power by being the butt of the joke.

Upper Middle Research identifies readers with professional expertise and matches them with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour (probably during lunch) and keep them abreast of what’s going on in their field. Members get access to all peer survey data.

TASTE ❧ Sniff, Sniff

Upper Middle spoke to the only newspaper publisher in Maine slanging hinoki about his unexpected side project and the case for a bit of smoke. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What’s the everyday use case for sandalwood and cinnabar powder?
Lighting incense is like putting on a record when you're at home. You're setting a scene. It requires intention. What do I want to do in this particular moment? I find that when I light a stick, I am way less likely to spend 20 minutes spacing out and looking at my phone. I get that it can feel goofball or woo-woo, but it’s there to support what you do not to make you into something you’re not. 

It’s good for focus even when it’s not the focus?
It circles the moment. It’s like what Brian Eno said about ambient music: It’s as interesting as it is ignorable. 

What makes Japanese incense distinct from everything else on the market?
If you’re getting into wine, give France a look. That doesn't mean don’t check out California, but France has it dialed. Japan has incense dialed in terms of both production and consumption. Japanese incense is, generally speaking, made from natural ingredients. There aren’t many chemical accelerants – the stuff in fireworks – in there. That’s good for your health and the experience because it’s never overpowering. You’re not choking on the stuff. You get nuance. 

You live with children (editor’s note: they’re his). What do they think of this incense stuff? Is this a case of ‘Dad has a weird hobby?’
My older one appears totally indifferent. The young one is the family sensualist. He’s the kind of kid who stops and appreciates views. I’ll be like, ‘What do you want to do this morning?” He’ll be like, ‘Light a stick. Let’s read together.’ What a guy.

You’re also selling these beautiful little dishes—why the emphasis on accessories?
In my house, there’s incense on every windowsill and you gotta put the ash someplace. It used to be oyster shells, but Josh and I are collecting these little dishes we pick up while traveling. It’s a touch. More atmosphere is always good.

Aaron’s three recs for less experienced burners….

➺ Wine tourists go hard. ➺ Vague statement sunglasses are on the march. ➺ Succession, but make it Lord of the Flies. Is it still a party if everyone is on beta blockers? ➺ Sesame Street always mattered. ➺ As it turns out, yes, religious leaders want to touch the face of God.

MONEY ❧ Ice Machines

KITCHEN DEBATES

The professional managerial class owes its economic power more to marriage than the S&P. The correlation between American spouses’ education levels has increased 40% since 1960. Ambitious, white-collar people marry ambitious, white-collar people. But there’s a twist. Couples with shared attitudes about making money don’t always have shared attitudes about spending it. And mismatched spending leads to mismatched people—especially when prices spike.

Tariffs are at Depression-era highs. Refrigerators might double in price. When KitchenAid panic hits, reactions will split. Many in the Upper Middle – particular entrenched elites – possess a reflexive, WASPish focus on ease over consumption that makes an old GE preferably anyway^[4]. For others, not buying a side-by-side feels like losing face — not just shelf space. Morality aside, heated fridge feelings melt marriages.

“For people to whom identity and consumption are deeply fused, losing the symbols of success and personhood is a bitter blow,” sociologist Martin Schor wrote in 1998 while documenting the rise of granola people in the suburbs. “Marriages founder on such episodes, as divorce lawyers can attest.”

Marriages punctured by financial tensions founder in fairly predictable ways. In 2017, researchers poking around BYU’s massive “Flourishing Families” dataset, found that husbands married to a women they viewed as “spenders” were 900% more likely to report financial conflict while their wives were 1100% more likely to self-report financial conflict. (Views of the husbands’ spending were less predictive of conflict than views of his income.)

There is, in other words, a gender dynamic at play. American women are – for reasons as varied as historical misogyny, toys, and pure barre – more likely to engage in personal and familial identity building through consumption. A working mother becomes, as historian Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it, “a manager of feeling, a consumer of products that promise emotional payoffs, a curator of family life.” Few men (even men who made a lot) felt they controlled the household budget.

The odd truth is that within the Upper Middle the cost of complexity – the energy required to live high-earning, high-spending lives – is often easier to bare than the cost of simplicity: making difficult choices. For many couples in spender-spender or spender-saver relationships, it’s easier to build a whole life around not having to worry about buying a very nice fridge than to just not buy the fridge in the first place. 

Lives change slowly. Prices, not so much.

➺ The actual problem with expensive cars is a 17-year-old flake named Harper. ➺ First class is getting awesome and we’re two years away from them bringing back steerage. ➺ Tariffs only kinda went down, but the market is way up.

[2] I’m keenly aware that this makes Aaron sound like a stoner freak. That’s simply not the case. He’s more of a wears-a-beret-to-a-diner freak. It’s very winning.

[3] Before we had this conversation, I’d honestly never considered the smell of carrots. I really like the smell of carrots.

[4] This is a super deep cultural phenomenon very tied up in education and regionalism. Overeducated people from New England (wasssssssssup) generally have profound ascetic impulses. We honestly take pleasure in not buying stuff. It’s not a sadomasochistic thing, but it’s not not a sadomasochistic thing.