the life and death of... nonprofit organizations

For many nonprofits, to be striving towards are mission, we are also striving towards our own deaths as organizations. While this may not be the case for arts and cultures organization or childcare centers, it is often so for social service and community development oriented organizations.

A transitional foster care home ultimately wants less kids staying at its facilities, because it means that more children are finding stable families to live with. A homeless shelter ultimately prefers that the homeless find affordable housing instead of staying at their temporary shelters.

Currently, a community development corporation has been very successful in revitalizing the area where it is located. The region is beginning to attract more population, tourism and income, and appears to be thriving from its dilapidated abandoned-by-industry state. The organization has watched its loan and mortgage business dwindle as the private sector has found it profitable to move in and take over. Small businesses in the area are thriving with new stores and attractions opening all the time. The question ahead remains: What is its role going forward? Has it accomplished its mission?

Death is not always bad and growth is not always the golden touch. Let’s hope that very successful non-profit organizations can acknowledge and celebrate their successes, and gracefully bow out when their time has come, so that resources can be directed elsewhere. Because though some areas may see improvement, there are still many poor amongst us.

simulating nature

the life and death of great American suburbs

Part of the allure of the suburbs was that it promised an escape from the city. We wanted to be closer to nature-- we wanted green instead of concrete. But what we aspired for in our car-centric outer rings of cities, was rather some filtered simulation of the real thing. Jane Jacobs writes, that in the suburbs, “Nature is apparently assumed to consist of grass, fresh air, and little else.”

Nature is not the uniform, well-watered lawns and tended flowers of suburbia. Nature is not clean and tidy. It’s messy. Ticks, mosquitoes, mud, earthworms and beetles are all part of nature. And if you’ve ever camped out before, being in nature is not comfortable. It can be beautiful, breathtaking, enjoyable, amazing, but definitely not comfortable.

Jane Jacobs writes on the dangers of trying to recreate nature in the suburbs:

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world’s champion sentimentalizes about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world’s most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

It is neither love for nature nor respect for nature that leads to this schizophrenic attitude. Instead, it is a sentimental desire to toy, rather patronizingly, with some insipid, standardized suburbanized shadow of nature—apparently in sheer disbelief that we and our cities, just by virtue of being, are a legitimate part of nature too, and involved with it in much deeper and more inescapable ways than grass trimming, sunbathing and contemplative uplift. And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by bulldozers and covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have killed the thing they thought they came to find. Our irreplaceable heritage of Grade I agricultural land (a rare treasure of nature on this earth) is sacrificed for highways or supermarket parking lots as ruthlessly and unthinkingly as the trees in the woodlands are uprooted, the streams and rivers polluted and the air itself filled with the gasoline exhausts (products of eons of nature’s manufacturing) required in this great national effort to cozy up with a fictionalized nature and flee the “unnaturalness” of the city.

Jane Jacobs wrote this in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which was first published back in the 60s. She saw through the myth of the suburb during a time when the picket fence dream was still live and vibrant.

There are times when the clean lawns, tidy houses, pleasant gardens, and the comfort of car transportation is very appealing to me, but I also know that the suburban landscape is probably not sustainable in light of rising gas prices, and not the type of ideal living arrangement that I would like to see.* I expect to see the decline of the suburb and the rise of the city again. (Though what I fear, is that the rich will come to live in the city, and the poor will be forced out to the suburbs).


*And there are other things about the suburbs that rub me the wrong way—for instance, that the safety of the suburbs seems to rely upon socio-economic segregation and automobile transportation (which ironically enough, kills thousands of people every year).

on the uses of diversity (2)

or: the entry in which I reveal my political cards (not that it should be a surprise to anyone)

The Economist recently published an article on political segregation. More and more Americans are choosing to live in areas where their political beliefs are in line with everyone else’s:

For example, someone who works in Washington, DC, but wants to live in a suburb can commute either from Maryland or northern Virginia. Both states have equally leafy streets and good schools. But Virginia has plenty of conservative neighbourhoods with megachurches and Bushites you've heard of living on your block. In the posh suburbs of Maryland, by contrast, Republicans are as rare as unkempt lawns and yard signs proclaim that war is not the answer but Barack Obama might be.

At a bookshop in Bethesda (one of those posh Maryland suburbs), Steven Balis, a retired lawyer with wild grey hair and a scruffy T-shirt, looks up from his New York Times. He says he is a Democrat because of “the absence of alternatives”. He comes from a family of secular Jews who supported the New Deal. He holds “positive notions of what government actions can accomplish”. Asked why he moved to Maryland rather than Virginia, he jokes that the far side of the river is “Confederate territory”. Asked if he has hard-core social-conservative acquaintances, he answers simply: “No.”

In the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering for quite some time: do I currently support Barack Obama because I really do believe he’s the best choice for president? Or is it because almost everyone else around me also does (I’m surrounded by liberals :P)? There’s still many months until election time, so there’s time to assess thoroughly and decide. If I end up doing what everyone else is doing, I hope it’s not from following the herd. And if I do decide differently, I hope I’ll have the courage not to hide it from others, because I am worried about what they think of me.*

It’s a pity that there isn’t more contact and dialogue between people of different political preferences. It’s easy to become silo-ed in our own bubbles, comfortably feeling smug with our political opinions, and writing off those who different opinions as stupid/elitist/ignorant/absurd etc… If we are to find some viable solutions to the problems that we are facing, ones that will actually be implemented in Congress and not just dreamed about, we do need to be actively trying to dialogue with and understand others’ opinions. Instead of just writing off another's opinion as wrong, it’s good to ask: What are their assumptions? (As Nick has written about in his blog). And if those assumptions are different, we can ask: why are they different? how can we work through our differences? and how can we continue to respect them in light of their different beliefs?

All this is much harder when we socially separate ourselves from those who have different political preferences from us. Living as neighbors, colleagues or friends, humanizes those “liberals” or “conservatives” or “anarchists” or “socialists”. It becomes much harder to label them and see them under the stereotype of their political preferences.** It puts us in a position where we must at the very least interact with them, instead of having all our knowledge of them be mediated through the internet and the evening news.

The Economist article continues on the dangers of lack of diversity:

There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme. Even clever, fair-minded people are not immune. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade, two academics, found that Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. Democratic judges become more liberal when on the bench with fellow Democrats.

“We now live in a giant feedback loop,” says Mr Bishop, “hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”

Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members of Congress. Moderates who might otherwise run for office decide not to. Debates turn into shouting matches. Bitterly partisan lawmakers cannot reach the necessary consensus to fix long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems.

America, says Mr Bishop, is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.” He has a point. Republicans who never meet Democrats tend to assume that Democrats believe more extreme things than they really do, and vice versa. This contributes to the nasty tone of many political campaigns.

Interestingly enough:
The more educated Americans become, the more insular they are. Better-educated people tend to be richer, so they have more choice about where they live. And they are more mobile.



* It’s also still up in the air whether or not I will be able to vote in this historical election. I’m still in the process of applying for US citizenship. My civics exam is next week, and if I pass, I’m not sure when I will be sworn in. I haven’t voted before in my life, and so there’s a certain excitement in me about this upcoming election. I think in the past, I’ve taken voting too lightly, or ignored elections altogether, because it was something that I couldn’t be part of. But now, I might actually be part of this so-called democratic system, and I feel this growing sense of investment and care that I haven’t felt before.
** It’s ironic how “liberals” who are so sensitive about intolerance and racism, are rather quick to make generalizing comments about “conservatives”.

in praise of economics*

I’ve always been skeptical of economics—the curves and intersecting lines depicting utility and preferences and other variables I no longer remember. It seemed so reductive, and it always seemed to rest on the shaky assumption that additional consumption was better (though with diminishing marginal returns).

While I have yet to be convinced that economics can explain all of human behavior, I’ve grown to appreciate its applications to real life situations. Understanding people’s preferences and their assessment of costs and benefits, enables the effective implementation of policies. It’s often not helpful to try to control and legislate the end result. Rather, it is often better to put in place the conditions that will make people inclined to choose that end result. To clarify, here are two examples:

In this article, referenced in Lee Huang’s blog, Krauthammer writes:

At $3 a gallon, Americans just grin and bear it, suck it up, and, while complaining profusely, keep driving like crazy. At $4, it is a world transformed. Americans become rational creatures. Mass transit ridership is at a 50-year high. Driving is down 4 percent. (Any U.S. decline is something close to a miracle.) Hybrids and compacts are flying off the lots. SUV sales are in free fall.

America's sudden change in car-buying habits makes suitable mockery of that absurd debate Congress put on last December on fuel efficiency standards. At stake was precisely what miles-per-gallon average would every car company's fleet have to meet by precisely what date.

At $4 a gallon, the fleet composition is changing spontaneously and overnight, not over the 13 years mandated by Congress. (Even Stalin had the modesty to restrict himself to five-year plans.)

In the Death and Life of American Cities, Jane Jacobs writes about how unsuccessful cities designed around car transportation can be (including the terrible traffic). She writes about cities often unknowingly enter a slippery slope in order to accommodate cars. As soon as the city makes room for more parking spaces, widens streets and build highways, even more people use cars, resulting in more traffic troubles, which demand further changes to accommodate cars. Eventually, the city becomes one large traffic sprawl where you can’t get anywhere without a car (e.g. Los Angeles).

In order to avoid this, Jacobs does not advocate complicated tax schemes or incentive plans (though she does acknowledge the need to improve public transportation). However, the primary measure would be to make the city more inconvenient for cars (e.g. staggering stoplights with frequent changes – inconvenient for personal cars but good for buses). As the city became more inconvenient to drive in, more people opted to walk, bike or take public transportation.

So yes, more and more, I’ve seen the effectiveness of policies that take advantage of the market system or that employ cost benefit analysis. (I feel like I'm supposed to write a better conclusive sentence to this blog entry, but that's really all I have to say...)


* I haven’t taken an economics course for about six years, except for one on Urban Fiscal Policy about three years ago … so if I am mistaken on a few items, please forgive me and clarify in the comments. Thank you!
** I was also very enthused to hear Mayor Michael Nutter’s commitment to “a pedestrian-focused urban form that would not be trumped by the design demands of cars.” Gas prices are not going to go down, and the age of automobile is waning. So what if Chestnut Street is always a traffic mess? It's a lively street that would be destroyed if the road was widened. It’s much eaiser to just walk or to take the trolley or the subway. For more details on Nutter’s speech reinstating powers to the Philadelphia Planning Comission, please see this article in the Inquirer.

sex and women's rights

two terms not to be confused with one another

I’m a little late on writing about the Sex and the City Movie. Part of me enjoyed the TV show because it was funny and part of me secretly envied the wardrobes of those four women, but whatever other part of me that remained resented the show for the way that it represented the supposedly ideal life of a female:

At least, you could argue, Miranda has a job, as a lawyer. But the film pays it zero attention, and the other women expect her to drop it and fly to Mexico without demur. (And she does.) Worse still is the sneering cut as the scene shifts from Carrie, carefree and childless in the New York Public Library, to the face of Miranda’s young son, smeared with spaghetti sauce. In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it. It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness. All the film lacks is a subtitle: “The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.”

~ From the New Yorker

If this is the epitome of role models for my generation of females, then I am quite saddened. Sex and the City is occasionally lauded for promoting sexual liberation and freedom for women. These days, it seems that female liberation is only about sexual liberation and reproductive rights.*

And if Sex and the City represents this, then this female liberation seems rather intent on turning all us women into selfish, men-obsessed, materialist girls, comfortably living out an extended childhood.

Has female liberation also lost sight of the actual critical issues of our society? To cite from the article from my previous post:

… elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery…





* If you use the words “rights” and “freedom” to defend any issue, you will certainly sound justified in your reasoning.

Notions of Oppression of the Dead White Male in Today’s “Institutions of Higher Learning”

Subverting Structures of Minority Privilege and Deconstructing Diversity

In this article, The New Learning that Failed (published in the New Criterion), Victor Davis Hanson explores (and criticizes) the reasons for the failure for academic institutions to promote the study of classics (in other words, the so-called Western canon of white male dead authors). He makes several valid assessments on the state of the humanities departments in today’s university. He touches upon the inability to recognize beauty:*

There is no vocabulary left to convey ugliness or near perfection in art or literature—at least none that is not instantly deconstructed to prejudices of race, gender, and class. In a university class, we read mostly poems without meter, rhyme, musicality, or an elevated vocabulary, and novels without heroes or protagonists or even much action; we view art that is far removed from what the eye sees or would wish to see. The result is that our students cannot recognize beautiful things around them or within themselves.

Having studied plenty of minority and post-colonial literature, there’s some really beautiful work written (of course, we never described it using that word) that is well worth studying. But that doesn’t mean that a dead white male cannot write something relevant to us today. And there are plenty of poems without meter, rhyme or musicality, and protagonist-less novels that are excellent, but that doesn’t mean the ones that have them are so antiquated that they are not worth reading.

It’s important to study the writings of dead white males (and yes, there are exceptions), because they have in large part shaped the structure and basis of our society today. If we are to understand who we are now, we need to go back and understand where we have come from. We also need to understand what relevance they might have for our current situation.

Of course, I do believe it’s important to understand other cultures and acknowledge the ways that the Western canon may have omitted them, but if that becomes our sole war cry, then we may soon lose sight of reality:

Theories of exploitation were divorced from the real world. While relatively well-off students anguished in class over perceived gender and radical oppressions, the United States remained the number-one destination of the world’s immigrants fleeing political bias, poverty, and religious intolerance. The first-generation Mexican national who ran as fast as he could from the oppression of Oaxaca, and clipped the bushes outside the tasteful faculty office, instinctively knew and appreciated the advantages of Western culture far more than did the leisured professor inside.

Feminists insisted that Harvard’s president Larry Summers must be fired for insensitive remarks regarding the under-representation of women on math faculties; elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery. In contrast, Greek learning had emphasized that deeds must match words; otherwise, to paraphrase Aristotle, it is easy to be ethical in our sleep.


Language in the university has lost its connection with reality—a danger that Socrates warned about in his battles with the Sophists and we have seen in our own time with the communist attempt to remake vocabulary to further social and economic agendas. “Diversity” does not mean diverse anything, surely not differences in political thought or ethnic backgrounds, but rather a requisite number of different skin colors. A classroom with three offspring of affluent African-American professionals can be “diverse” while having children of Appalachia or impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe is not. The “free speech” area may mean that radical pro-Palestinian groups can hand out anti-Semitic literature or Chicano activists may vandalize conservative newspapers, but it is not a place where one can talk safely and candidly about the problems of illegal immigration, or social contributors to the AIDS epidemic, or the need to calibrate affirmative action more on class than race.

…

We, in contrast, have lost all sense of proportion and simply use the self-absorbed yardstick of our own times versus all others. Thus Iraq—not the summer of 1864 or December 1950—is the worst (fill in the blanks) war, blunder, or quagmire in our history or of all time. A flippant campus slur is the most sexist thing ever heard, as if the frontier woman on the Colorado plains without electricity and with eleven sick children never had it as rough. Wounded Knee is tantamount to Okinawa, the loyalty oaths of the 1950s commensurate to the Inquisition. And why not, when the purpose of education now is not to train young minds in a method of disinterested inquiry supported by historical exempla, but to condition them to think in preordained, deductive fashion—in other words, as Sophists rather than Socratics?

We’ve prioritized these assumed values of diversity over the quality and influence of the work itself, and abstained from making value judgments about any pieces of work lest we offend someone. The academy, supposedly a place for honest intellectual inquiry and pursuit of truth, has been overrun by political correctness. As the study of literature becomes more concerned with the nitpicking about notions of gender construction in Dicken’s novels, it loses more and more of its relevance.

Then again, it’s not like this is anything new:

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.

~ from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

*Of course, that’s also because we’ve assumed, that literature is a rather subjective matter, like all other things… and therefore, we can’t really say that it reveals any truth of any kind, only that it perhaps produces certain effects and reflects certain notions of prejudices and etc…

bicycle safety announcement

My apologies for interrupting this blog's regular programming, but I believe this is an important public safety announcement:

Please check the street for cars AND bikes (and pedestrians for that matter), before you open your car doors:

The former general counsel of Comcast Corp. was killed yesterday as he bicycled down Main Street in Moorestown, police said.

Stanley Wang, 67, of the 500 block of Sentinel Road, was traveling east on Main Street around 12:20 p.m. when the driver of a parked Dodge Dakota pick-up truck opened his door. Wang struck the door and was knocked him from his bike into the street.

Wang was then struck by a passing Chevrolet Cavalier driven by Kellie Gifford, 19, of the 100 block of Winthrop Avenue.

Wang, the former general counsel of Comcast, was taken to Kennedy Memorial Hospital - Cherry Hill, where he was pronounced dead at 1:08 p.m.

Police are not releasing the name of the driver of the pick-up truck.

The accident remains under investigation. Anyone with information is asked to call Sgt. Randy Pugh at 856-914-3045.

~ From the Philadelphia Inquirer

Also, please don't honk at bike (or pass it too closely) that's somewhat in the center of the road. The bike is considered a vehicle and has a right to be there. It's also probably in the center of the road because it's trying to avoid potholes or car doors being flung open.

You can also consider doing the test.

on the uses of diversity*

When I first took a good look at some of the restaurants and shops on the street where I work (Walnut Street between Broad & 19th), I was concerned that this area was just going to be super ritzy: Burberry, Coach, Le Bec Fin, Occitane, Williams Sonoma, the Bellevue… I was afraid I’d feel frumpy and ugly walking around (as I do in Manhattan), because everyone is better groomed and dressed than me. However, as I have spent more and more time in this area, I have been able to see its diversity. This area may have its disproportionate share of overpriced bags and designer shoes, and may be residentially expensive and exclusive, but it also manages to be very diverse.

Take for instance, on a sunny day, Rittenhouse Square is brimming with people: students picnicking on the grass, mothers from the neighborhood and their children, fancily dressed women walking their dogs, old married couples taking walks, suburbanites who work in the city eating lunch, homeless men sitting on a bench, construction workers and bike messengers sitting on the railings and talking, an artist painting the park from the sidewalk… I have grown to love this park because it is so diverse- it is almost possible to see a snapshot of the entire city within the park and it is hard to feel like you don’t belong there because everyone is so different.

As Philadelphia grows to become “the next great city”, I don’t want more Upper East Sides and Midtowns appearing in the city—I want the diversity of Rittenhouse Square to extend residentially throughout the city, where neighborhoods can be mixed, instead of segregated. While it is good to retain the cultural characteristics of different neighborhoods, we need to resist the desire to displace the poor into housing projects and run-down neighborhoods, where their problems are exacerbated. How do we balance that with the market forces that come into play in the city? (I feel like I am watching my neighborhood gentrify by the day). I wish I knew…

A friend recently noted that there were middle dividers appearing in many of the benches in Rittenhouse Square. These dividers are generally designed to keep the homeless from sleeping on them. This saddens me as it is one step that the city is taking to exclude the homeless from the park (reminding me of the way Penn shuttles away the homeless when parents tend to visit campus)—to the detriment of the homeless, as they are shuttled off to temporary shelters and excluded from part of city life that they may very well enjoy, but also to the detriment of the rest of us, who may wish to hide conveniently away from dismal problems that our city has.

Promoting diversity in city use helps mitigate some of the problems of the city. When rich and poor can live alongside each other, safety is improved, as it is much more difficult for an area to be overrun by drugs, violence and prostitution. It also enables the poor to access the resources of their better-off neighbours and lessens damaging mindsets that crop up in lower-income only neighbourhoods (e.g. early pregnancies). And for the rich, it promotes awareness, understanding, learning, and hopefully friendships with people who are different from us.

All us college educated liberals love to tout the benefits of diversity and love to claim it for ourselves in the form of minority friends, gay friends and international travel. But how many of us are actually willing to engage in a friendship with someone from a housing project or a homeless man, without condescension, judgment or fear?


*Much of this entry has been prompted by my current reading of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, which has helped me see the city with fresh eyes. Written in the 1960s or 1970s, Jacobs launches a spirited critique of planned “garden cities”, pointing to the abject failure of housing projects and planned developments. Jacobs writes extensively on New York and Philadelphia and praises Rittenhouse Square highly for its diversity and variety.
** Can you believe it? I wrote an entry without quoting from another book or article!

the abundance of the rich

With the recession, I’ve been reading quite a bit of the rich becoming less rich. Many have suffered as a result of the downturn in the market due to real estate losses. Many of these rich struggle with maintaining their lifestyles: Some have refused to cut back on their $10,000/month mortgage because they don’t want to sell their dream home despite having lost a job. Or others who lament the fact that their bonuses are not going to be particularly big and must cut back on private jet plane rides.

I have had very little sympathy for their situations, as I know that the plight of the poor is much harder. The poor generally suffer more. For them, it is not a question of less hair extensions or less restaurant meals, but trying to decide whether to buy food or pay for gas, resorting to eating junk food because it’s cheaper than real food or losing their houses altogether.

Yet, reading this recent article in the New York Times has stirred pity and sadness in me, not for the fact that the wealthy now have less, but for the way that they are so controlled by their wealth. We think that wealth gives us power, but from these examples, it seems much more likely that wealth has power over us:

One of (a divorce lawyer)’s clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations.

“I literally had to sit there and tell him that he had to tell his wife that she had to stop spending,” she said. “He was actually scared she would leave him because their financial situation changed so drastically.”

~

“Even if they’re not in danger of not paying their mortgage, there’s still a psychological change,” said Chris Del Gatto, chief executive of Circa, which has watched its business jump by 50 percent in the last year as wealthy clients sell their spare diamonds and Rolexes. “The economy is an issue even for people who don’t need the money.”

Their spouses could leave them when they discover that their net worth has collapsed to eight figures from nine. Friends and business associates could avoid them as they pass their lunchtime tables at Barney’s or the Four Seasons. And these snubs could trickle down to their children
“They fear their kids won’t get invited to the right birthday parties,” said Michele Kleier, an Upper East Side-based real estate broker. “If they have to give up things that are invisible, they’re O.K. as long as they don’t have give up things visible to the outside world.”

So New York’s very wealthy are addressing their distress in discreet and often awkward ways. They try to move their $165 sessions with personal trainers to a time slot that they know is already taken. They agree to tour multimillion-dollar apartments and then say the spaces don’t match their specifications. They apply for a line of credit before art auctions, supposedly to buy a painting or a sculpture, but use that borrowed money to pay other debts.

~

The drop in wealth has also exposed other personal problems, like bad marriages. Money — which bought jewelry or extravagant vacations — helped smooth over many of these difficulties, said Kenneth Mueller, a psychotherapist in the East Village who works with many Wall Street bankers and real estate developers. Now, he said, his clients “catastrophize” smaller bonuses or shriveling stock portfolios. “You have to remind them that there’s something that has always been there,” he said. “All the money helped mask the anxiety.”

~

The very wealthy can’t hide anything from their nutritionists and personal trainers, because they see the weight gain. Heather Bauer, a dietitian who works with many Wall Street executives who pay $600 to $800 a month for her services, says her clients have been eating and drinking more in the last six months. She sees results of this indulging each time they step on a scale, and in their journals that record what they’ve eaten.

One Wall Street executive, Ms. Bauer said, snacks on nuts in her office all day to manage the stress of potentially losing her position, while another confesses to inhaling four bowls of cereal at 10 p.m. Even their sex lives are suffering, Ms. Bauer said, because of the stress or because the weight gain makes them feel unattractive.

~

No wonder it says in Ecclesiastes 5:12 that “the sleep of a laborer is sweet whether he eats little or much but the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep”.

I admit that when I see the wardrobes and manicures of Sex and the City, or the sophisticated ladies shopping at the Burberry and Coach stores on the street where I work, a small part of me wishes and envies for that so-called “freedom” (to buy) and image of wealth. But an even deep part of me knows that if I had all that, I would not be satisfied nor content. “Whoever loves money never has money enough” (Ecclesiastes 5:11).*

*And I am thankful that I can say right now, I am very happy with what I have. And in fact, I have a lot (much much more than most people in the world have).