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Recession Lexicon: Nouveau Poor
/n. Your class distinction if you used to have two private jets and now just have one. Or had to give up your Pilates class or nanny. You’re feeling poor, but really, you’re not actually poor-poor.
The term has been around for months now, and Barbara Ehrenreich, a chronicler of social change, discussed this demographic in the New York Times on July 14. The recession, she says, has been portrayed as “smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.”
Just as “nouveau riche” was a pretension, “nouveau poor” occupies the same distinction.
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Funny you should post this–I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the nouveau poor lately. Right now it’s okay to cop to having no money and you can be openly frugal without social repercussions. But I wonder how long those allowances will last. Since I started a web mag about cheap living, I notice my friends sort of apologizing about their $300 purses to me, the way some meat eaters might feel guilty eating a hamburger in front of a vegetarian.