Charlotte Cowles and the TOOS Class
The Cut, sister publication to NY Mag, recently published an article by its financial advice columnist about how she got scammed out of $50,000.[1] The point is supposed to be that “anybody” could get scammed. The scam was quite sophisticated and started innocently enough. Someone calls you claiming to be from Amazon, asking if you made a purchase you did not make. But the second someone purporting to be a law enforcement officer threatens to arrest you if you go to a lawyer, it seems like any rational person should know to hang up the phone.
One commenter, “mr__piss,” said:
The whole lead-in about how she’s not like the poor, stupid, lonely people she imagines to be easily scammed had a certain je ne sais quoi that I instantly clocked as the mutterings of an effete, inbred child of rich people - and my ability to clock that sort of thing from the get is one of the few things I like about myself.
Her husband works for a nonprofit, she’s 39, but they live in a $4 million dollar house in Prospect Heights? She’s related to the Roosevelts? Ivy league is a given, but she feels the need to highlight it on her personal site? A child named Ripley? This whole thing is just another rearranging deck chairs on the titanic of increasingly hubristic, insulated failsons and faildaughters are discovering the otherwise object permanence level of obvious lessons the rest of us understand.
You think Amazon will white glove you over to the CIA in a few minutes? Tell me you don’t do your taxes without telling me you don’t do your taxes. This person is so uncalibrated in their ability to navigate the world that their ability to generalize any intellectual output for anyone other than her similarly 0.1% situated friends is completely shot. Let her go be on the board of a do-nothing charity, this game is up.[2]
Is the part about the 4 million dollar house true? Cowles said nothing about it in the article. Instead, it seemed like she was just an ordinary person:
Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. It took me years to save, stashing away a few thousand every time I got paid for a big project. Part of it was money I had received from my grandfather, an inheritance he took great pains to set up for his grandchildren before his death. Sometimes I imagine how I would have spent it if I had to get rid of it in a day. I could have paid for over a year’s worth of child care up front. I could have put it toward the master’s degree I’ve always wanted. I could have housed multiple families for months. Perhaps, inadvertently, I am; I occasionally wonder what the scammers did with it.
Because I had set it aside for emergencies and taxes, it was money I tried to pretend I didn’t have — it wasn’t for spending. Initially, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to afford my taxes this year, but then my accountant told me I could write off losses due to theft. So from a financial standpoint, I’ll survive, as long as I don’t have another emergency — a real one — anytime soon.
With some research, I discovered that the claim that she lives in a 4 million dollar house is almost certainly true. Via a genealogy website, I found someone named Charlotte Cowles listed as living at an address in Brooklyn. Cowles the writer lives in Brooklyn. From there, I found the ACRIS filing documents on a government website that lists the house as having sold for 3.8 million in 2018 to a woman named Charlotte Cowles. Are they the same person? I found that:
1. Cowles the writer claimed on her LinkedIn profile that she went to Columbia starting in 2003.[3] If she were the typical age for a college student, she would have been born in 1985. Cowles from the genealogy website was born in December 1984.
2. The Cowles who bought the 3.8 million dollar house listed an address on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Cowles the writer was living in the Upper West Side in 2014.[4]
3. A man bought the house along with Cowles, presumably her husband, Daniel C. Fielding. Cowles the writer appears in a 2012 photograph with a man labeled as “Dan Fielding.”[5]
(Note that I didn’t link the genealogy website link or the property transfer documents, which both contain her address. Is it a problem that you can find someone’s address in a few minutes if you know their first and last name and the city they live in? Maybe, but don’t blame that on me.)
Journalists, even at the most elite publications, don’t make much money. The Glassdoor salary range of a New York Times journalist is $67,000-121,000 a year.[6] Cowles’s husband works for an “affordable-housing nonprofit,” which, sadly, means he probably works to make housing less affordable. How does this couple afford a 3.8 million dollar house?
Maybe they’re renting out parts of the house. Even then, it’s not like banks will loan random people 3.8 million dollars to invest in property and rent it out. This couple’s got cash. It’s possible Dan Fielding is a self-made tech millionaire who retired to pursue his affordable housing dreams. Far more likely is that one or both of them is from a rich family.
In claiming that $50,000 was a “lot of money,” Cowles wasn’t outright lying. The children of the rich aren’t usually gifted millions of dollars on their eighteenth birthday. They have to wait for their parents to die before they become “census” millionaires. Since rich people usually aren’t fat and don’t smoke, that will take a long time. But it doesn’t mean they are ordinary, middle-class people until that happens. They usually receive a lot of in-kind aid: college tuition paid for, cars gifted, rent paid twelve months in advance. We know Cowles received such aid. To her credit, she’s openly talked about it:
Journalist Charlotte Cowles, who writes about money for The Cut, went to Columbia University, where everyone lived in dorms. Once she graduated, she saw the friends she’d known divide into two different groups: those who could get an apartment in Manhattan, and those who had to move home and look for a job. “My parents were able to help with a deposit on an apartment that I shared with three other people. ... There’s a big part of me that’s like, would I have made it in this career if I had student loans and no way to be in New York City after I graduated from college? I really don’t know.”[7]
The commenter “mr__piss” recognized what Cowles was, but he didn’t give it a name. I do: Cowles is top-out-of-sight. (TOOS) The phrase was initially coined by Paul Fussel and referred to “those with immense wealth who live in private luxury and do not interact socially with other classes. Their mansions are situated far from public roads behind high walls, and are thus literally out-of-sight.”[8] Blogger Lion of the Blogosphere changed the meaning somewhat, referring to those who are figuratively, not literally, out-of-sight.[9] The TOOS are not merely rich, but a specific type of rich, distinguished by a specific background and career path. They are native-born Americans with generational wealth who do not strongly identify with any ethnic or religious group. Sheldon Adelson and Mitt Romney, because of their strong Jewish/Mormon identities, are not TOOS. Anyone who speaks with a Southern accent, no matter how rich, is not TOOS. Elon Musk, an immigrant, is not TOOS. Donald Trump might have been TOOS, he had the right pedigree for it, but his pride in his wealth is completely at odds with the TOOS mindset, which is to be vaguely embarrassed about wealth.
Cowles is very TOOS. She and her husband have English surnames; the heart of the TOOS is the old Northeastern WASP elite. She went to an Ivy League university and majored in creative writing rather than a STEM field.[3] She’s a journalist and her husband works for a politically-focused nonprofit organization. She doesn’t aspire to spend her money on “vulgar” rich people things like fancy cars, instead, she “might have spent that 50,000$ on childcare expenses or put it toward that “master’s degree I’ve always wanted.”[1] While members of this class are sometimes imagined as conservative Republicans, in reality they are usually liberal Democrats, like Cowles. Cowles looks like a member of the TOOS class, that is, she’s slightly above-average looking but no supermodel. The nobility never had magical, beauty-granting blood, but they aren’t fat like low-class people.
Why do the TOOS have this particular career path? While I would think that the TOOS are smarter than the average American, they are not vastly so. Quantity has a quality of its own; there are far more very intelligent non-TOOS people. For the mediocre majority, this career path makes sense. Use your family connections to get into an Ivy League school, but don’t major in STEM, where you might wind up left in the dust by smart middle-class or immigrant kids. Major in something like creative writing. Don’t go work as a lawyer, on Wall Street, or in tech, where the stakes are high, the consequences of failure are severe, and long hours are required. Work in journalism, the arts, for a nonprofit, or as a teacher in an elite private school. What you certainly don’t do is sit around all day attending parties, like the idle rich of the past.
The specific career path of the TOOS isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you find the TOOS annoying, you’d like it even less if they behaved in a more classically aristocratic manner, openly proclaiming that they are entitled by birth to Senate seats and control over the most vital businesses in the country. It’s far better for the economy if the mediocre children of the rich throw their money into passively managed index funds instead of trying to “prove themselves” by buying businesses and running them into the ground. You could see the TOOS is a success of the American way. In America, you can build up wealth, save it, and give it to your children knowing they won’t have to pursue political power to save their fortunes. Instead of keeping everyone out through zero-sum political warfare, they can just sit back and enjoy the ride. But it’s also worth asking if this class is destabilizing the meritocratic society its ancestors created via its embrace of wokeness.
To some, the career paths and political views of the TOOS are part of a clever plan to pursue their class’s financial self-interest. They donate to nonprofits to keep money in their class. $60,000, as part of a massive fortune, will be captured by inheritance taxes. $60,000 donated to a nonprofit can reduce the individual’s tax burden. It can then be given to a young TOOSer twenty years later as wages taxed at a relatively low rate. The TOOS like environmentalism because it can be wielded as a weapon in support of NIMBYism, which benefits the property-owning class at the expense of renters.
This narrative always seemed like an Occam’s razor violation to me. If this class was so concerned with maintaining its fortunes and avoiding taxes, why not vote for the party that openly promises to lower its taxes? I think it’s more subtle. The Republican appeal fails because it is, for their lives, so far removed from reality. They aren’t “job creators.” They don’t work ten times harder than everyone else. They don’t invent groundbreaking new technology. They were just born rich, plain and simple. The Republican platform offers them a chance to feel greedy, but they won’t want to feel greedy. They want to feel good, morally righteous, charitable. The wokists come in and offer them what any elite class wants: to feel like it’s part of an elect group superior to the masses. Because you believe in “white privilege,” know the meaning of the word “heteronormativity,” and didn’t vote for the “racist” Donald Trump. Your great-grandpa in the 1920s looked down on working-class people for reasons that make you feel uncomfortable, but you’re looking down on the descendants of those same people for reasons that are completely different.
It doesn’t hurt that many of these ideas will cost you less than them. Pay an extra dollar per gallon for gasoline to support the environment? I can do that. We all need to make sacrifices for progress. If my kid struggles to find a job because journalism is “too white,” well, Grandpa can give him a loan he can pay back whenever.
Some of you have heard all of this before. Doesn’t everyone know this? I don’t think so. You know it if you’re spatially close to these people. But imagine the viewpoint of a middle-class nineteen-year-old living in flyover country. In pop culture, rich people are actors, athletes, Hollywood producers, CEOs, bankers, and hedge fund managers. They fly around in jets, make billion-dollar deals, and give orders to subordinates. The guy who works at an affordable housing nonprofit and has parents worth eight million bucks, we don’t really have a word for that. So this is your word of the day: TOOS.
1. https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html
2. https://twitter.com/leylaaa31/status/1758324417434648936
3. https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlotte-cowles-72429411/
4. https://mdash.mmlafleur.com/ampersand-woman-charlotte-cowles/
5. https://www.patrickmcmullan.com/photo/1944205
6. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/New-York-Times-Journalist-Salaries-E960_D_KO15,25.htm
7. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a26091060/money-millennials-parents-career-success/
9. https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/another-post-about-the-top-out-of-sight/