The Emotional Impact of Wealth

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In our May-June issue, we feature the work of Jinnie English, a social worker and psychotherapist who specializes in supporting high-powered executives who were once poor. Hidden behind the trappings of success (expensive clothes, a fancy home), her clients “have a lot of psychodynamic issues,” English told University of Chicago Magazine. They’re still dealing with “the internal struggle of being poor.”

It’s not just successful corporate types, however, that have to deal with the dynamics of wealth. Financial security–and what having it or not having it means to us, on a personal level–are subjects that simply don’t get enough frank conversation in our culture.

Enter Enough, the vivid conversation project from Dean Spade and Tyrone Boucher, two folks we named Utne Reader visionaries in our November-December. 2009 issue. Enough is a website, an open forum, where people share stories and thoughts about the personal politics of capitalism, wealth, and class.

Bonus: In the same issue of the magazine, we also profiled Partha Dasgupta, a visionary economist who takes issue with the gross domestic product for the things not included in the calculation: environment, education, and human welfare, for example. Dasgupta’s “inclusive wealth” measure wraps in those missing elements.

Image by P/\UL, licensed under Creative Commons.

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