I grew up as a proud New Yorker. It was in the Bronx, but in those days we regarded ourselves as New Yorkers in every sense, even though we had to take the D train to Manhattan. Once “downtown,” we enjoyed the museums, ice-skating in Central Park, theater (not prohibitively expensive then), the automat, and just sharing the exhilarating streets of the city with our fellow New Yorkers.

As working class kids, we went to public school, which seemed up to the task, and after high school to one of the branches of what later became the City University. At colleges like Hunter, tuition was free (though there was a fee of $24 a semester). My dad worked for the United Parcel Service, was a fierce union supporter (a Teamster); my mom a housewife who had joined the workforce at 15. We never felt poor, even though we lived in a one-bedroom apartment and, indeed we were not, as my father’s wages rose steadily as a result of the prosperity of the times and of belonging to an effective if not always squeaky-clean union.

My sister and I knew we’d get “good jobs” after college, which to us meant doing something more “interesting” and socially useful than what our parents had to do to earn their bread. We thought that was what happened: my sister became a claims representative for Social Security. I kept going to school after my B.A. and became, finally, a professor of English literature. We had families and bought houses. That was before the renaissance of greed.

Having recently gone on a Circle Line Cruise around New York Harbor. I was struck by the way the tour guide went on about Donald Trump and his children and other tycoons. And a recent book by an author named Julian Edney, entitled Greed: A Treatise In Two Essays, begins about New York City, “Sign the tab in certain Midtown eateries, and your neighbors’ eyes slide over. Is that a $48,000 Michel Perchin pen? What’s on your wrist, a $300,000 Breguet watch?”

Well no. My current pen is a ball-point I picked up at Staples, and on my wrist I have a nice Seiko, 20 years old, that cost me about $100. I drive a 1997 Subaru Outback Sport, and my husband and I live in a big stone Mt Airy house that is worth maybe $400, 000. I have realized for some time now that I couldn’t live in NYC, not without a serious downward slide in my lifestyle.

My stepdaughter and her husband, who are artists and paralegals, will rear their daughter in a three-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, and she will grow up in an apartment smaller than the one I lived in as a child, even though her parents went to college. They don’t know if they will send their child to public school since, with some exceptions, the NYC schools are not considered educationally adequate anymore, yet how could they afford private school, especially in New York?

But there are those for whom high prices are part of the fun. In Greed, Edney reports, “In New York at an exclusive Morell & Company auction last May, a single magnum of Dom Perignon champagne was sold for $5,750.” I realize that from the perspective of the super-rich, I am not on the economic map despite an academic career that culminated in my becoming a full professor, my big old house, and my all-wheel drive car! The present climate at times makes me feel pinched.

It is not only New Yorkers who are squeezed and made to redefine their achievements by the greed of the times. In Philadelphia private schools are viewed as even more essential than in New York, and the big building boom in Center City has focused on condos that cost close to a million. But resources for ordinary people are inadequate, and greed reigns everywhere in the U.S.. Edney says, “In Palm Springs and Bel Air, $100,000 twin-turbo Porsches and $225,000 Ferraris buzz the warm streets. Hotel rooms, anyone, at $10,000 a night? Estate agents in suburbs of Dallas and Palm Beach have advertised baronial homes for sale at over $40 million.

These are prices paid by the exceptionally wealthy, the folks who skim the pages of the Robb Report (average annual salary of subscribers: $1.2 million) in whose glossy pages are reviewed the best of everything. . . . In a recent issue a southern plantation is advertised, ‘everybody’s dream,’ at $8.5 million. Yet my cousin, who at 54 needs cataract surgery, must get her 90-year-old father to pay for it; she and her husband own a small business, and their profits are not enough to pay for medical insurance.

How did this happen in our country? Has the U.S. broken from its traditions? Edney: “There are now more than 200 billionaires. Some five percent of American households have assets over $1 million. And we are back to levels of extravagant consumption not seen for 100 years.” Thomas Frank says in the NYT Times (8/18), that this kind of society of economic extremes, a country ruled by business, is part of our history. For him the 19th century is “relevant again in all sorts of startling ways” because “the reigning economic faith of our time . . . is merely a souped-up version of the Victorians’ understanding of the market-as-nature. Again Americans thrill to the exploits of the great tycoons, and gradually we are becoming reacquainted with pervasive inequality.”

Of course the United States has other traditions besides rule by a wealthy elite. The movement to abolish slavery, the women’s rights movement, the effort to create and maintain civil liberties, the struggle of working people to form unions and get legislation passed that would keep them healthy and safe on the job, the civil rights movement, the second wave of the women’s movement, the effort to have pure food and drugs.

But what are we going to do about living in a reconstituted plutocracy? First, we have to get our values straight. On a spiritual and emotional level the consumption of more and more commodities does not lead to inner peace; indeed, it is all about feeling superior to other people, which leads to loneliness. We should keep this in mind, along with the fact that despite those billionaires, very, very few of us will ever even be millionaires. (My students seem sad when I tell them this truth, for the myth lives on that anyone can get to the top, that it is simply a matter of determination. In 1983 57 percent of people polled believed that in America one could go from very poor to very rich. (According to Harper’s, September 2006, 80 percent still believe that!)

America changed from the 1930s to 1973, becoming more egalitarian, and this was because of some very good leaders, but more importantly, because of social movements in which people struggled together in order to better their lives. According to a recent article in the New York Times, between 1929 and 1947 the real wages of production workers in manufacturing rose 67 percent while the income of the richest one percent actually fell 17 percent. And between 1947 and 1973, the years I was growing up to be a proud American, real wages rose 81 percent. Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell one percent while the real income of the richest one percent of Americans with incomes of more than $227,000 in 2004 rose 135 percent!

The concentration of wealth in a few hands leads not only to everyone else getting poorer but also to distrust and contempt for those below oneself economically. And so it is crucial to resist this: to encourage ourselves and our children to have respect for those at all levels of society and to strive for material prosperity but not require fetishized commodities for self-esteem.

My father, whose self-esteem was excellent, used to announce (to our affectionate derision) that he was “a common man.” I didn’t understand then, but he was expressing how much he identified with the general welfare. In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda, the fashion diva played by Meryl Streep, bullies her personal assistant into getting a not-yet-published Harry Potter book for her twins.

When the young woman is miraculously successful and shows her a copy, Miranda snaps, “Did you expect them to share?” Her comment satirizes the ethos of the corporate elite that Miranda represents, its rapaciousness, its individualism run amok. One irony here is that sharing, including shared membership in a society, is one of life’s deepest emotional satisfactions, far more satisfying, I suspect (though I confess I can’t be sure) than a Michel Perchin pen or a Brogue watch.