A friend posted a list this week, the genre that always does well on Facebook: ten differences, some subtle and some not so subtle, between old money and new money. Old money loves quiet, while new money is always running something in the background, an instrumental track or a muted television or some other noise of the low grade sort nobody asked for. Old money spends more on the chauffeur than the car, more on the chef than the kitchen accessories, more on the accountant than the office furniture, and keeps a designated day for clearing every bill. Old money is, the list concludes, never desperate.
New money likes theme parks.
The post is well written and the friend is a good writer. It had two hundred likes by lunch and a long comment thread of people saying yes, this, exactly, my khalu was like that. I read it sitting at a Banani rooftop birthday looking out at a skyline of buildings that, by any honest accounting, are all new money. None of those buildings existed in 1971. Most of them weren't there in 2001. The "old money" the list was teaching us to recognise is, in Dhaka, mostly a category with one and a half generations of continuity behind it. Two or three genuinely older families survived Partition and Liberation by being lucky or in the right export trade at the right time. Even those families have spent the last forty years either dispersing into Toronto and Sydney, or quietly going broke in Gulshan with the lights still on for the neighbours.
That's not really my objection though. The dating problem is everyone's first objection to content pitting old money against new money, and it's the easy one. The harder objection, the one I want to write down because I haven't seen it written down, is that what the list is doing, more quietly and more annoyingly than just getting the dates wrong, is smuggling a moral argument inside what looks like a sociological observation, and once you notice the move you can't really stop seeing it.
Most of what the list attributes to "old money" isn't really a class marker at all. The items are character habits the list is quietly relabelling as inheritance. Paying your accountant well takes discipline. Choosing not to fill a quiet room with background music takes restraint. Building a wardrobe over fifteen years instead of five weekends takes a long time horizon. All three are habits a person can practise into their character at any age, and none of them depend on when the money in your household stopped being scary enough that you could stop checking the balance every time you spent it. They get distributed messily across people whose money is six months old and people whose money is six generations old, with no obvious correlation to which side of that imaginary line they sit on.
The list is technically a description and structurally a verdict. The structural verdict is what gets two hundred likes; the description is just the polite costume the verdict is wearing into the comment thread. People nod along because they recognise the virtues and want them, and the list quietly tells them the virtues come already packaged in a class identity. That's a flattering thing to be told if you happen to be in or near that class, and an aspirational thing to be told if you happen to want to join it. Either way, the message is that the work of becoming the kind of person who pays a chef well is not really work at all; it's heredity. You either have it or you don't.
That implication is wrong on the facts and dishonest about the work. Walk through any Dhanmondi mosque after Friday prayers and you'll meet old money families that are visibly broke. The assets have dispersed and the memberships have quietly lapsed. The family car has been downgraded, and the family WhatsApp keeps describing the new car as a car for city traffic because baba doesn't like driving the bigger one in this heat. Walk down any side street near Banani 11 and you'll meet tech founders whose money is only a generation old, and who pay their accountant more than they pay themselves. They would never put a TV on in the background while a guest was visiting. They have a designated weekly window for clearing every outstanding obligation, including the small ones nobody would notice if they slipped. The list, applied honestly to the actual people on a Dhaka street, doesn't sort cleanly along the line it claims to be drawing.
The dishonesty about the work is the more interesting half of the critique. The traits the list attributes to old money, the calm and the restraint and the long time horizon, are not given to anyone by inheritance. They are practised, by some people, across some years, in conditions that often happen to correlate with having had money long enough that the panic has eased out of the household. The correlation is real and the causal arrow is not what the list implies. Calm doesn't get produced by old money; calm is something some people slowly learn in the absence of acute financial pressure, and which other people fail to learn even when the pressure has been absent for three generations. The same is true of restraint, of time horizon, of the kind of unshowy quietness the list keeps gesturing at. All of it is character work rather than inheritance, and treating it as inherited removes the credit from the people who are actually doing the work, which is the part of the move I find quietly unfair.
It also, and this is what I find quietly offensive about the genre, removes the responsibility from the people who haven't bothered. If "old money is never desperate" is a class observation, then a desperate person at a wedding is just being new money, which is unfortunate but not really their fault. The path to not being desperate, on this reading, runs through being born into a different family rather than through doing the slow work of becoming a person who isn't always proving something to the room. Both the credit and the responsibility get laundered out of the equation, and what's left is a vibe that reassures people they are already the kind of person they wish to be.
There's a sharper test I keep coming back to when I read one of these lists, which is whether the same trait would still be celebrated if it appeared on the wrong body. Take the chauffeur point. Old money, the list says, spends more on the chauffeur than on the car. Charming. Now picture a garment factory owner in Tongi, newly rich and the first in his family to have any money at all, who has bought himself a perfectly ordinary white Allion and pays his driver, who has been with the family since before the factory existed, twice the local market rate plus medical for the wife. Is that old money behaviour? By the trait, yes; by the class, no. Most people running the test in their heads will, if they're being honest, quietly refuse to grant the Tongi owner the same praise the list wants to give the Gulshan zamindar's grandson, and that refusal is the small revealing moment that shows what the list is actually grading. The class was always doing the work; the trait was decorative.
Run the same test on the point about obscure versus trending. Old money loves the obscure, the list says, and new money loves what's trending. There is some truth in this as a rough population statistic, but treat it as a virtue and you have to credit the obsessive Spotify user with a library of five thousand tracks of Dhaka indie from its fourth wave, tracks nobody else listens to. He is not old money by any definition. He is doing the trait. The praise belongs to him too. The list cannot grant it to him without dissolving the entire framing it depends on, so the praise quietly gets withheld, and we keep the framing.
What the list mislabels as 'old money.'
There's also a reactionary subtext running through the genre that's worth naming because once you've named it the list reads differently. The list isn't only coding "old" as good and "new" as bad; it's coding "tradition" as virtue and "modernity" as gauche, and the modernity the list singles out for special contempt is, suspiciously often, the modernity practised by people of a different class than the writer. Theme park rides are, in the list's framing, vulgar. Why are theme park rides vulgar? They're a paid experience that many people who are not yet wealthy save for and look forward to with their kids. The people who tend to look down on theme park rides tend to be the people who can afford the alternatives the list happens to find more dignified, like a quiet Mediterranean villa where nothing happens loudly. The aesthetic preference is doing the moral work, and the moral work is being done at the expense of people who can't afford the aesthetic.
I have a particular reason to find this annoying that's worth naming. My family runs along two lines that the genre would file very differently. On one side are the chartered accountants, who have run small businesses out of ledgers since the nineties, with every transaction written and dated and signed in by hand, with portfolios and reconciliations and a deep aversion to any expenditure that isn't documented. On the other side are the artists, who run studios out of old Dhanmondi flats and businesses out of phone calls and mood boards and a tab that has been running for years of which cousin owes which favour. They would consider it rude and slightly humiliating to ask their landlord for a printed receipt. Both sides have lasted multiple decades in this city. Both sides have produced people who would, by every item on the list, look like old money to an outsider; both sides have produced people who would, by every item on the list, look like new money. The list cannot describe my family because the list is not really about families. It's about an aesthetic, projected onto families that mostly don't fit it.
What I think is actually going on is closer to a more boring observation, which is that wealth that has been around for a while in a household has had time to stop being interesting, and people stop performing things they no longer find interesting. That's a real phenomenon, but it isn't a class trait. It's a habituation effect, and you can produce it inside a single generation by being deliberate about how you treat your money, and you can fail to produce it across five generations by remaining anxious about the same money. The household, not the class, is doing the work. Calling that work "old money" is a category error dressed up as social science, and the category error is doing harm because it tells people the work isn't available to them.
If you want to be the kind of person the list calls old money, the path the list won't tell you about is genuinely available. Pay your bills on a designated day. Pay the people who work for you more than the market thinks you should. Don't run music in the background to fill silence you haven't decided to dislike. Build a wardrobe slowly, with things you actually wear, and let the rest of the closet stay empty. Get a real accountant, learn to enjoy talking to her, and pay her well enough that she'll still be your accountant in fifteen years. Stop trying to prove anything in particular at any wedding. None of those moves require you to be from a family that's been wealthy for three generations. Several of them have been practised, in my own observation, with more discipline by founders in Mirpur who are recently rich and only one generation removed from having none of it, than by industrial families in Gulshan three generations deep, and the list would refuse to give the founders the credit because the credit is not really about the practice. It's about the family.
Good things are good things. The list is correct that calm is better than noise, that restraint is better than spectacle, that paying attention to the people who work for you is better than buying a flashier piece of equipment. Those things would be true if the list had attributed them to socialists or to monks or to Dhaka cha-er-dokan owners or to civil servants in the middle of their careers in Motijheel. They are true regardless of who's practising them, and they are true regardless of how long the money has been in the family. Treating them as proof of class membership is the part the list got wrong, and it's the part that does damage, because it tells the reader that the work is the work of being born well rather than the work of becoming a more careful person.
The friend who posted the list is, for what it's worth, one of the more disciplined and least desperate people I know, and his money is barely a decade old. He is doing the things the list praises while belonging to the category the list mocks, and he doesn't seem to find the contradiction interesting. I suspect that's because most of us read these lists looking for confirmation that we're already the kind of person we'd like to be, rather than looking for the actual model of the work. The model of the work isn't dramatic; it's small choices made repeatedly, on Tuesdays nobody's watching, by people whose families nobody on the rooftop quite knows the history of.
I went back to the rooftop conversation after I'd thought about this for a while. The topic had moved on to a different aunty's daughter's wedding venue, which apparently had a "very old money" feel to it, by which the table meant the band wasn't loud and the drinks were being served in proper glasses. The aunty's daughter, I knew from a different conversation, came from a family that had made its money in the late nineties on a single fortunate land transaction in Bashundhara, which by the list's own dating made her very new money and by the rooftop's classification made her very old. The category was doing exactly the work it always does, which is to mean whatever the speaker needs it to mean in service of an aesthetic they've already decided to admire, regardless of where the underlying money actually came from. What had made the wedding read the way the table was reading it was that the aunty's daughter had, by every account I trusted, made a careful series of small choices about the band and the glassware and the seating chart and the time the food was served. The land in Bashundhara had not made any of those choices for her. The careful version of herself she'd been quietly practising for the better part of a decade had, and the rooftop, which had no language for that practice, was reaching for the only label it had ever been taught to use.