Wealth & Money Quote by George Weinberg

Privilege usually gets written as destiny, but Weinberg flips it into something more brittle: a Yale-and-Columbia lawyer still needs a “healthy push” to do the right thing, while a seventh-grade graduate becomes the engine of survival. The line works because it refuses the polite story we tell about merit. The father carries the resume of inherited stability; the mother carries the skill set of urgency. In a few brisk clauses, Weinberg makes education look like an accessory and adaptability look like power.

That parenthetical list - “lawyer, Yale and Columbia” - is doing cultural work. It reads like a credential roll call, the kind that’s supposed to settle arguments. Then he undercuts it with a domestic verb: “walked out.” The prestige doesn’t prevent failure; it merely makes the failure more surprising, more indictable. Against that, the mother’s biography is compressed into action: “took a typing course,” “got a secretarial job as fast as she could.” Speed becomes morality. Competence becomes care.

The subtext is also gendered and historically specific. For women of that era, “typing” and “secretarial” aren’t just jobs; they’re the narrow on-ramp to independence when institutions don’t offer you the Ivy League. Weinberg, a psychologist who spent his career naming and challenging social pathologies, frames his own origin story as an early lesson in how power actually moves: not through pedigrees, but through the person willing to make a hard decision, push included.