Recent studies show that young adults’ transitions to adulthood are more strained and less linear than before. For one, economic research shows diminishing prospects of upward mobility, especially among the middle class. The COVID-19 pandemic also has caused significant social, political, and economic unrest. Clearly, young adults today are transitioning into adulthood in an “unsettled” time in which there is growing inequality, less mobility, and more job precarity. It is crucial to consider the role of money—or monies—that underlie these cultural and economic shifts. In this dissertation, I seek to understand how young adults think about and engage in money matters, and how this varies by their social class background. To examine these questions, I conducted in-depth interviews with 57 young adults who are affiliated with a public four-year university in Southern California, either as current college students or recent college graduates. I use a cultural economic sociology perspective to study three specific areas of money matters: financial knowledge, financial relationships, and economic futures. On the topic of financial knowledge, I find that despite the popularization of finance, which makes formerly exclusive knowledge more accessible, young adults from higher-class backgrounds still have an advantage due to their access to parents’ relevant financial knowledge and professional financial resources. This shows that financial knowledge is a key cultural capital—a financial cultural capital—that reproduces inequality. On the topic of financial relationships, I find that the quality of parent-child relationships and the family’s financial context are key to young adults’ relational work. Specifically, I suggest that young adults who grew up in lower-class families engage in more emotionally and financially taxing relational work to manage their parent-child relationships. On the topic of economic futures, I find that young adults, even those from middle-class families, are optimistic and draw on notions of meritocracy, perform an agentic self, and discuss job market conditions in their discussions about financial futures. This shows that young adults’ identity work when envisioning their futures involves both asserting their moral worth through narratives centered on meritocracy and agency and acknowledging broader economic conditions. This dissertation, which focuses on the role of social class background in young adults’ acquisition of financial knowledge, financial relationships with parents, and vision for and narratives about economic futures, advances sociological understandings of social reproduction and inequality among U.S. young adults.
