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Notes -
Last week's discussion of a $100k salary in 1959 versus 2025 got me thinking about an age-old question: Of the money we earn and purchases we make, how much is devoted to improving the way we relate to other people (e.g. to enhance our social status, to buy exclusive experiences, etc.)? Or to put the question another way, how much money do I spend on things which, if they were affordable to everyone, would be kinda pointless?
So for example, as a fairly wealthy person, I paid a lot for a house in a "nice neighborhood," which in practice means a neighborhood that is sufficiently expensive so as to exclude poor people.
I think that the prospect of an AI revolution makes this issue especially salient. If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?
I see this as a culture war issue because my sense is that people on the Left tend to be dismissive of this problem. For example, they seem to think it would be a great idea if public policy opened the doors of "good schools" to the "disadvantaged." Or if everyone went to college.
Perhaps a better example is the numerous YouTube videos I have seen of the "urbanist" genre. Which basically slam car-oriented suburbs and push for policies promoting walkable neighborhoods. They seem to ignore the point that the inconvenience of suburban living is not a bug but rather a feature. That kinda the point is to keep out, well, riff-raff for lack of a better word.
In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?
I think there's two separate questions here. There's things rich people do because they're genuinely pleasant, but which overcrowding would ruin; and there's things rich people do purely as a status symbol because few people can afford them. I think the world genuinely gets better if no one is buying gratuitously expensive brands anymore, and people instead focus on buying clothes, accessories, etc. that they actually like for their own sake. Whereas it would genuinely be a shame if vacation spots became so popular that there was no way to enjoy mostly-empty nature anymore.
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