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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 mean, you don’t have to delve into the tribes being dismissive of the problem to understand the differences- measured by consumption, Mississippi is far richer than NYC. Measured any other way, lol no it isn’t.
This shapes a lot of attitudes on the question- from teacher pay to the rise of ‘socialism’(these people aren’t Marxists, they just want free shit- because they insist on lifestyles that are unaffordable if it isn’t free. Literally, NYC/San Fran apartments have a high percentage that are subsidized, but if it isn’t subsidized it’s a huge stretch even for the high incomes in these places) to ongoing tribal divergence(I wonder how much of the blue tribe hatred of red is just that we don’t care about how much their trendy apartments cost to rent- they should accept less desirable neighborhoods/avocado toast/international travel).
Suburbs are sometimes exclusivist, but theres also plenty of suburbs that are affordable to the lower working class- I live in one. They’re simply a practical solution to ‘everyone gets a single family home with a yard’ in a rich country where you have to be quite poor not to have a car. Most of my neighbors, if offered the choice, would not move to a walkable safe neighborhood, because they want a single family home with a yard.
In blue states, though, you can't build new suburbs of single-family homes, because the anti-growth mindset has won. For instance, there's lots of space in Western Maryland to build such things, but the Maryland Master Plan says no, that's gotta be preserved. This has been a sore point for people living in those counties who DO want the growth for well over a decade. Blue Tribe has been causing the housing price increases itself.
You can't build new urban places either - the City that Builds in 2025 is Austin, TX. The dynamic isn't urbanists vs suburbanites, it's builders vs blockers. And it is, unusually, Red State (builder) vs Blue State (blocker) political culture, not Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. Republicans in Blue States are some of the worst blockers. As far as I can see, Blue Tribers in Austin are making sure the new building happens in a Blue way, not trying to block it.
This is because in Blue States, the choices are between pods and nothing. In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.
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