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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?
The nice neighborhood isn’t just pleasant because the people there are rich, it’s pleasant because pleasant, low time preference, civilized people who have something to lose and adhere to social decorum are more likely to be rich. This is the “bail reform” debate, it turns out that no matter how unfair cash bail seems, people who can afford to raise $10,000 overnight are, broadly speaking, more likely not to commit crimes on bail than those who can’t.
Whenever I go to a restaurant where (rich, high earning, often at least moderately intelligent) clientele are dressed like disgusting slobs, which is almost all of them, the reason for their slovenliness is because of a decline in standards. It’s the same reason Elon Musk wore a t shirt to the Oval Office. These standards don’t depend on a high trust society, they depend on strict enforcement. The permissive society began before mass immigration. In America, 120 years ago, the predominantly white and black population dressed consistently in formal clothes when they went outside (outside of work hours, when they wore workwear, if blue collar) , they dressed up for church etc. You can see this in mundane street photography from the era.
You can actually enforce this stuff, too. You can make people dress well or have them harassed by the police. You can ruin people’s lives for leaving trash outside. You can have people whipped for chewing gum. You can take people’s children away from them if they’re bad at raising them (including bad at disciplining them). This is all possible and people have done it before.
You ought to look up "countersignaling", which is what they are doing.
No, that’s a bien-pensant take, but there are plenty of ways to countersignal the middle classes (who dress just as badly today) without doing that. Sweatpants are just more comfortable, and a more broadly permissive society standards just declined, that’s why it just so happened to happen at the same time as more permissive divorce, the sexual revolution, declining religiosity etc.
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