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Notes -
Thoughts on Consumption, Ethical and Otherwise
TLDR: As costs have changed with automation/globalization/etc the status implications attached to items or forms of consumption have changed, despite the costs reflecting less or even opposite directions of status. Why have the implications persisted beyond the mechanical reasons for it?
A discussion elsewhere since lost, and that acid-trip TEMU ad at the Super Bowl, had me thinking about a statistic I saw in a WSJ article that has really stuck with me.
American’s average spending on apparel has declined from 14% of expenditures in 1901 to 10% in 1960 to 4% in 2002. For the most part, we can see that as early industrialization in 1901, when many things were still tailored, to full factory industrialization in 1960, to early globalization in 2002. In 2023, with full globalization, expenditure on clothing declined all the way to 2%.*
My wife and I are probably a little fancier and more enthusiastic about clothing than the average on the Motte, if asked I would say that I spend more on clothing than I need to and own too much and too expensive of clothing, but we were absolutely blown away by the idea of spending 10% of our annual income on clothing. We agreed that we could probably do it, and have fun doing so!, for one or maybe two years, but after that the budget that would create would just be insane. The idea, as an upper-middle class professional couple, of spending something like $30k-$40k on clothing per year every year is insanity! Buying the best and starting with nothing, I don’t really see how a man in my position could spend more than $10k on clothing, once, with less than $1k/yr spending after that to maintain/freshen, unless one gets deep into really truly strange and expensive frivolities. Yet we still talk about clothing items as status symbols in the same way, despite clothing making up a decreasing percentage of spending, despite the obvious fact that if a lower income American spent like a 1960 American they could easily afford to look like a modern upper class American. Clothing just isn’t actually expensive anymore.
And this got me thinking of how many status symbols have changed so thoroughly in their cost, while remaining essentially the same in their perception. I own a 25 year old BMW 3 Series, which had a $27,000 msrp when new, which I like driving around casually; I also have a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche which I drive for work, which had an MSRP of $48,000 new. ((For those of you following along at home, I never got around to actually buying a new-er manual car to replace it)) Persistently, people will give me “rich kid” jokes about the BMW, while the Chevy is treated as working class. Not only that, guys driving new pickups that retail north of $60k will give me the same guff about the BMW! The branding still gives credibility or prestige, even long after the relationship of cost has evaporated or reversed. Small “sporty” BMW = rich, pickup truck = blue collar.
I’m utterly confused as to how people around me spend their money, and I’m fairly certain they are equally confused by how I spend mine. I have friends with similar incomes to mine, who are in credit card debt, but also don’t have the things I would expect a person with my income who is also in credit card debt to have. The money seems to evaporate into nights out, travel, concerts, and house renovations. They look at things I “waste" money on, and I can’t say they don’t have a point: I could probably reduce my clothing budget significantly, I own too much expensive assorted strength training and fitness crap, I could reduce my grocery/food budget considerably if I cooked more from scratch. But then I equally look at their spending, and they invite me to go on a trip, or out to a bar, and I look at the price and say I’m not spending $2k on travel, or $100 on a night out. Though I’ll equally admit that my own travel habits are extremely cheap, and my own tastes in food and especially alcohol relatively light and plebeian.
We’re factually in the same social class, we make similar money in similar positions, but our consumption patterns are different. And what fascinates me is that one set of consumption patterns is judged as normal, even blue collar, while another is judged as fancy, bougie, aristocratic. And the meanings of these symbols of upper-class taste have endured beyond and transcended the actual cost-balance of the activities. The expensive microbrewery play-acts as industrial space. Expensive travel is normal, even treated as normative. Housing, education, healthcare are ruinously expensive but treated as normal, invisible even. I’m not sure I know who is right and who is wrong, or even if someone is right or wrong, in terms of what form of spending will lead to The Good Life. But I’m sure we’re both going wrong in reading into status symbols in the way people once did, when the meanings are so twisted and confused.
Did they?
I don't know what clothing you and your wife wear, but in general is seems like clothing primarily signals things about youth/age/region/tastes/subculture, and signals about wealth very little unless your wife is buying those bespoke ballgowns from the Oscars or something. Plumber is by far the most enthusiastic describer of clothing in the SSC-sphere, and is credibly an actual plumber.
There's a certain class of mostly older women who wear large pieces of turquoise jewelry. It's especially common among realtors in their professional photography. As far as I can tell, it signals "fussy and hard to work with," but I assume they're going for something else. Regionally sensitive PMC? I'm not exactly sure, but it's consistent enough to be meaningful and intentional. Turquoise jewelry is not so cheap that people don't think about buying it, but not so expensive that even a burger flipper working their first job couldn't save up and buy an elaborate piece if they really wanted to. Or couldn't get it at a second hand shop at a steep discount. But they generally don't, because it's a signal from a previous generation, from a time when a person could spend 10% of their income on clothing, and actually project a meaningful image. From a time when people inherited things for reasons other than nostalgia, and there weren't a bunch of china tea sets in the second hand stores for $10.
Keeping slim and in shape later in life signals status, and it does seem like there's a trend of people over 30 who want to show how young they still are training for and running marathons and climbing mountains. Especially the training part. our user name seems to fit into that pattern?
I looked this up. It just looks like a sedan? A nice-ish sedan. I'm surprised you're getting comments on that car, were they joking? Is it because you have to find a special mechanic or something? I'm trying to recall people around me talking about cars, and other than comments about "compensating" or "mid life crisis," it's mostly been for hobby cars that they clearly put some personal attention into, like turquoise muscle cars that people decorate for car parades. I have heard some shade thrown at the big trucks that look like they haven't ever been used to haul anything, and likely never will, but I do also see a lot of expensive trucks genuinely hauling things (RV looking trailers if they're well off, but still), so it can be hard to guess.
My workplace tends lower middle class, with less money than yours, very far from the coasts, and I have been surprised by how many people talk about taking their kids to Disney World, especially, and also parties with a lot of other kids at trampoline sorts of places. It's not that we don't go on trips ourselves, or wouldn't go to Disney World on principle, but these are the same people talking about how they hope they can make it to their next paycheck, as though credit is not a thing. Are they not using credit because they're worried they'll go too far if they start, or just exaggerating about needing to wait until actual payday?
Sure. Construction contractors sometimes make a decent amount of money, but they will buy pickup trucks and take their kids to Disney World with it. They will not buy nice suites, because where would they wear them? Going to the opera costs the same as going to three regular movies, but then you have to sit through an opera. Visibly training for running events is extremely bougie.
They don't think about using credit, on principle.
I'm from a very similar background to your co-workers -- lower-middle class, not coastal -- and it was drilled into my head from a young age that debt meant slavery and you use credit cards only and exclusively to build credit for mortgages or cars (if you have to), and you must pay it off each month, and preferrably keep your credit utilization low. My parents have a solid nest-egg and little debt, but if you talked to them about money you'd think they were constantly in danger of bankruptcy. In their household, paying interest on a credit card even one month is something close to a mortal sin -- it's just unthinkable.
While I think this is probably an overreaction to the problems of debt, I suspect it's the same sort of cultural overreaction that made Baptists go hard against liquor. The American frontier was full of drunks -- literally, there were stories of preachers having their church ransacked by drunk mobs on Sunday morning. So the clergy who ministered to them (mostly congregationalists, Methodists, and Baptists) ended up taking the nuclear option: "You people obviously can't handle your booze, so we're going full abstentionist, no liquor at all, you show up drunk and we're disfellowshipping you. Shape up, you sinners."
And that view became crystalized and theologized from a discipline based on prudence to a definitive theological approach of Methodists and Baptists, the same way that clerical celibacy in the Latin Church went from a discipline based on preventing the direct inheritance of parishes to (in the trad days) a definitive theological approach where clergy are seen as marrying the Church.
Nowadays, the American interior (where evangelicals are the primary ministers, interestingly enough) is now full of people trapped in debt. So, the approach of normie American interior culture is shaped by this problem in a similar way alcohol to how alcohol shaped the frontier, eschewing it totally because of the potential for abuse (and perhaps because it signals separation from less conscientous people for whom debt is less controlled). I think in religious terms, so what strikes me is how this gets tangled up in the prosperity gospel, producing "supernatural debt cancellation", the favorite of slimy televangelists the world over. Call it evangelicals finally figuring out usury is supposed to be a sin.
Your parents are right about credit card interest.
That improperly risk-averse position is not having/using one for regular spending instead of a debit card.
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