The Sneaker Cult (an economist's view)

Slate.com via National Post ^ | Thursday, January 31, 2008 | Ray Fisman

[ottbmare]

But who doesn't have store bought dishes and flatware? Where else would one get them?

One inherits them. The nouveau riche (who are by historical definition middle class vulgarians) have them commissioned.

[ottbmare]

The point is that being middle class means a frantic effort to improve yourself and your family, or improve the opinions other people have of you. Hence watching PBS (and advertising the fact that you’re a donor by carrying your stuff around in a bag with the PBS logo on it so people will think, “Wow, she’s educated, she watches all that boring stuff.” Or reading the New York Review of books. Or knocking yourself out trying to get your not-unusual kid into an Ivy school because you think he’ll do better financially that way. Or buying ritzy shelter magazines like Architectural Digest, thinking that AD displays “good taste” while it actually displays the houses of really rich middle class people, the kind the typical middle-class American would be if he or she came into money and could hire a decorator.

Lower middle class people have their own set of tastes and interests, and so do upper-middle-class WASPs and all the other social classes. Even though there are easily 30 classes in this country and they vary by region, Fussell does a good job of spelling it out, modulo the passage of 25 years since he wrote it. The same principles apply.

The existence of social classes and barriers in this country is a valid subject for discussion, but it’s been America’s dirty little secret for a long time.

[dan1123]

This economist is missing a basic truth, namely that the reading ability of children is not considered to be a status symbol by many poor blacks(it’s considered to be “acting white”), but it is by many whites across all wealth categories.

Yep, the economist here sounds to me like he is desperately trying to discount Bill Cosby's statement in the face of a study that supports it. One underlying error is equating the local communities and equating his middle class lifestyle against a stock broker lifestyle to a lower-class, crime-ridden lifestyle against a middle class lifestyle. There is much less societal cost of a middle class lifestyle than a lower class lifestyle.

[ottbmare]

That list seriously needs to be updated.

[jokar]

No crap.
Bump

[ottbmare]

Let’s not allow Rubens et al. to mislead us about what constituted beauty in centuries past. If you look at portraits of the mistresses of kings, who could presumably have anybody they wanted, you will see women who are basically well-proportioned and with a soft layer of padding, but not at all Rubenesque. Just healthy girls. Photographs from the 19th century of famous beauties do not show fat girls. Their waists are quite narrow and are kept that way by corsets, so clearly having a narrow waist and a generous embonpoint was the idea, then as now. I don’t think Rubens’s ladies were considered the ideal back then, and I suspect Rubens had Issues, if you know what I mean.