More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Throughout time, matters of seeming practicality have evolved into symbols of status.
Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to a charwoman because even a janitor can kiss a charwoman—or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better and kisses better?”7
The ability to use time for something with no obvious productive purpose was an option only for the upper classes.
Simultaneously, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, grounded in meritocracy, the acquisition of knowledge and culture, and less clearly defined by their economic position.
In fact, the display of wealth was deemed “passé” to a point that conspicuous consumption was no longer associated with the very wealthy, but rather with everyone else.
Succession
noughties
the upper class now maintains its exclusivity by attaining limited edition versions of goods.
Supreme
Today abundance of leisure no longer indicates higher status.
Others within this group, such as an unemployed screenwriter or Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) trained artist, are barely able to economically participate in this world but use their insubstantial means to signify membership. The screenwriter too reads the New York Times and (perhaps irrationally and to his own economic detriment) also buys his organic strawberries at Whole Foods. He carries a canvas tote that displays a political or literary statement as another signal of his cultural knowledge and engagement with the intellectual current of the moment.
Aspirational class leisure, whether reading the Economist, listening to NPR, or taking a yoga class, is imbued with knowledge and productivity in the same spirit as work.
drink almond milk instead of regular milk, and reuse grocery bags every week are all signifiers of position that are not inherently more expensive than their alternatives but thought to be more informed.
Reuse is more common with poor
In his 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard argued that the rush of consumer goods meant advertisers, marketers, and promoters needed to create consumer desire, perpetuating a cycle of materialism.
spent extravagantly on beach vacations or what the English call “sun holidays”—much to the consternation of the middle class, who believed this behavior was wasteful and useless.
as a share of their expenditures, the middle class is spending more on conspicuous consumption relative to their income while the wealthy (and the very poor) are spending less.
!!
inconspicuous consumption”—spending on nonvisible, highly expensive goods and services that give people more time and, in the long term, shape life chances.
Succession
There are two categories where we spend more: health care (up from 5.1% to 8.1%) and education (up from 1.4% to 2.1%). (See table 2.1.)
Make healthcare free
while education expenditures have increased 60% since 1996, the top 1%, 5%, and 10% income fractiles have increased their share of education expenditures by almost 300% during this same time period.
Finally, the richer one is, the more educated one is, the more likely they are to cremate. Many working class families are more likely to bury, while wealthier families are much more likely to cremate—which isn’t always but should mostly be cheaper.”
I speculate that underpinning these spending patterns is not just social contexts where visible goods matter but also the nature of jobs associated with higher education levels. A medical doctor, lawyer, or consultant (for example) may work longer hours, and thus the investment in a housekeeper, gardener, nanny, or any other good or service makes home life easier.
Those who are devoting more of their money to status goods and less to college fees may not even have the option of the latter. Say, for example, you have an extra $100. You can buy a handbag, a pair of shoes, or some electronic equipment. What that money won’t do is make even a dent in a $50,000 tuition bill or an annual health insurance premium.
Today, according to Euromonitor International, manicures are a $1 billion industry. Over a six-month period, 27 million adults had salon manicures and 32 million had pedicures.
Today, Essie Weingarten’s eponymous nail polish, Essie, is a household name to many an American woman and is sold in pharmacies and nail salons around the world.
TIL
Cultural capital (as opposed to economic capital or money) is the collection of distinctive aesthetics, skills, and knowledge (often attained through education and pedigree).
Language has also always been a means to show social position—like manners, it takes time to acquire and practice particular word choices and turns of phrase.
to comfortably use swear words or the word “death” (rather, it is “passing away” or “taken to Jesus”).
To borrow an example from the sociologist Douglas Holt, the act of attending the opera is not the cultural capital, but rather the combination of the knowledge of when the performances are scheduled and where to buy the tickets, the appreciation of the music, the ability to reference the performance in discussion of other topics, and having people to share the experience with—and finally, the understanding that going to the opera is a valuable use of time.
It me
today’s aspirational class tend to be “cultural omnivores” in their consumption patterns, reflecting their knowledge, worldliness, and open-mindedness as a result of education and immersion into diverse environments
Vance Packard observed this of upper classes more than 50 years ago in his dissection of class behavior: “The average person of the lower group feels anxious in the presence of strange foods, and considers them fraught with danger. A Midwestern society matron reports her astonishment to find that her maid will not touch many of the very costly foods she serves the guests, such as venison, wild duck, pompano, caviar. Even when these are all prepared, steaming and ready to eat, the maid will cook herself some salt pork, turnip greens and potatoes. These are the foods she knows.”
Casualness in all facets of life has become a part of aspirational class habitus.
A household’s rule of taking one’s shoes off
Or cutural
information about what is cool or in the know is all they have and thus they too engage in nonpecuniary means of inconspicuous consumption that allow them to define their social position by reading and referencing obscure blogs and Twitter feeds, carrying NPR canvas bags, and riding fixed-gear bicycles. They drink hemp milk, not dairy; drive old Mercedes revamped to run on veggie oil instead of second-hand Honda Accords; buy fast food at food trucks rather than McDonald’s; even though these goods are more or less comparable in price.
Hipsters may not be labor market elites (although many are), but they draw their elitism through rarified information too. They know who to read, who to follow on Twitter and Instagram, and particular types of insider language and obscure (almost fetishized) objects of consumption, whether almond lattes, green juice, or the $12 Casio calculator watch.
Bianchi also reports that even though women are working more in the twenty-first century, they are actually spending the same amount of time, if not more, with their kids as the stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century.
Experience-driven goods, such as travel, wine, lodging out of town—the fun parts of life—are also a significant area of top income spending.
Traveling like this has the second-order effect of generating cultural capital and symbolic boundaries and numerous non-pecuniary signifiers of being well-rounded, knowledgeable, and probably interesting at dinner parties.
Only if you flex it
Education is perhaps the biggest tangible example of the divide between the haves and have-nots in America.
Breast-feeding is free, it’s better for the baby, and it’s better for the mother, yet it’s practiced mainly by women who could afford the best formula out there and, as college-educated women, many have full-time, high-pressure jobs
Another pediatrician, who worked at a community clinic, explained to me that, in the past, in some populations, the women were given a shot of Depo (a birth control medicine) almost immediately after birth. Depo has the effect of significantly reducing milk supply when given right after birth versus being administered 4–6 weeks later.
day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is ‘free,’ I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.”
the use of wet nurses by mothers, unless they had rare physical limitations,
fashionable women in England and America, infant formula became the more accepted means of feeding one’s baby. Wet nurses (not as popular in these countries as in France) were working-class and rural women
While the national rate of C-sections is more than 30%, non-Hispanic whites and Asians, and particularly educated non-Hispanic whites, are the least likely to have one, leading researchers to conclude that C-sections, outside of emergencies, are most associated with poor-quality medical care.39 Twenty-five years ago, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the exact opposite finding: The majority of C-sections were occurring among wealthy, white women, suggesting that high socioeconomic status rather than medical indication drove this delivery outcome.40
Home birth is indeed a privilege for those who can afford to pay out of pocket (insurance doesn’t cover it).42
South American women pride themselves on C-sections as a way to avoid vaginal stretching, schedule their deliveries, and have control over their lives. Some 80–90% of private hospital deliveries in Brazil are Cesarean, some up to 99%. The World Health Organization believes that a rate exceeding 15% of women having Cesarean deliveries is too high.
As I write about motherhood, I realize I am the very woman I write about.
But truthfully, I do not absorb these practices in such a conscious manner. In my habitus, this is just how we do things; it is in the air. It feels unconscious and intuitive, like one’s personal sense of morality or the desire to eat when hungry. Yet national statistics show me there is nothing unconscious about my decisions. My choices are influenced all the time by where I live, financial means, and the resources offered close by and those mothers also engaging in these practices thus affirming my choices:
the “healthy selfie,” which is a photo taken post-workout that can be instantly posted to Facebook or Instagram, or one’s blog.
triggered
Even watching television—Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, or HBO’s latest epic—is about being a part of the cultural zeitgeist. How else can an individual seem informed (and intellectually productive) at a dinner party if he’s not spending free time doing things that make him seem smart and culturally aware?
Damn
Intelligentsia buyers actually become friends with their coffee farmers and fly them to Los Angeles to meet the rest of the staff (and some of their customers).
Ok cool
Whole Foods is the mainstream, mass-produced leitmotif of the conspicuous production movement.
