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People don’t go to farmers’ markets for deals—most of the fruit and vegetables are the same price as in upscale grocery stores—nor do they go to get diversity of produce. After all, the farmers only sell what’s in season, rather than the cornucopia of flown-in exotic, out-of-season fruit found at the average supermarket in the dead of winter.
Etsy gets 20 cents for every listing and 3.5% of the sale price (most goods are sold for $15 to $20). The average seller is a college-educated woman in her twenties or thirties.
most of us have a value system that reflects the socioeconomic conditions of our childhood.
presence of formaldehyde in Victoria’s Secret lingerie,
many voluntary simplicity members are able to make this life decision because they can live off of accumulated wealth.
As the archeology professor Elizabeth Wayland Barber put it, “The truth is that almost none of the objects that we think of as handmade truly are. And that has been the case for thousands of years,” referencing a fragment of Egyptian linen from 2500 BC as one such rare, fully handmade item.
Even if the founders are personally less interested in profit than social values, the market, their shareholders, their board, and sheer capitalism may ultimately pull them into the mainstream, globalized economy and all of its mass-produced discontents. As they become indoctrinated into multinational companies, the products become patinas of the conspicuous production process from which they first emerged.
Whatever there is to say about the issues around labor exploitation (and there is plenty to say), there is something important in providing economic resources and possibility to countries that would otherwise not have participated in a capitalist market.
Through their shared values, ideologies, and consumption patterns, twenty-first-century cities connect more with one another than with towns and suburbs that may be more geographically proximate.
The subsequent urban deindustrialization, commencing in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, left cities with no middle class and no jobs.
the very cities that had been impacted by deindustrialization—Boston, New York, Chicago—were experiencing a resurgence due to the location of headquarters, financial services, law firms, and other highly skilled service industries.
The need for proximity to exchange ideas and the desire for instant access to the immaterial resources of density put a premium on the dense urban geography.
The dominant intellectual paradigm in urban economics is what is termed the New Neo-Classical Urban Economics (NNUE), which argues that individual and firm preferences around “amenity value,” or quality of life, explain the location choices of companies and labor market elites.
What determines a city’s success—and delineates the global urban hierarchy—is the extent to which a city offers consumption options to its inhabitants.
People themselves also become local goods that others want to be around,
Smart people want to be around other smart people not just for work, but also for friendships and romantic relationships, and over time that results in highly stratified hyper-educated affluent places
cities as home to the affluent tend to cater to their consumption needs specifically.
Handbury explains that it’s not so much that cities’ basic consumer items are more expensive (according to her, items like milk are less expensive in cities), but rather that people’s tastes become more expensive when they live in a city.
cities offer what she calls “hidden amenities”—access to (other) elites, lovely parks to stroll through, safe streets, diverse options for take-out—all of which improve well-being by 30% more than any standard-of-living index captures.
we are experiencing an “urban revolution” (indeed, 82% of the US population and more than half of the world are urban)
When we look at consumption data, inhabitants of Los Angeles really do appear to have come from a different planet from those in Miami or Dallas.
Yet, interestingly, other than a few cities, urban dwellers are not drinking or spending more on coffee than everyone else in the country. In fact, New York City, home to what we thought was the crazed, coffee-addicted urbanite, actually consumes less than the national average by about 30%.
Only Miami is a teetotaler across the board, spending about 40% less than the rest of the country on alcoholic beverages.
the city was one’s dining room, living room, and extended home—rather
New York City women spend two times more on shoes than everyone else.
We walk more
The only two exceptions to this trend are New York City and Detroit, where inhabitants spend up to 150% above the national average on dating services.
While all cities possess elites, some younger cities don’t have a lineage of old-money high society and are more egalitarian in general—Los Angeles, Miami, and Atlanta,
By way of anecdote, after moving from New York to California, I found that within five or six years I wore less black, ate more vegetables, learned how to cook quinoa (even though I still find its appeal mystifying)—all of which were antithetical to my New York City modus vivendi and identity.
(social psychologists call these WEIRD for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)
From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable
It fails to take into account research that suggests that money can buy happiness up to $75,000 annual income.
This study was disproved and old, so $75,000 is more now.
Today, because consumer items are so cheap (as is credit), material goods tell us very little about the economic success of a household.
Thomas Piketty argues in his runaway 2014 hit Capital in the Twenty-first Century that the period of relative equality between World War I and the early 1970s was an anomalous period of capitalism. Using detailed data from countries around the world across a 200-year period, Piketty makes a compelling case that for the years between 1914 and 1973, a series of government policies and global crises flattened out the gap between rich and poor and prevented the rich from getting greater returns on capital. Piketty believes that the inequality that is so profound in the current day is actually
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The goat
The cultural elites (let alone the economic elite) in this country are so removed from the day-to-day hardships of the middle- and lower-income classes, that they may become unable to even imagine (let alone solve) the pervasive problems of their poorer fellow citizens.
By 2021, the number of Asian middle-class consumers, an estimated 2 billion, will far outpace their Western counterparts.
Kharas and Gertz believe that from 2009 to 2030 there could be a sixfold increase in the Asian middle class,
perhaps the single greatest sign of entering the middle class is buying an automobile.
once the middle class catches on, as this book has shown, the dominant elites find new ways to illustrate their status.
