The Velvet Rope Economy Quotes

“It sounds like an innovative answer to the problem that everybody faces at an amusement park, and one perfectly in keeping with the approaches currently in place at airports and even on some crowded American highways—perfectly in keeping with the two-tiering of America. You can pay for one level of access, or you can pay for another. If you have the means, you can even pay for freedom. There’s only one problem: Cutting the line is cheating, and everyone knows it. Children know it most acutely, know it in their bones, and so when they’ve been waiting on a line for a half-hour and a family sporting yellow plastic Flash Passes on their wrists walks up and steps in front of them, they can’t help asking why that family has been permitted the privilege of perpetrating what looks like an obvious injustice. And then you have to explain not just that they paid for it but that you haven’t paid enough—that the $100 or so that you’ve ponied up was just enough to teach your children that they are second- or third-class citizens.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“you've got to create that aspiration at the upper end so people will want to participate at the lower end”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“the richest one percent of Americans live nearly fifteen years longer on average than the poorest one percent, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“The pattern for patients in the East Bay is echoed more broadly across the country, according to Dr. Renee Hsia, an emergency room physician at UCSF who also researches health care policy. It took 4.4 minutes longer for victims of cardiac arrest in poorer areas to reach the hospital than in high-income areas, her research found. “Four minutes may not sound like much but it represents a significant increase in mortality,” Dr. Hsia said.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“Ranked by their ability to lift students from the bottom quintile of income to the highest quintile, eleven of the top fifteen colleges in the United States were part of the CUNY system.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“A national poll by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital found that 61 percent of young people in middle or high school sports were charged a pay-to-play fee.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“Rising S, a Texas-based company, does build bare-bones underground shelters for that crowd. But since 2012, Lynch has been catering to a different group—wealthy citizens who want all the comforts and amenities of home if and when catastrophe strikes. “We’ve revolutionized the bomb shelter,” he told me. “Everybody was building cold and clammy structures, with no color, no nothing, just a storm shelter with some shelves. You could drive to work in a Kia but what if you want a Mercedes and can afford it? Our clients are like that.” Lynch’s upscale clients share the view that society is splintering and fear the consequences for the privileged in a world where the collective trust in public institutions has weakened. It’s a dark take on American society, but one that keeps Rising S’s nearly 100,000-square-foot factory humming with new orders. “We are one unjustified police shooting away from having riots across the United States,” Lynch said. “A lot of people are worried about war, social and civil unrest.” So far, that’s meant building an underground swimming pool for one client, while another ordered a hidden stable to keep his valuable stud horses safe.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“About half of the Private Suite’s members are based in L.A., but de Becker is seeing more travelers from the Middle East, Russia, and Europe sign up. In many cases, Hollywood stars expect studios to cover the cost of the Private Suite in their movie deals. “It’s becoming a standard contract term, like first class travel or luxury hotels,” de Becker said. For paying customers, the price might seem ridiculously high, but it’s a bargain compared with the cost of a charter, de Becker pointed out. Instead of spending $200,000 to charter a flight to London, a studio can use the Private Suite and spend a fraction of that getting stars and their assistants to London on a commercial flight. Members of the Private Suite pay $4,500 to join—service for each flight costs $2,700. It’s possible to use the service à la carte if you’re not a member for $4,000 per trip.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“At Yale, a top choice of IvyWise students, the median household income of parents was nearly $193,000 with 69 percent of the student body hailing from the country’s richest 20 percent of households. Students in the least affluent 20 percent of households account for just 2.1 percent of Yale’s class. To put it another way, a child born into the one percent is 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than a child born into the bottom fifth of American households.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“At what they call the “Ivy Plus” universities (the eight Ivy League colleges plus Stanford, the University of Chicago, Duke, and MIT), more students came from the top one percent of American households than from the entire bottom 50 percent of households in terms of income.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“All these factors have made the ability to influence the deliberations within the admissions office infinitely more valuable. An annual donation to the college fund or attendance at cocktails with alumni and prominent professors is not enough. For the very, very rich, a pledge big enough to put their name on a building will do the trick, as will a seven- or eight-figure gift. Jared Kushner’s father famously donated $2.5 million to Harvard in the 1990s, and lo and behold, his son was admitted, despite middling grades in high school.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“In some ways, the Velvet Rope Economy is self-reinforcing: as more resources are earmarked for elite fliers on separate security lines at the airport or shifted to patients who can pay more at the hospital or make a sizable donation, the need for special access only becomes more pressing.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“John Battelle, a healthy San Francisco media entrepreneur with a wife and two teenagers, initially had his doubts about whether it made sense to pay thousands of dollars per month to Dr. Shlain to treat his generally healthy family. But then Battelle’s teenage son broke his leg during a suburban soccer game after school. Naturally the first call his parents made was to 911. The second was to Dr. Shlain. “They’re taking him to a local hospital,” Battelle’s wife, Michelle, told Dr. Shlain as the boy rode in an ambulance to a nearby emergency room in Marin County. “No, they’re not,” Dr. Shlain instructed them. “You don’t want that leg fracture set by an ER doc at a local medical center. You want it set by the head of orthopedics at a hospital in the city.” Within minutes, the ambulance was on the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for California Pacific Medical Center, one of San Francisco’s top hospitals. Dr. Shlain was there to meet the Battelles when they arrived, and their son was seen almost immediately by an orthopedist with decades of experience.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“It’s tempting to think that when you call the bank or another financial service provider and you are put on hold for twenty-five minutes, it’s simply because it’s a peak time of day and many other account holders are calling at the same moment. Tempting, but wrong. In reality, the wait time likely has nothing to do with timing and everything to do with your CLV, or customer lifetime value. This is a calculation of how much your business is worth to whoever you are calling, and the higher the number, the better the service. At a bank or credit card company, it might be determined by your balance. Frequency of travel and spending levels help set your CLV at airlines and hotels. More and more, as soon as you call any consumer-facing company, according to Palmatier, the company’s first step is to identify your phone number and then determine your CLV. “If it’s high,” he explained, “they might take your call more quickly, or direct it to one of their best-performing or most highly trained representatives. We call this heterogeneity in customer service, and it’s driven by the profit motive.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“Lynch’s upscale clients share the view that society is splintering and fear the consequences for the privileged in a world where the collective trust in public institutions has weakened. It’s a dark take on American society, but one that keeps Rising S’s nearly 100,000-square-foot factory humming with new orders.”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“demographics is destiny”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“build it and the affluent will come”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“the most expensive positional goods may actually be inferior in some ways to lower priced versions of the same product, but the status they confer on the owner more than makes up for it”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business

“when these two factors - product differentiation and capacity constraints - are combined, the sky becomes the limit”
― Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business