We know how financial bubbles work, and I've been thinking... can there be such a thing as a prestige bubble? Here is the scenario: some group of people gains status beyond what they are actually worth, expectations grow unrealistic, more and more social and political capital is invested in these status-boosting games, and then the whole thing collapses as everyone laughs at the naked emperors. It's basically a bubble in investments denominated in the fuzzy currency of social status. I could argue that investment bankers have gone through such a bubble in recent years.

I know some people have suggested that there is a financial bubble growing right now in the field of education. Even the Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article which pretty much says that the educational sector with the most influence on social policy - graduate school in the humanities - is not just a bubble but an outright pyramid scheme. I suspect that there might be an even more important prestige bubble happening to the prestige of an Ivy League degree. Here are a few quotes from posts Arnold Kling has made this week:

I think that people can legitimately complain that the educated class that dominated Wall Street and Washington first made the mortgage mess and then railroaded through a bailout in which a transfer of wealth from main street to Wall Street was marketed as a benefit to main street. The educated class is losing the respect of the rest of America for reasons that are well deserved.

Harvard types believe that they are smarter than markets. And, at this moment in history, the Harvard narrative is that the financial crisis was caused because of blind faith in markets regulating themselves. According to this narrative, the election was a mandate to Harvard to deal with huge market failures in finance, health care, aggregate demand (hence the stimulus), and climate/energy. Based on this narrative, Harvard is absolutely committed to expert control over the economy

That certainly sounds like the status of "Harvard types" - people educated at the best American universities - is inflated, and being furiously inflated further. These are the people who, in practice, rule the world. What if the bubble pops and their status quickly sinks to the level of, say, computer programmers before bottoming out? I'd say "sinks to the level of fry cooks", but that would just be wishful thinking on my part...

If you thought I hate smart people (which isn't really true; I just don't want to be ruled by smart, educated people who have class), read this post by Sonic Charmer. He (?) does a good job of defining who these Smart People are, and why being ruled by them sucks.

I don't have much to add, though another of the posts about Smart People reminded me of an old saying: "A gentleman never talks about money - a gentleman simply has it". I'm not a gentleman and don't ever plan to be, but I think the world would be a hell of a lot better if polite society applied that rule not to money but to brains.

HT: Ilkka Kokkarinen

I hope celebrating the birth of Christ, or the secular holiday where "Santa Clausewitz brought them toy machine guns, tanks, and remote-controlled fighter planes", or just the few days off from work has helped all of you become wiser, better people in some way. Myself, I have learned two things on Christmas Eve. One, that John Derbyshire's dog poop test of class really works, and two, that my family is definitely not middle class.

Giles Coren humorously comments on the classless class-war rhetoric of local moron Polly Toynbee:

The next day, in my favourite paper's always-gripping education section (“Down wiv' Eton!”), there was another extract from the book, in which Dave and Polly had joined some state school kids from Brent on a trip to Oxford (I bet the kids were delighted).

The clichés here were more delicious still. Not only did the word “spires” appear twice in the same short extract, but the lawns, bless them, were “manicured”. Except they're not, Polly. They're just mown. Same as everywhere else. You don't have to be rich, or posh, or evil to mow the bloody lawn. They mow the lawn on council estates too. It's you, Polly, and you, Dave, who are trying to present Britain as a cartoonish, divided society to suit your own arrogant, dim-witted, outdated Weltanschauung.

For as long as I can remember, I have always viewed privilege and excellence not with disdain, but with reverence, delighting in its potential opportunity. The fact that some of us have already managed to escape the dirt gives us something manifest to aim for, and perhaps to surpass. This is a viewpoint I hope readers of Corrupt also share.

I hadn't posted in about a week because I was away on a small tour of Eastern Europe with one of my bands. Such trips are always an opportunity to learn something new, and on one of the stops I saw an Ed Hardy store across the street from the venue. I had never seen this clothing in person - it isn't popular in my part of the world - but I had read much hatred directed at it. After seeing this stuff up close, I finally understood where that hate comes from.

These clothes function in a very similar way to the mansions of wealthy Gypsy families with their imposing size, large balconies, bright paint, colorful metal roofs, turrets etc. They say two things about the owner. One is "I have enough money for this" and the other says "I care a lot about how people perceive me, but not at all about how middle-class people perceive me". That signal irritates your social betters immensely because it tells them that you enjoy freedom from their status games. We have our own status games with their own rules, of course, though we might be a little more free because our games have much simpler rules. What matters, though, is that your betters see immediately that all the subtle little ways in which they keep each other in line do not work on you. Unsubtle hatred is the only option they have left, and unlike brands such as Coogi or Crown Holder, Ed Hardy clothes are worn mostly by white guys so it's not "racist" to unleash that hatred.

I find that unsubtle hatred very appealing. I'm no good at subtlety anyway. Middle-class people don't like us, we don't like them, and it's good to get that out in the open sometimes. (Now, I play in one band with some middle-class people. They're not really bad people, just kinda weird. They know I'm not like them and we're all OK with that.) I didn't buy anything at that store, though. All the designs are tattoo-based and I don't like tattoos. Hey, I'm old...

Robert Wilbin writes an interesting post about how some ways of chasing status are more beneficial for the rest of society than others; that's the kind of thing we often think about when we make fun of other peoples' status games for being worthless or condemn them as harmful, but we almost never put in Wilbin's clear and direct terms. Is a particular status competition positive-sum, zero-sum or negative-sum? That's an excellent question.

He's dead wrong about one thing, though: that competitions in which a few people gain extremely high amount of status are less desirable. If plenty of people make small-to-medium gains from something, I don't see the problem wtih a few at the very top making huge gains. The examples he brings up are popular music and sports, and I know for a fact that not being an international star still brings me plenty of status instead of creating unhappiness for me, as Wilbin seems to think it would.

The same thing with sports; I don't even compete anywhere but lifting weights makes me look better and more intimidating (both major status boosts), it also gives me the status of "strong dude you should ask for help when you need heavy shit moved". I come out well ahead in this status game even though I'm no Gennaro Gattuso or even Hossein Rezazadeh. Their far greater status doesn't make me sad in the slightest.

I don't think I'll ever understand egalitarians...

HT: Ilkka

Ilkka Kokkarinen writes about the excellent Hall of Douchebags:

"badass musician" is an oxymoron, and I'd say that is the best and most succinct way to put it. A successful career in music requires tons of discipline and practice and thus a middle class value system, to say nothing of having the financial means and a place to practice, which is why these days bands tend to come from suburbs.

Well... he's right and he's wrong. Successful musicians are definitely more reliable and organized than badass, but they're not really all middle class. At least where I live most cover bands, especially the ones which play weddings, are made up of working class dudes, while most bands that write their own songs and lose money are middle-class. Pointing out one more example of how the working class tends to be more interested in chasing material well-being while the middle-class is more interested in seeking status isn't interesting, but the bit about a place to practice got me thinking about a tangent.

Having somewhere to practice is especially important for drummers. In a densely populated city where real estate is expensive and scarce it can be very difficult, which is why drummers are easier to find in small towns or out in the country (or, I suspect, in sprawling American cities such as Houston). That doesn't mean that big city music tends to have worse drumming than small-town music - successful bands end up with a good drummer one way or another - but it does make a real difference in another way. Big city drummers are usually forced at some point to learn to control their volume, not only so the neighbors don't call the cops when they practice but also so that they can play in tiny big-city pubs without being so damn loud that the band will never be hired to play there again. I think that's why city bands are more likely to rely on variations in tone color - think of all those post-rock bands with guitarists with a dozen effects pedals which are very much a city phenomenon. If you've got a loud-as-fuck drummer and need to crank your amp all the way, it will make no difference whether you've got some knob on some effects pedal set to 4 o'clock or 3 o'clock. With a more restrained drummer, small differences like that can be perceptible. Hell, maybe you can even use a dulcimer in a few songs without the idea getting murdered by feedback problems. You rarely see that kind of thing in small-town rock bands.

Also notice that the most urban of genres - hip-hop and R&B - often use sampled or programmed drums, meaning it's possible to work on it even if you live in the middle of a city and don't know anyone with a drum kit. I don't think that's just a randomly cultural development, I think it's caused in part by the economics of urban real estate which affects the economics of music and therefore the sound of city music.

Middle-class people are a lot weirder than you probably realize. For example, all my neighbors are middle-class and all have a really freakish attitute towards fruit trees. They treat them as decorative shade trees which just happen to have colorful things growing on them. They don't even pick the low-hanging fruit as there is no low-hanging fruit anymore - the trees, not having been trimmed in decades, grew tall and don't have any low branches anymore. The inhabitants of one house doesn't even bother picking the grapes growing right on the balcony - I guess they must really hate grapes.

I guess they prefer to spend their time doing things other than trimming trees and picking fruit, then just go buy some fruit at the store. That even includes the people who spend a lot of time working on their flower beds and lawns. They just like their trees as trees, I guess, whereas I like trees as a source of food and will cut down any tree which is not productive enough. I know that eating store-bought fruit is healthier, and I'm sure some of them laugh at me for basically acting like we're still living in a socialist country complete with food shortages, but to me they're just a bunch of weirdos who have food growing right outside their windows and don't eat it.

This GNPX post mentioning the different attitudes of various social classes regarding the importance of genetics in athletic success reminded me of a Dusk In Autumn post from last year about what hip-hop lyrics have to say about the heritability of personality traits. That got me thinking about all those country songs about being an alcoholic, criminal etc. Do they blame these "poor life outcomes" on environmental variables or genetics?

Of course the first song to come to mind was Kevin Fowler's "Long Line Of Losers".

The lyrics are full of indications that Fowler believes genetics are very important, and no blame directly placed on environmental variables. The meaning of lines such as "my bloodline made me who I am" is obvious enough, but there are more subtle clues as well. Note that his grandmother was never around during his life, his grandfather wasn't around much as he was in jail half the time and working on the road a lot (running moonshine), but he considers them important enough to how he turned out to start the song with them.

Even the "good" environment of having a mother who always went to church is not shown as helping Fowler grow up to be an outstanding citizen. The most telling line, though, is "I was born with a shotglass in my hand" - that is to say, inclined towards alcohol from birth, before any environmental variables had much of a chance to influence anything. So, there you have it - just like underclass blacks, rednecks generally believe that personality traits are strongly heritable. In this they are also joined by urban underclass whites, as evidenced by these Euro-wiggers who recorded a hip-hop cover of "Long Line Of Losers".

If you want this post to have a serious point, it might be that scientific research and the common beliefs of the stupidest and least educated members of society are pretty well aligned in this case, and the nurturist beliefs so popular among the middle and upper classes are wrong.

Middle-class people are weird and funny, but quite often they don't know it. Observed from the outside, though, they're really freaky. For example, middle-class people always talk with the same accent and grammar no matter what. Take a look at someone who has to deal with a wide array of customers sometime - a butcher, mechanic or shopkeeper. Regular folk will use a different accent when talking to their coworkers from the same part of the country, a different one with coworkers from other regions, another one for customers they know well, a more formal one for most customers, and a different one when dealing with foreigners. A middle-class person would only adjust their word choice slightly, but use the same damn accent and grammar structures with all these groups. That's weird!

What if instead of waging campaigs against smoking, governments instead focused on getting the right people to smoke?

Nicotine, like caffeine, is an awesome little drug with only minor negative side-effects (in and of itself). It increase mental performance (i.e., productivity). It stands to reason that a society that has substantially cut down on a drug that increases alertness and memory will lose some productive capacity. . . Plus, nicotine's ideal delivery system, smoking, has severe negative effects that typically don't manifest themselves until its purveyors have reached the twilight of their careers. A mad scientist could hardly have done better than to have designed a drug that is addictive, makes people more productive, then cuts them down just as their wealth creation capacity has waned and their pure consumption life stage has begun.

Mental performance is important for all kinds of jobs, from digging ditches to investment banking, but clearly it's much more important in desk jobs. With that in mind, governments should invest some resources into encouraging the middle and upper classes to smoke tobacco. I wouldn't suggest actually making it a crime for those with desk jobs to not smoke, as I think people should have the freedom to be less productive if they so choose.

The real upper classes are probably doing OK by substituting more modern prescription medicines, at least in the US, so they might not need cigarettes anymore.

I don't have much acquaintance with seriously rich people (though I'm always up for more) but I know this much about them: they have easy access to a whole range of pharmaceuticals that are unavailable to us proles. This is in fact one of the big class markers in the U.S.A. today. If you are rich, you are probably a regular user of Adderall or Ritalin, or both. If of a certain age, you also self-inject Human Growth Hormone; and if male, you have that rub-on Testim cream. You probably have a lot of other stuff I don't know about — as I said, I'm not that well acquainted with the upper strata.

If you dwell down at the very bottom of society you likewise have access to a good range of drugs, though mostly different ones. Us poor middle-class drones are perforce drug-free: too law-abiding for crack, too poor to afford HGH. It's a rotten deal.

Instead of trying to discourage tobacco use across society, governments should create targeted campaigns which focus on the middle classes and get them to increase their smoking. Maybe that's something government can do without screwing up?

Naaaaah. I can't bring myself seriously propose any policy aimed at getting people to die younger, not even if they're middle-class people. Guess I just like life too much.

Commenting on one of Alfred's posts, Bhetti writes:

Oh, Al, you give such good advice! I would literally stick my hand in a pool of acid just to read you.

Hold on a sec! Before you go sticking your hand in a pool of acid, you might want to familiarize yourself with the latest relevant scientific research so you will know to go about this. Although the liquid is a different one, this study happens to be very directly applicable to Bhetti's situation:

They recruited 67 undergraduates, and asked to make two short lists of words - one containing five words they might use after hitting themselves on the thumb with a hammer, the other containing five words they might use to describe a table. The participants submerged one of their hands into room temperature water for three minutes, to provide a standardized starting point, then transferred it to a container of cold water and instructed to keep it submerged for as long as they could. In one condition, they were told to repeat the first swear word they had included in their list; in another, they repeated one of the words describing a table.

The researchers measured how long the participants kept their hands submerged in cold water, and asked them to rate the amount of pain they felt. Their heart rates were also recorded after they had submerged their hands in room temperature water as well as after the submersion in cold water. Contrary to their hypothesis, they found that swearing actually reduced the amount of pain felt. The participants kept their hands submerged in the cold water longer for longer, and also reported experiencing less pain, when they repeated a swear word than when they repeated a word describing a table.

So, when you do this please remember to curse like a sailor! Sure it won't reduce the damage or help your skin heal, but it actually works as a painkiller. And in case you think this isn't a very ladylike thing to do, according to the results it is very much becoming of a lady:

A difference between males and females was observed. Swearing led to a greater reduction in pain perception and a bigger increase in heart rate in females.

It's great to know that science sometimes studies things which are actually useful and relevant to our lives!

HT: Razib

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen

It’s like a silly fairy-tale, unreal, and containing characters without natural emotions. At least that seems to be how most people who are not Jane Austen geeks usually describe "Pride and Prejudice". Fair enough; we’re surrounded by the English countryside by the turn of the 18th century, soaked in polite conversations and tea-drinking. And at a distance, the plot is not all that exciting: A Mrs. Bennet wants all of her five daughters married to (preferably) wealthy and good-natured men. At a ball the family encounters a few specimens, one of which is Fitzwilliam Darcy, whose pride repels them all despite even his wealth and fine heritage. Darcy, in turn, is disgusted by the low status of the Bennets. They get off on the wrong foot, to say the least – and things get worse. Soon, however, Elizabeth Bennet, the smartest of the daughters, catches glimpses of the true nature of Darcy ...

Well, that sounds predictable enough, as the worn point of this novel – even from its title – is for us too look beyond what we see first-hand. From here Austen’s satire of social classes makes most critics revel in a rather tiresome anti-hierarchical interpretation – and pretty much stop at that. But this story is so much deeper and can easily be seen from a different point of view: It’s not opposing shallow prejudice in the "because-we-are-all-equal-inside" kind of way – Austen is brainier than that. Intelligent people, like Elizabeth and Darcy, may get dismayed by how most people are scheming actors of foul character or simply incompetent rabble, and so they become more suspicious of their fellow men. But Austen declares we shouldn’t give up: we may find the most excellent rare gems underneath that pile of drivel – if you’re brilliant enough yourself, that is.

It’s also very easy for us to hate successful people these days, when all we see is superficial morons on top. This is where Austen gives us some hope to hang on to: In order to overcome the mistake of despising anything that might make us jealous, Austen uses her sly sense of humour, imaginative dialogue and beautiful use of words in a way that makes us love these qualities in any person and shows that while it’s not "OK" to suck, truly great people can be victorious without any hard feelings. All you need is appreciation of beauty – and beautiful is what this love story is, quite contradicting the on-going revenge of the ugly and the dumb of today.

So fairy-tale or not, humanity needs this book. Not only because it’s what I would call first-class sophisticated entertainment. After turning the last page we are left with an immense heart-warming feeling. For once, this is not because the underdogs won. Austen teaches us to have loving hearts yet critical, discriminating eyes. With her help we can – without feeling cruel – easily justify our happiness when the unselfish and strong characters that deserve it the most win each other.

No, I'm not going to complain about how badly they govern or about how they think they're better than us. While we have a decent idea of what they're like because we get to read about them and see them in the media, their ideas about us are often absurdly clueless. It's cute when they try to say something about us they think we will appreciate.

For example, let the Wall Street Journal run something nice about NASCAR. Let them try to make it seem more classy by comparing it to the medieval joust - an upper-class sport if there ever was one. Then let them add a picture.

Using a picture of Dale Earnhardt’s fatal crash at the 2001 Daytona 500 is such an offensive act that there are almost no words to describe it. To be clear, this reporter is so ignorant of the trespass she has just committed that she should not be writing about NASCAR in the first place.

On top of that the picture's caption -- “See some highlights in the history of stock car racing” -- seems to imply that the death of Dale Sr. is a highlight in the history of stock car racing.

I don't know much about NASCAR but that really doesn't sound like much of a highlight to me, either. All this reminds me of something Megan McArdle wrote last year:

People from a handful of schools, most of them hailing from a handful of major metropolitan areas, dominate academia, journalism, and the entertainment industry. Our subtle (or not-so-subtle) distaste for everything from their entertainment to their decorating choices to the vast swathes of the country in which they choose to live permeate almost everything they read, watch, or hear. Of course we don't hear it--to us, that's simply the way the world is.

In the 1980s, I played on possibly the worst girl's basketball team in the state of New York. Every time another Catholic school kicked our asses (I believe one memorable game ended at 48 to 2) we consoled ourselves by making fun of their big, sprayed, permed hair, and the lavish eye makeup that ran down their faces when they sweated. We didn't know that what divided us from those girls was economic class--they were the children of plumbers and bodega owners, while we were the children of bankers and lawyers and lobbyists. We genuinely believed that we had simply been gifted with a better fashion sense.

But I bet those girls knew exactly what we were saying as we got on the bus. And I'm pretty sure they knew what we were really talking about.

Ah, aristocracy and its curious ignorance.