20 ms·

Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

• everybodyknows 3y ago
  Needs "2022".
• tech_ken 3y ago
  Is this the new codeword for "champagne socialism"? Interesting how "trickle down economics" isn't provided as an example of a luxury belief, seems like it would fit the provided definition extremely well in the context of US politics.
  • zbyte64 3y ago
    Devil's advocate: maybe because the author perceives "tickle down economics" as a position adopted by many of the working class and may even aide in survival.
    • tech_ken 3y ago
      Sorry I was being oblique to signal some snark. You're sort of hitting my point directly: "luxury beliefs" are just whatever you personally believe to be (a) wrongly held and (b) limited to only the aristocracy (ie. not the opinion of "real Americans"). But concretely demonstrating both is kind of difficult and largely relies on your own subjective experience. It's a political cudgel, not a proper tool of inquiry.
      • hooverd 3y ago
        Wild how the Real America always ends up being exurban jet-ski dealers.
        • tech_ken 3y ago
          A Jeffersonian Democracy of yeoman jet-ski dealers
• SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  “there are no starving people with celiac disease”
  • ekux44 3y ago
    Starvation is how celiac disease was root caused. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-celiac-disease https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-celiac-dise...
• giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Kind of falls apart at the end with the defund the police thing. If you ask poor people "do you want to defund the police" they'll mostly say no. If you ask them "would you rather see fewer police in your neighborhood, and more medical and social response teams instead?" they'll mostly say yes. So in a sense sure "defund the police" is a luxury belief but also... no.
• chancemehmu 3y ago
  Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by Huxley: "If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others"
  • leereeves 3y ago
    It sounds like you're talking about an aristocracy, and the quote even uses that word, so I wonder: do you think the aristocracy is responsible for most of the progress in the world? I'd argue rather that, historically, progress has generally involved removing or disempowering the aristocracy.
    • etrautmann 3y ago
      not the OP but presumably it depends whether you're referring to social progress, art, technology, etc.
    • michaelt 3y ago
      Huxley being a famous author of dystopian and satirical fiction, that might be a quote from a fictional bad guy or idiot written by Huxley.
      • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
        A casual check says the quoted text is from Huxley's Crome Yellow (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1999/1999-h/1999-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1999/1999-h/1999-h.htm) and that the speaker is a character known only as Mr. Scogan, which some suggest is an analogue of Bertrand Russell.
    • 3y ago
• jawns 3y ago
  This piece does not really touch on the many confounding variables that are found when examining the correlation between esoteric beliefs and social status. Level of education, for instance, is a biggie, even when accounting for the perceived prestige of where one goes to school. The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept. But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol. I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.
  • mortify 3y ago
    Did he say that a topic was bunk because it was held by the upper class? I took his point that the prevalence of these luxury beliefs is higher among the upper-class in gross disproportion to the impact those beliefs have on people. E.g. cultural appropriation is sometimes used by people in power to pretend they have a connection to cultures where none really exists. It's a form of manipulation. The impact that has on the average person's life is minuscule. The impact of someone from the middle-class taking cultural clues from other cultures in non-existent, yet it's easy to find discussions about the alleged harm this causes among some social groups. The luxury is in the time spent on relatively unimportant matters, much like spending millions of dollars on a bejeweled egg. That doesn't mean the egg doesn't exist.
• rawgabbit 3y ago
  The author is arguing extreme ideas like defund the police is self serving without anyone’s real interests in mind. Instead of calling it luxury beliefs, this the next phase of identity politics. A new litmus test.
• logseman 3y ago
  Given that working class rubes like myself who finished college in a place my man can't even find in a map are somehow able to know what “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative” mean, and do that by the same means as everyone else (reading about it) I'm going to presume that the good man has a very peculiar understanding of what "elite" means.
  • hooverd 3y ago
    Indeed, I studied in the engineering and not the gender department (we barely had liberal arts IMO), and I too learned how to read. Maybe the cultural elite, like starbucks baristas and people who work in HR.
    • lupire 3y ago
      I think you missed a word or few in there.
      • hooverd 3y ago
        Nah, you see this belief that baristas and grad students are the real elite. It goes back to thinking class is a cultural thing. So your rural landed gentry is working class because they own a truck.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  This guy's Twitter account is full of the worst replicating psychology stuff. He's an outrage merchant surfing the present wave. When I pointed out one such failure to replicate he blocked me.
• alex_young 3y ago
  Seems like the rich are spending lots on fancy cars and big houses. I’m not sure saying you support x or y belief is quite the same signal as a sports car.
  • expertentipp 3y ago
    TBH to me it feels like all the money in this world is spent on fancy cars, houses, and yachts. Anything funded from taxes, insurances, or contributions is basically "the limits are exhausted, the waiting times are in months, your case is not covered". Meantime all the cars and houses I see while driving and walking around? Wow.
• _cenw 3y ago
  The terrible argument, built over several pages, is that "defund the police" as a political conviction is a status symbol, because rich people live in gated communities and don't need police. It ignores the evidence is a 10% increase in a single poll, in which the majority was not of the inverse opinion that police is without fault, they just had a slightly different outlook on necessary police reform being possible in the current structures. It's yet another deliberate misunderstanding of "defund the police" (not a maybe understandable accidental misunderstanding). Would be interesting to have this poll broken down by race, putting those most affected by broken windows policing and police violence first. And also those who coined the term.
  • marknutter 3y ago
    "Among Democrats, Black (38%) and Hispanic (39%) adults are more likely than White adults (32%) to say spending on police in their area should be increased. There is no significant difference across these racial and ethnic groups in the share of adults who say spending should be decreased" (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/26/growing-s...)
• justanother 3y ago
  Starts off with an interesting premise and makes me think, hey, maybe I should re-examine my priors, let's see the evidence. And then the evidence turns out to be something about people who "make more than $100K," and goes on to assert that they "live in gated communities" and "can afford private security." In 2023, "making over 100K" just means that you're usually on-time with your monthly housing payment. Author may indeed be going somewhere with this, but I'd like to see stronger support for the thesis.
  • allemagne 3y ago
    If we're talking a security firm paying minimum wage hired by the HOA to do rounds at a gated townhouse complex, that's not some unattainable luxury for someone making "just" $100K.
    • waveBidder 3y ago
      it's funny contrasting California expectations with the rest of the country.
      • menshiki 3y ago
        It's even more funny seeing it contrast with the rest of the world.
  • shric 3y ago
    > In 2023, "making over 100K" just means that you're usually on-time with your monthly housing payment. This hugely depends on where you live. To 90% (conservatively low) of the world's population making over 100k a year is insane levels of luxury.
    • polski-g 3y ago
      It is a luxury belief to believe that $100k is a pauper's salary.
  • Loughla 3y ago
• satellites 3y ago
  “A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.” “By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here. This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.
  • mc32 3y ago
    If they they have a good confidence, there error could be around 3% up or down. So that's not bad. And, yes, I think Defund the Police was primarily espoused and driven by people who would be little affected by the outcome of such performative stances. The people who live in the places where the police got defunded suffer greater crime rates and disorder --which is why we see people at the grass roots asking for more police. It's known that lawless places will suffer from lawlessness and then engender vigilantism --this is evident is most war-torn places where 'warlords'/gansters control neighborhoods.
    • michaelmrose 3y ago
      Few cities reduced police budgets at all certainly nobody in any meaningful way defunded the police and even cities short of officers have funding for additional officers they lack people far more than money. Also in case you didn't notice police don't do much to protect normal folks from crime. They'll be there 15 minutes after whatever happened happened to file a report if they aren't too busy screwing with law abiding citizens. Personally Ive seen little help when needed and plenty of harassment.
      • hooverd 3y ago
        What are you going to do about a police work stoppage, call the police?
      • 3y ago
• brindlejim 3y ago
  In a feminized society that systematically elevates victims, status seekers must either LARP as victims (Singapore scions doing undergrad at Yale who march as "people of color") or make an ostentatious show of allyship, publicly subordinating their interest to that of the "oppressed".
• Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  That was not convincing. The article only touches two unorthodox beliefs: that we should defund the police (really a preference, not a belief) and that success is largely attributable to luck. But the elites are more likely to believe conventional wisdom on climate change, on whether vaccines work, on whether the Holocaust happened, on whether digesting genetically modified organisms changes the consumer's DNA, any number of things. Heterodox beliefs in these areas do seem consistent with the hypothesis of in-group signaling, but not with signaling status. Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not status signaling. Why the elites would be more likely to say luck is important is not obvious to me, but a single example does not justify the sweeping generalization that this article makes.
  • _cenw 3y ago
    > Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not signaling. Or with police being a net-negative to your life. Like living in a disproportionately policed area. Or having a disproportionately policed skin color. The poll is pretty clear, defund the police doesn't mean anarchy, it means replacing it. The how's a bit up in the air, but it's more about how irredeemable the current system seems to someone.
    • razakel 3y ago
      The police are there for when limited violence needs to be meted out to prevent greater harm. They are not counsellors, social workers, or doctors. More funding needs to go to those professionals instead of giving the police military-grade weapons.
• xyzelement 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Hey could you show me an example or two of a pro-hamas rally that has happened on a college campus recently? I've been going to pro-palestine rallies because they're experiencing a genocide funded and supplied by my tax money, so I kind of consider protesting against it a right and obligation of mine. Haven't seen much mention of hamas at them though but maybe I'm not at the right ones. You could also stand to interrogate a little more the connection between poverty in "the hood" and the global struggle against colonialism. American black people and palestinians have a long history of mutual solidarity. Aren't you curious about why?
    • anon291 3y ago
      > You could also stand to interrogate a little more the connection between poverty in "the hood" and the global struggle against colonialism. American black people and palestinians have a long history of mutual solidarity. Aren't you curious about why? Honestly for me... no. My parents grew up in poverty in a British colony, and they're extremely well off and their children more so. It gave us a lot of advantages. If they grew up here in the United States as a colonized people, they would have had even more advantages, and if I'm being honest, my entire family looks at the black community with confusion as to why they don't take advantage of the fact they're born in America, which puts them lightyears ahead of my parent's upbringing and poverty. My mom ended her career by a desire to give back and taught in inner city public schools. Honestly, that was enlightening and explained a lot of why kids aren't doing well. Although both my parents and those kids grew up / are growing up poor. My grandparents wouldn't have tolerated what my mom found in the schools. At the end of the day culture matters.
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        OK. I mean if you're not curious about it I'm not going to try to convince you? Generations of activists and scholars have found a relationship here but if you're certain they're wrong to that's your project. Not sure why you even wrote anything past the first sentence here.
• regentbowerbird 3y ago
  This is an interesting read but at the same time I'm puzzled at the length this is going to in order to avoid engaging with ideas the author disagrees with. This seems similar to the "virtue signaling" attack. But instead of opponents being charged with hypocrisy, they are accused of being (1) privileged, (2) vain, and (3) either senseless or indifferent towards the well-being of others. It seems to me this is suggesting these people don't ever deserve to take part in democracy, which is worrying.
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• lscdlscd 3y ago
  [flagged]
• fredley 3y ago
  On language, in Britain there was (and still is to an extent) a whole host of words that would mark you as 'non-U' (aspirant middle class) rather than 'U' (upper class). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English It is still evident today if you know or interact with any truly upper-class people. There are still variations in the names for some things which persist even now.
• mistercow 3y ago
  The defund the police point here is really weak. The author is taking a pretty small difference across very coarsely divided economic categories, and then ascribing the difference to their pet theory, without any effort to address the myriad other candidate hypotheses for why this difference would exist. And to look at a “100k and up” bracket and say “oh, well they can afford to live in gated communities and hire private security” is just absurd. No, the vast majority of that bracket cannot.
• uses 3y ago
  With a cynical viewpoint like this, how would you know the difference between "luxury beliefs expressed just to keep others down and make me look fancy" vs "earnestly held beliefs based on learning, and perhaps I could learn something by considering these beliefs"? Perhaps evaluate the beliefs based on their merit, rather than whose beliefs they are?
• codesnik 3y ago
  "so, translated beliefs could be just expensive status symbols coming from dishonesty and having too much of free time. So here are examples of leftist beliefs, see?"
• jamincan 3y ago
  Is someone earning $100k/year really reflective of the elite? I don't really think that cuts it anymore and I would be surprised if the real elite are actually calling to defund the police.
• mathgradthrow 3y ago
  The aristocracy showing off how much money they have is "why things are expensive"? I feel like maybe economics has come a long way since Veblen.
• NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  I found myself experiencing some serious cognitive dissonance reading this, so there’s probably a lot of truth to it.
• tayistay 3y ago
  I think the explanation for "defund the police" is simpler... they just see the bad stuff cops do on the news, but haven't ever actually needed the cops personally (and few of their friends have too), primarily due to their affluence. There are exceptions, obviously. Of the people who have obtained a restraining order, I wonder what percentage want to defund the police.
• neotrope 3y ago
  Rob gave a talk at the All In Conf if you're rather watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck7Krz7QcxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck7Krz7QcxU My luxury belief is that AI Safety is a joke, but it's a dangerous belief as the benefits of AI will not be equally distributed and biasing towards caution could reduce future suffering. So... Be cautious reading comments here as many of us are in the socioeconomic class that luxury beliefs appeal to.
• lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  I am not clear why this is flagged but it seems pretty on point academic-blog for a US university (hey look, there are class issues in society ! who knew!) I think the idea of luxury beliefs is a fairly good descriptor for what the .5% will need. Once you start looking there are many examples - how many high flyers do you know that have taken up ultra-marathons (very time consuming) or charity work as an all but obligatory percentage of time. It's a marker for "I have family life so locked down that I can attend to these other expensive options and not be overwhelmed.
• mindslight 3y ago
  Of course there is some truth in here. But the sheer majority is missing the forest for the trees. Luxury beliefs are certainly products of wealth - it requires a level of wealth to declare something is wrong rather than pragmatically keeping your head down and going with the flow. As our society becomes more wealthy, these beliefs gain mindshare and become widely accepted - democracy, natural rights, freedom from religion, worker protections, etc. These things are products of wealth, a type of wealth in their own right, and we should be greatful that our society has become wealthy enough to declare that they should be universal. The author kind of references this at the very end, but then steers right back into the regressive fundamentalism as his closing conclusion. Looking forward, many visions of progress are somewhat wrong, misguided, or at the very least overstated. Remember when we were all going to be living in Buckyballs? Which is why you have to kind of hold your nose to wade through much of the blue tribe groupthink. But the answer isn't to conclude the entire idea of progress is fallacious and dopamine-pine for the glory days of hard work that are comfortably in the past. Rather, it's to discuss and critique the forward-looking ideas on their own merits, despite the neo-clergy and other politickers that will attack you for it.
• darigo 3y ago
  Alex Kaschuta discussed this with Rob Henderson on her Subversive podcast: https://www.alexkaschuta.com/p/subversive-podcast-rob-henderson#details https://www.alexkaschuta.com/p/subversive-podcast-rob-hender... Her point is that this effect is way bigger in 3rd world countries, where these kinds of beliefs signal alignment with "The West" and the status that comes with that.
• NeoTar 3y ago
  I find the luck vs. hard-work a weird dichotomy - both are true and both are false. If you don't work hard, you probably won't be successful. But if hard-work were sufficient for success then the richest person in the world, or the President, or however we measure success would also the hardest working, which I don't think most people who agree with. Similarly, although I think most sports-people would be acknowledged to be very hard-working, there is a matter of luck in their success - you need to find the right sport for you, you need to avoid injury, you need to perform at your best on the day of the big competition / when the talent-scout is visiting. Perhaps it's just a problem of perspective - if you are relatively successful to begin with you can see that there are a lot of people less successful than you who worked harder by some metric and so would attribute success more to luck and connections than hard-work; if you are relatively unsuccessful, perhaps the correlation between success and hard-work is more immediate - you see that the people who work hard are more successful than you, and that those who slack-off are not.
  • rawgabbit 3y ago
    The author did not do a good job delving into what exactly do these phrases mean. They mean different things to different people. If you are in a working class neighborhood, you value hard work as you see the consequences of unemployment, drug abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. You value hard work to escape poverty. If you are an incredibly successful and wealthy, you will readily admit that luck played a large part in your success. You see many people who worked just as hard or even harder, but fortune smiled on you and not them.
• moribvndvs 3y ago
  Sure, skepticism is a useful tool. Understanding someone’s motivations and how their wealth influences their worldview is a natural approach for assessing their position. However, the conclusion presented here–taken at face value–is reductive and ironically spells out what appears to be the author’s own bias. I’m not one to go out on a limb to defend affluence, but is it not enough to draw conclusions (whatever they may be) based on veracity and sound logic? Or shall we all just categorically dismiss the opinions of the person further up from you on the economic ladder?
• notacoward 3y ago
  There's a grain of truth here, but only a grain. Who hasn't seen an obviously affluent TikTok Tot (fancy home studio, high end video gear, expensive clothes and makeup) trying to gain clout by talking about the very same injustice of which they are the beneficiary? Pretty annoying, yes. But at the same time, the fact that an idea is expressed for clout doesn't make the idea wrong. We could debate "defund the police" all day, but whether TikTok Tot supports it is irrelevant. That's called well poisoning, close relative of ad hominem, and it's a fallacy. It's the fallacy that pervades OP. In some quarters, superfluous weaponry is a status symbol. In related quarters, it might be ostentatious displays of crosses and other religious symbols. Does that mean guns or religion are bad? Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but their use as status symbols doesn't determine the answer. What's more interesting is that OP omits such examples. All of their examples feed into a very particular political narrative, and cherry-picking is another thing that should make readers suspicious. In the end, the article starts with a small and somewhat interesting observation, which is great, but then ascribes to it greater (and more particular) significance than it deserves.
• dang 3y ago
  Related: Luxury beliefs are status symbols - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547954 - Nov 2022 (45 comments) Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31713870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31713870 - June 2022 (1 comment)
• Animats 3y ago
  "Class", by Paul Fussell, is a fun read. It's from 1981 and reads like a period piece today, but it's still a good read. Somehow, "Black Lives Matter" morphed into "Defund the Police", which turned into a joke. It derailed any serious effort to fix the real problem of cops shooting too many black people. Not quite sure how that happened. The hard work thing seems to be the reverse of the criticism usually leveled in that direction. The more common criticism is that rich people claimed their riches came from hard work, while most of the time they actually got a big boost from their parents.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    I got to this point in my life (working for a living as an engineer/manager) in large part by help from my parents (public school teachers) and they from their parents (coal mining and steelworking). My kids will get the same type of help such as we’re able to provide it. My parents’ hard work has a payoff for me and my wife’s/my hard work will very likely have a payoff for our kids. This is a feature, not a bug, IMO.
  • snoochyboochies 3y ago
    On average, between 10 and 20 unarmed black people are killed by police each year since 2020. This accounts for less than 1% of all police shootings of black people. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    The amount that movements get adopted by, amplified by, and sometimes co-opted by people who have no idea what they are talking about is substantial. Thats before you even get into the grifters (Shaun King). Just to bring in another contentious topic, but this simple interview personifies what I saw in summer 2020. https://x.com/israel_advocacy/status/1718742999591456921 https://x.com/israel_advocacy/status/1718742999591456921 Whatever your view on the relative merits, you have 2 protestors talking about how 1) they don't really support the chant 2) of course they chanted it 3) no we don't actually know the context of half the words in the chant I'm not from the UK but I generally interpret the specifics of those accents to be a bit more upper class than lower for sure. Not to mention the phrasing, words used, and general indirection of the response. One of my neighbors was like this during summer 2020. In retrospect she admitted she was just bored of being locked up during covid, and ended up to the right of me on policing lol.
• j7ake 3y ago
  The fraction of people with luxury beliefs that also have to request vacation days to a manager is too high to be an exclusive upper class signal. Private jets, yachts, personal cooks and butlers are truer symbols of the upper class.
  • hbossy 3y ago
    Yes, but these people don't really interact with lower classes. I think what author wanted to describe is signaling in situations where people just a few social ladder steps apart meet each other. Like gathering in local church or family reunion. Everyone dress basically the same, everyone eat the same grandmas cake but one cousin is MIT-educated engineer, one owns a car dealership and one stack shelves in Walmart.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    “A Rolex isn’t a status symbol if you use it to know when your lunch break is over…”
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    > Private jets, yachts, personal cooks and butlers are truer symbols of the upper class. Those are all signs of wealth; most classy people would actively avoid them, even if they're wealthy. I'm from the UK; I suspect that in the USA, it's easier to raise your social class by simply spending money. Here, social class by default is inherited. It's reinforced by where you went to school. Most people of high social class are slightly embarrassed about it; showing it off is seen as tacky.
    • j7ake 3y ago
      Are you saying the upper class in UK eg the royal family actively avoids flying private and making their own breakfast and doing their own laundry? Or is the royal family not classy? Would be happy to hear examples of upper class UK people who still do their own laundry and flies coach.
      • dagw 3y ago
• isaacfrond 3y ago
  Orwell's line from Notes on Nationalism (1945): "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1035696-george-orwell-there-are-some-ideas-so-absurd-that-only-an-intell/ https://quotepark.com/quotes/1035696-george-orwell-there-are...
• croisillon 3y ago
  "a vulnerable poor person in a crime-ridden neighborhood can’t afford to support defunding the police" [citation needed because the vulnerable poor person is police's first target]
  • indigo945 3y ago
    Agreed; the article completely skirts the obvious point that the Black Lives Matter movement was not founded by upper-class white students at an urban college, but by working-class black people who are directly affected by the issue at hand.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • qup 3y ago
      Where are those founders now?
  • MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    "Crime is number one concern for black adults. Police doesn't even make the list." https://x.com/PeterMoskos/status/1515170739791568899 https://x.com/PeterMoskos/status/1515170739791568899
    • croisillon 3y ago
      because getting shot by the police is neither violence nor crime?
      • fundad 3y ago
        Crime is such a concern because you can’t call the police if you want to live to support your family.
      • steveBK123 3y ago
        It's a matter of proportion. In NYC for example theres 400 murders per year, and maybe 1 "bad shoot" by cops where someone ends up dead and the cop should be in jail. Other jurisdictions the proportion can be far worse, and justifiably reform is being sought. LAPD has about 10x the cop on civilian shootings of NYPD. In some areas it's like being worried about getting powder burns from the airbag in your car if you crash it and the airbag goes off. I'll keep the airbag, as will most people when you actually poll them. Meanwhile some of the white liberals who were marching in summer 2020 are the first people to call the cops for trivialities like a noise complaint or car parked in their bike lane..
• j7ake 3y ago
  What would it take to have status symbols be the ability to spend your time writing poetry, proving theorems, playing music, and making art? Seems more wholesome than these zero sum games played by the rich.
• indigo945 3y ago
  > When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a > dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural > appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.” > > Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you > visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will > eagerly explain them to you. I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook. > But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental > effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are > for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else. This is certainly true for a high number of luxury beliefs, such as "trickle down economics", "small government" advocacy and "catallaxy", none of which come up often among dishwashers; and all of which freshman students at Yale, who just read their first essay on Friedrich Hayek, will gladly explain to you.
  • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • stewx 3y ago
      Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. An uneducated person may be highly intelligent but have little knowledge.
      • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        ok - in that case: when I switched to a white collar job suddenly all the world's knowledge was unlocked in my brain, and I knew the meaning of all these terms that had heretofore been opaque to me.
        • jocaal 3y ago
          The author addresses this in the text. He claims the wealthy have the time (And I will add access to resources like the internet and books) to spend on learning esoteric knowledge. From my N=1 experience, that seems to be true. I don't really get why that offends you. Is it really hard to believe that people in different social classes prioritize learning different things?
• neilk 3y ago
  Let’s consider the contrary. Do poor people sometimes hold highly questionable beliefs, promulgated by institutions, and does professing these beliefs in expensive and flamboyant ways confer status? Religion ticks all these boxes. In some contexts, so does patriotism, racism, worship of the military, publicly dumping cases of Bud Light, etc etc etc. In some ways, even disdain for education is a sort of expensive status display. The author is just describing what people of all kinds do. Yes, there are very silly beliefs which sometimes seduce educated elites. But that just makes them like everybody else. Also, the author is picking on some trendy ideas which are currently held by some of the elites, but so what? It would be truly surprising if a decade-plus of higher education and immersion in data and discourse did not produce a different consensus. The author offers no evidence that “defund the police” is an inherently absurd idea, no more than other formerly radical ideas like universal suffrage or abolishing slavery. In my town, the police absorb over 20% of the city budget, have doubled their spend in the past decade, and are unaccountable to the people. So I think it’s at least a topic worthy of interest!
  • cmcaleer 3y ago
    Defund the police was an inherently absurd idea. It especially bothers me that proponents gave no reasonable explanation for what happens next after defunding[1] and many seemed to have no appetite for reform. Portland was kind of a poster child for this. Just look at how things have changed after their budget slash. - Police staffing levels are at critical levels [2] - Violent crime has shot way up in 2021 (along with the rest of the country) [3] - Things got so bad so quickly that in just a year millions of dollars were added back to the budget [4] - Things have continued to get worse relative to the rest of the country (which has seen crime drop back down) [5] When someone believes that there's semen in a beer, or they go to church, or they reply 'thank you for your service' to someone on the internet, that doesn't have real consequences for people. It might get spoken about in the media sometimes, but it's more just a side-show. When a stupid slogan ruined the best chance America had for wide police reform in decades, that does have consequences. Even more now, nobody (who should be a cop) in Portland wants to be a cop. Lower class communities that need more patrols don't have them. People don't feel safe in their houses. Who do you think took the brunt of this: those who chanted the slogan, or those in the huge minority ethnic groups in East Portland? And the most critical part about this: defund the police was treated with some amount of legitimacy by the media because it was their in group saying it. It should have been treated as the fringe belief it really was. Imagine if that airtime was used to campaign for reform. The real frustration of it all is that it was a zeitgeist that could have been an opportunity for real reform, and really making people want to be cops. Instead the moment was pissed away by a dumb slogan, rather than constructive debate. [1] Besides at best a hand-wavy 'community policing', which conjures up memories of that one Simpsons episode. [2] https://manhattan.institute/article/portlands-police-staffing-crisis https://manhattan.institute/article/portlands-police-staffin... [3] https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/figure-2-Shootings-in-Portland-January-2019-June-2023.png https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/fi... [4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/portland-among-u-s-cities-adding-funds-to-police-departments https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/portland-among-u-s-citie... [5] https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2023/10/30/oregon-crime-data-statistics-violent-police-shortage https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2023/10/30/oregon-crime...
• tlocke 3y ago
  > “I’m so fit that I can afford to expend valuable energy to show you how strong and robust I am compared with the other gazelles.” Is this why humans dance?
  • euroderf 3y ago
    There is also multiperson synchronisation.
• m463 3y ago
  Strangely, this reminds me of a book on relationships I read. It said that only when people were safe and secure in their relationship, were they able to speak freely and voice their true opinions. Maybe this is similar. If people are financially and physically secure can believe things openly, even if they have little to do with reality.
  • boxed 3y ago
    Or put another way: after reality is removed, beliefs can become insane.
    • pavlov 3y ago
      This is one potential explanation for why successful people quite often drift towards conspiracy theories and paradoxical bitterness as they get older. I'm thinking of Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk, but examples abound.
• surrTurr 3y ago
  On the point of success and the rich believing it is just luck whilst the working-class beliefs it's hard work: Maybe both is true. Becoming successful in working class jobs often *does* require hard work, whilst becoming successful in upper-class jobs depends more on other factors such as luck. For example, to become a great construction worker, you need physical strength, stamina, and a strong work ethic, as the job involves long hours of manual labour. On the other hand, landing a high-paying job in finance or tech might depend more on being in the right place at the right time, networking, having access to resources and opportunities etc.
  • TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    A high-paying job in finance or tech is not what rich means. Rich means ownership and rent-seeking. It means dominating some part of your culture to the extent that you can force your will and desires on significant numbers of people - often against their personal interests. One of the best examples is the health insurance industry, which bankrupts half a million Americans every year - usually people who have been paying insurance premiums for decades, but their money is somehow channelled to shareholders instead of providing care when they need it. If you're not profiting from an operation like this on a mass scale, you're not truly rich.
    • trollerator23 3y ago
      > A high-paying job in finance or tech is not what rich means. > Rich means ownership and rent-seeking. Huh? No it doesn't.
    • Neil44 3y ago
      Rich is a subjective term but your definition of it is strangely unusual and specific.
      • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
        most likely because they resemble the more general understanding of the word rich.
• menshiki 3y ago
  > They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort. This is basically the old paradigm saying that "people don't make money, money makes money." No one became a billionaire without being in the right place and knowing the right people. Access to that environment can be only gained if one already has significant capital. I guess this is what they mean by luck.
• TerryGrampl 3y ago
  This reminds me of an interesting piece I read last month, which looks at one particular luxury belief that is especially divisive right now, and criticizes it with regards to class: https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/25/trans-the-new-ideology-of-the-ruling-class https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/25/trans-the-new-ideol... Like those described in the article above, this is very much a middle-class movement whose proponents have seized the opportunity to sneer at working-class people as bigoted, stupid and reactionary.
  • nyanpasu64 3y ago
    Tell that to the trans people I've met who were physically beaten and mentally abused by authoritarian parents, unable to move out or find secure housing due to burnout, mental health disabilities, and a lack of aid or sustainable jobs, in both Western and third-world countries.
    • lupire 3y ago
      According to the article, I rightly choose not to believe they exist because they are inconvenient and I am too busy working to accept such an inconvenience. The same logic refuted abolitionism.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • TerryGrampl 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • throw6746 3y ago
        At least it was easy to see you had no interest to present factual arguments and just regurgitated what you read online. For somebody asking empathy about your childhood, you seem to give very little to others.
        • TerryGrampl 3y ago
• thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
  > A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police. > They can afford to hold this position, because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security. This isn't what defund the police was about at all and is just a strawman to stop inquisitions into the actual point of the defund the police movement. > In the United States, "defund the police" is a slogan that supports removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police Defund the police was never a anarcho communist feel good movement despite what articles like this will guide you believe. That said, the slogan was slightly ambiguous so it was absolutely destroyed in the "marketplace of ideas". Apparently defunding the police actually means get rid of the police entirely. I guess the slogan had to be "decrease the budget, not entirely remove it just less money, for the police and move that money into other prevention and treatment methods for community support".
  • noch 3y ago
    > Defund the police was never a anarcho communist feel good movement despite what articles like this will guide you believe. In this article titled, "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": "Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol... (https://archive.is/H293i https://archive.is/H293i)
    • thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
      Do you think the majority of the people who say defund the police believe that? Just because a minority of people have a terrible opinion doesn't mean the entire movement does. Also even the author doesn't believe they can actually abolish the police. > I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
• seydor 3y ago
  too many words to say something obvious. rich people have always had the luxury of time to think novel things. That's what gave us most of science, philosophy, politics, liberalism, socialism, the democracy of today and the freedoms to make powerpoint presentations about it. history decides which of them go to the garbage bin
• nomilk 3y ago
  > Conspicuous consumption - in economics, the consumer practice of buying goods in greater quantity/price/quality than practical [1] Luxury beliefs sound like conspicuous consumption for beliefs. The analogy also works in that some people "boast" of having certain beliefs in the same way some people might think very highly of themselves by, say, wearing loud brand name clothing. In both cases, others (perhaps with more taste) may not be as impressed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
• jyounker 3y ago
  The poster's entire article is based on a strawman. The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions. For example, you send mental health specialists when someone is threatening suicide. This reallocates funding from the police to more capable responders, but allows the remaining police to actually focus on law enforcement. The author ignores this completely to make his argument.
  • switch007 3y ago
    “Defund the Police” reminds me of “High Speed Rail 2”, the biggest benefit of which would have been extra capacity for passenger and freight, new stations etc, not reduced journey times. Defund The Police is obviously such a terrible name if their true goals are as they say
  • doublespanner 3y ago
    The whole point is that the defund the police movement is a signal taken up by people not directly effected by the issue; not a comment on the details or potential effectiveness of the concept...
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      So "the whole point" is that people are only allowed to support policies they would be directly aided by, or disagree with policies they are directly injured by? Huh, super mysterious why this line of reasoning is popular amongst people who want the world to remain the same.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    Big question is does police currently have enough funding for those main tasks? If not defunding them by taking money from them only makes situation even worse. Or do you actually need more funding to spend on the other stuff? Which could in best case over some years decrease overall costs for society.
  • stewx 3y ago
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  > In other words, high-status people desire wealth and status more than anyone else. Isn't that a bit like observing that powerful people tend to be politicians, or that being wealthy is correlated with wanting to make a lot of money? Wealth, power and status are scarce goods, so it stands to reason that the people who possess them are the people who are most-motivated to seek them.
• jxdxbx 3y ago
  He seems unconcerned about the actual truth and falsity of ideas, just how “useful” they are. The single most important predictor of economic success in life is the wealth of your parents: luck. Maybe some people find this “discouraging” and would prefer if it were not true, or if people did not believe it. But it is true. Social mobility in the United States in general is fairly low. Personally I prefer to know the truth and to work to fix things I think are unfair, rather than proposing that we just adopt viewpoints that make people into better workers.
• moomin 3y ago
  Yet another dude who’s dressing up the idea that the working classes are “noble savages” in a lot of fancy words.
• langsoul-com 3y ago
  There's a book called "The Tragedy of the Virtuous Justine" that really exemplifies how luxury beliefs are luxury because they have nothing to lose by adopting them. In contrast, the less well off stand to lose so much more. Take plant based meats to save the world belief. They cost double or quadruple the price of normal meat. Given how people live pay check to pay check, living out that ideal will cause them to suffer.
• diamondap 3y ago
  > Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about. I can't say I agree with all the author writes, but that statement is spot on.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    Yeah the key point is this plus "the affluent can hold these luxury beliefs because they aren't the people impacted by the downsides of them"
• atomicnature 3y ago
  Basic question: What exactly is a luxury belief?
  • razakel 3y ago
    Politics that the speaker personally happens to not care about.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  Goes on to write a post so unnecessarily long and full of quotes of little known auteurs français, that only people with a lot of spare time can read.
• snoochyboochies 3y ago
  This is an interesting social phenomenon. Given HN's user base, if the author is correct, his hypothesis would predict that the users of HackerNews are disproportionately likely to hold these luxury beliefs.
  • yoyohello13 3y ago
    Given the number of borderline Sociopathic comments I've seen on here about population growth and worker exploitation I wouldn't be surprised.
  • local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    The responses here range from denial to outright hostility at the author, which to me proves his point. This is Ground Zero for the people he's describing!
• vannevar 3y ago
  Other examples of "luxury beliefs" not mentioned by the author include the idea that all the poor need to do is work harder, and the idea that unregulated capitalism provides the best outcome for all.
• mo_42 3y ago
  I don't buy it. Wikipedia lists nine possible explanations for stotting. The author, however, simply picks the one that fits his story. There are also multiple explanations for sexual evolution. I can hold the belief "Defund the Police" as a poor or as a rich. So it's easy to fake this signal. Also, I don't see any evidence that this belief is held mainly by rich people.
• timkam 3y ago
  The general concept of luxury beliefs is very interesting, but it feels the author gives it an ideological spin: 1. The author claims that when luxury beliefs 'trickle down' to the working class, they are damaging, which is supposedly not the case for luxury goods. Still, in some not-so-privileged parts of society, signaling status with luxury goods consumes the larger parts of people's budget. Think of someone living in a cheap apartment while driving a (leased) luxury car. This is certainly more damaging than believing the police should be de-funded (which does not have any consequence whatsoever on the micro-level, stupid as it may be). 2. The author claims that advocating a disciplined work ethic while attributing one's own success to luck is inconsistent (and hence bigoted). Still, it _is_ true that success is mostly luck, due to opportunities we cannot control. This does not mean that one should not work hard. It's not that affluent people say: "I am rich because of luck, so you should not even try." The realistic take is that success is mostly due to luck but hard work is one of the few ways to control success _to at least some extent_. Also, in many societies hard work is seen as a virtue in itself, not matter whether it pays off or not. So I would claim that "hard work pays off" is a luxury belief for people who are already super privileged, have strong networks, et cetera. When you are born into the elite, you can afford claiming that marrying into the elite is inferior to working your way up...
• jenkstom 3y ago
  The basic idea is sound. But the majority of the examples are strangely politically biased and in my experience they are things I've never heard from the 1%.
• SergeAx 3y ago
  > [Gaselles] repeatedly jump as high as they can, springing vertically into the air with all four feet raised. > The signal this sends to predators is essentially: “I’m so fit that I can afford to expend valuable energy to show you how strong and robust I am compared with the other gazelles.” I always thought that high jumps of savannah herbivores is meant to give them better view of predators, especially in tall vegetation.