I suppose the good news is, when the Russians finally get fed up with US hypocrisy and meddling, and Poot’n presses the red button, LA and DC will be the first to become radioactive toast. It’s an ill-wind…
Status is relative, and zero sum. There's only 100% available to 100% of the people - the more any one person gets, the less for everybody else. Name dropping is an attempt to increase one's status - and it works, generally. Especially with others who also name-drop for status. Forbes 400 richest, or their billionaire's list (2,668) is a more objective list of money wealth, but there's clear status that goes along with that.
Wealth can be positive sum, despite the fact that any limited time budget is zero sum. Competitive capitalism is hugely better for normal folk, those in the 20-50-80% ranges of status or wealth, mostly because getting rich under capitalism means serving mass numbers of normal folk as customers. Serving customers is seldom the big desire of those advocating socialism.
The rabbi claims: "one of the most important problems of our time is inequality. " Absolute poverty is an important problem, inequality in an inevitable zero sum status comparison is not. Insofar as poverty for citizens born with American privilege exists, it is primarily because of bad behavior. Bad behavior of parents, who thus victimize their innocent kids, and then bad behavior of those kids who become older every year, and far less innocent as they choose to act.
Focus on "inequality" is a deliberate attempt to avoid focus on bad behavior - since focus, too, is zero sum.
And all working normal men in America can afford a tuxedo, if they want.
I want to push back on this picture a little. Humans (especially men) being what they are, there is no other reliable way to stimulate high performance than competition, and competition always has its ugly sides. Communists and assorted socialists love painting pictures of the ugliness of capitalism and markets. IIRC, their picture of the Wall Street (broadly speaking) resembles the picture of D.C. presented in this post, with money taking the place of social status. Neither of these two pictures is untrue, but they focus exclusively on the ugly.
High performance thru competition is very true and important.
"competition always has its ugly sides." Only because people who compete have ugly sides. Those willing to cheat to win - because winning gives so much more status than merely "playing the game well". The ugliness of those willing to cheat to win is shown in competition, but is in the character of the cheaters.
Sports that emphasize obeying the rules and strongly penalize those who don't can even reduce the ugliness of cheating by making cheaters lose more often. One great social goal of most sports is to help players learn to lose gracefully, while striving mightily to win. The mighty striving is good practice for any achievement. The graceful losing is good for all social situations where one is never the best in everything.
"Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." Not entirely false, especially in sport, yet more often not true in that good competitors who are good losers are good with other people and cooperation leads to life success.
> Only because people who compete have ugly sides. Those willing to cheat to win
Everybody has ugly sides, and no, I can't agree. At war, those willing to win kill people even if they don't cheat, and killing is ugly. Sport is a very artificial environment, specifically constructed from warfare to exclude the absolute maximum amount of ugliness which is compatible with competing at all. Other environments, such as business or finance, are not so constructed, and give scope to very hard plays which nevertheless aren't cheating. Cartoon example off the top of my head is the top guy in "Margin Call".
Yep, look at American Psycho as a perfect example of this mindset. The theme of the movie seems to be "these Wall Street people are so shallow and materialistic, they'd ignore their colleague's sadistic killing spree if his fund's ROI stays high enough." It's a sentiment that reeks of status anxiety, for one, and as Mike notes, I don't see the social dynamics as being a whole lot different in politics, anyway. The only real difference is that politics is more zero sum than finance and the rewards are less in financial terms and more in intangible forms like prestige, influence, and fame, etc.
I agree that the status driven behavior of folks in the DC governmental market is basically the same as the status driven behavior of people in high finance and movies, but I have the sense that this is a blind spot of the left. By and large they seem to believe that this IS NOT an accurate picture of DC. Or if it is, it's only due to the influence of markets.
I was once on the Metroliner (dating this) to D.C., and the man (perhaps a lobbyist) across the aisle made a dozen phone calls, each with the purpose of slipping in to the conversation that he had "just sat down with Chuck Schumer."
It became a fun game for me to see how quickly and with what level of "casual" art the man would achieve his goal.
Hence the old saying that politics is show business for ugly people.
This explains how Trump manged to straddle those two domains so well.
I suppose the good news is, when the Russians finally get fed up with US hypocrisy and meddling, and Poot’n presses the red button, LA and DC will be the first to become radioactive toast. It’s an ill-wind…
I used to think I could ignore this game, but now think that is naïve.
Status is relative, and zero sum. There's only 100% available to 100% of the people - the more any one person gets, the less for everybody else. Name dropping is an attempt to increase one's status - and it works, generally. Especially with others who also name-drop for status. Forbes 400 richest, or their billionaire's list (2,668) is a more objective list of money wealth, but there's clear status that goes along with that.
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
Wealth can be positive sum, despite the fact that any limited time budget is zero sum. Competitive capitalism is hugely better for normal folk, those in the 20-50-80% ranges of status or wealth, mostly because getting rich under capitalism means serving mass numbers of normal folk as customers. Serving customers is seldom the big desire of those advocating socialism.
The rabbi claims: "one of the most important problems of our time is inequality. " Absolute poverty is an important problem, inequality in an inevitable zero sum status comparison is not. Insofar as poverty for citizens born with American privilege exists, it is primarily because of bad behavior. Bad behavior of parents, who thus victimize their innocent kids, and then bad behavior of those kids who become older every year, and far less innocent as they choose to act.
Focus on "inequality" is a deliberate attempt to avoid focus on bad behavior - since focus, too, is zero sum.
And all working normal men in America can afford a tuxedo, if they want.
What....no tuxedo! ; - )
I want to push back on this picture a little. Humans (especially men) being what they are, there is no other reliable way to stimulate high performance than competition, and competition always has its ugly sides. Communists and assorted socialists love painting pictures of the ugliness of capitalism and markets. IIRC, their picture of the Wall Street (broadly speaking) resembles the picture of D.C. presented in this post, with money taking the place of social status. Neither of these two pictures is untrue, but they focus exclusively on the ugly.
High performance thru competition is very true and important.
"competition always has its ugly sides." Only because people who compete have ugly sides. Those willing to cheat to win - because winning gives so much more status than merely "playing the game well". The ugliness of those willing to cheat to win is shown in competition, but is in the character of the cheaters.
Sports that emphasize obeying the rules and strongly penalize those who don't can even reduce the ugliness of cheating by making cheaters lose more often. One great social goal of most sports is to help players learn to lose gracefully, while striving mightily to win. The mighty striving is good practice for any achievement. The graceful losing is good for all social situations where one is never the best in everything.
"Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." Not entirely false, especially in sport, yet more often not true in that good competitors who are good losers are good with other people and cooperation leads to life success.
> Only because people who compete have ugly sides. Those willing to cheat to win
Everybody has ugly sides, and no, I can't agree. At war, those willing to win kill people even if they don't cheat, and killing is ugly. Sport is a very artificial environment, specifically constructed from warfare to exclude the absolute maximum amount of ugliness which is compatible with competing at all. Other environments, such as business or finance, are not so constructed, and give scope to very hard plays which nevertheless aren't cheating. Cartoon example off the top of my head is the top guy in "Margin Call".
Yep, look at American Psycho as a perfect example of this mindset. The theme of the movie seems to be "these Wall Street people are so shallow and materialistic, they'd ignore their colleague's sadistic killing spree if his fund's ROI stays high enough." It's a sentiment that reeks of status anxiety, for one, and as Mike notes, I don't see the social dynamics as being a whole lot different in politics, anyway. The only real difference is that politics is more zero sum than finance and the rewards are less in financial terms and more in intangible forms like prestige, influence, and fame, etc.
I agree that the status driven behavior of folks in the DC governmental market is basically the same as the status driven behavior of people in high finance and movies, but I have the sense that this is a blind spot of the left. By and large they seem to believe that this IS NOT an accurate picture of DC. Or if it is, it's only due to the influence of markets.
I was once on the Metroliner (dating this) to D.C., and the man (perhaps a lobbyist) across the aisle made a dozen phone calls, each with the purpose of slipping in to the conversation that he had "just sat down with Chuck Schumer."
It became a fun game for me to see how quickly and with what level of "casual" art the man would achieve his goal.
No.
Arnold should have splurged for a real tuxedo - and taken his lovely wife, more often, to places that call for a tuxedo.
If one likes folk dancing, it's not that hard to like ballroom dancing, and there are opportunities to do so that often include tuxedo wearing.
Slovakia has a whole ball season, before Lent, where my wife loves to dress up and wearing a tux is ok with me.