Monsieur le Baron @Mssr_le_Baron

4 Jun • 102 tweets • Mssr_le_Baron/status/1400636267499454465

Class thread! Class thread. Some people have perpetual

stews, this is a perpetual thread. Subsections will be
marked with CLASST for convenience, and if applicable, a
relevant Fussell chapter. My blog covers theory, so this
will more be specific examples of markers.
CLASST: V:
The mail order catalogue is dead, but shopping is not. Consoom is dead, long live
consoom! Today, many people buy things at the Big Box stores or Amazon. And here,
at the Big Box stores, you have class distinction. You see, there are many,
fundamentally the same...

But different. Big Box stores are all Big Box stores, but people will describe a vague
distinction between them, not in the products, but in the atmosphere. That's class
culture at work. We respond to market segmentation by class.

So let's start. Walmart is working class/lower middle. That one should be obvious,
but I will still state it. The focus is on frugality and everyday low prices. The working
class, by necessity, counts pennies. Walmart is bulk, but bulk of low
grade/commodity grade items.

The customers are usually dressed in a slovenly, prolish manner, and they act
accordingly. I see a lot of arguments and messes at Walmart. I like it. It feels earthy,
secure, down to earth, authentic. There's not a lot of focus on projecting an image -
people are here to shop.

Up a rung is Target. Target is middle class. You can tell by how it markets and
positions itself. No longer are you here for [product], you're here for the Target
experience. You're not a customer, you're a ~guest~, like you're at a hotel. And there
is conspicuous wait staff.

The middle class like the experience of being conspicuously waited on and treated as
special, worthy of distinction. The analogue here is how the middle class in Fussell's
day loved "posh" French restaurants that focused on the continental atmosphere and
wearing fancy clothes.

They're not just there for the food, they're there for the atmosphere. Target shoppers
aren't just there to shop, they're there to live - and Tar-jay will help. The price is a
little higher, and this keeps penny-pinching proles away. It is subtle things that
classgate.

•••
Next in our list is Costco. Costco is upper middle class. Costco is very austere and
minimalist. Customers are still waited on, but silently. At Walmart, you have to go
flag someone down. At Target, the wait staff gets in your face. At Costco, everything
runs smoothly, invisibly.

The theme of frugality returns, but in a variant form. Things are cheap because
they're bought in bulk. But what's being bought isn't cheap. The Costco promise is the
cheapest price *for the finest of goods*. Real extra virgin olive oil, imported wine,
wagyu steak, Mexicoke, etc.

The message is clear - Costco customers expect the finer things in life, and they treat
it as the everyday, not as a conspicuous expenditure for which costlier is better. Steak
is just the grocery bill, and you've got to keep it down. It is similar to another class
marker.

Costco is the dusty car of Big Box stores.

But there is also another side - the luxury car. And what's the Luxury Car?

Well, you had to have guessed it. Whole Foods.

Whole Foods/Costco represent New Money/Old Money.

Frankly, Whole Foods is a place that makes me incredulous. It's flashy, it's showy.
Everything about a Whole Foods is meant to show off gaudy, conspicuous wealth.
What they sell is often ridiculous and they sell it at ridiculous prices. At Whole Foods,
you make a splash.

So what above? Is there a Big Box store of the upper class? No, frankly. It would go
out of business. There are simply not enough upper class people to sustain a Big Box
store. But they do have their own stores. They're smaller, more specialized stores.

The upper class has small, boutique stores selling basically handcrafted or specialized
versions of goods. These stores are expensive, and the products are almost
indistinguishable from generic - but they are fine, very fine. You will find them in the
back alleys of cosmopolises.

Does the upper middle class have boutiques? Yes, but not for regular stuff.

sharperimage.com

Basically, you spend lots of money on amusing white elephants. The upper middle
class has plenty of money and likes to be amused. Being amused is an important class
value.

CLASST: VI:
The old Fussell wisdom still holds true, mostly. A general disdain for education is
prolish. Proles (rightfully) mistrust the higher education system. The education
system forms a key part of the American class system.

I won't belabor the old points, but I'll quickly sum it up. The middle class is very
proud of having gone to college. If they are from a small town, they may be convinced
this makes them much better than their origin. This is the transplant of CB's
"Midwestern Excellence joke".

It's middle class to draw the line between college-educated and not. The upper
middle class assumes college is a given, since most of them have been getting an
education since time immemorial. The thing that brings status here is going to a
good, prestigious college.

Don't just go to Podunk Directional State U. You've got to be a Harvard man like your
uncle and your father and your grandfather - carry on that legacy. The principle of
legacy. This is what matters. Uppers often go to silly little Lib Arts colleges that cost a
king's ransom.

Speaking of king's ransom, let's move on from Fussell and talk about what's new. In
his day, college was cheap. Now it isn't. While the uppers can pay their way, lower
classes must figure out how to pay for college.

The proles, often first gen students, get need-based aid if they can wrangle the
education bureaucracy/FAFSA. What they misunderstand is the generosity of need-
aid at prestige schools. If they get loans, it is often because they go to for-profits or
stingy low-grade schools.

It is the middles that bear the brunt of student loans. Their parents are too well-off to
fairly qualify for financial aid, and yet they are not well-off enough to pay their
children through. So the middle class ends up saddled with student loans, made
worse by high tuition.

While uppers often go to these strange liberal arts colleges, they're not an unpopular
choice among the middles, since they're not as competitive as fighting for one of the
Harvard slots. But the price is steep, incredibly steep.

So the upper middles. The more prestigious universities have incredibly generous aid
packages and fat endowments to fund them. As such, many upper middles end up
getting full ride need-based scholarships or sometimes full ride+ merit scholarships
that actually make money.

This is helped along by generous loopholes in the tax code that allow them to
maximize the financial aid given to them by shielding lots of income and assets from
FAFSA. Piketty has studied the US tax code, and the tax rate begins to decline at the
UMC as SSI phases out.

Tax and asset shelters allow the UMC to game the system and get "welfare". The
result is that I graduated to a higher income than most of you and without a penny of
student debt.

Remember, privilege is what you get for free.

If you pay for it, they're selling you something.

The tax gap in action. Note the dip that starts at the top 10% and dives at the top 1%.
That is the UMC hole. Red is with sales tax, blue without.
So that's paying for the party. What about getting there? Let's talk about school. This
is something else that has changed since Fussell's day, and it deserves some looking
at it. What does schooling look like for the classes?

For the underclass, school is like an tiny prison. The purpose is discipline. Rarely can
enough order be imposed to teach anything, and the students often aren't terribly
interested in learning anything anyways. These schools are usually failing. Teach For
America kids go here.

The working class will send their kids to whatever's around. They don't have the
luxury of uprooting to chase a school. This can be good, this can be bad. For what it's
worth, I had a working class Latina classmate in Calc, and these people get sucked up
into the UMC stream.

The middle class is the beginning of school consciousness and the desire for a "good
school". Their main goal is to avoid the disorder of the underclass, so for them, "good
school" is a euphemism for white school. You can admit that here. Ha! Any school is
enough for "college".

What is alien for Fussell's generation and probably most of you is what I call "The
Thunderdome". It is a school system of intensive winnowing and it is the main
pipeline from which our nation's elites are produced. This is the form of intense
American meritocracy.

It begins when the aspirant elite is a toddler. They begin to take IQ tests to qualify for
an elite preschool as well as personality screening. The cutoff for these tests is usually
somewhere about 130. Some parents make their toddlers do test prep. The stakes are
high.

If accepted, the Thunderdome begins. The toddler, then child, then teenager, begins
to compete with their rival-peers for resources and attention. The best survive, the
rest are winnowed. Rank and yank. Ace the test or don't come back. At every stage,
advance. Never fail.

A grade that isn't an A is a permanent black mark on the transcript that will ruin your
chances for Harvard. The child must have perfect grades, perfect grades, and perfect
extracurriculars. The leadership requirement means they must outmaneuver their
rival-peers to take a club.
Many cannot handle the pressure. The suicide rate is not insubstantial. Coffee is
common. A common coping mechanism beyond caffeine is performance-enhancing
drugs. A swift trade in amphetamines has developed, as well as cocaine. Anything to
get an edge in the academic race.

The winners are the products of "meritocracy", its blighted fruits. They are, as a rule,
both brutal and conformist - conformity is a must to reach "perfection" as defined by
a grading rubric. No principles but obedience. No desire but hunger.

An Ivy league professor, himself an alumnus, compared the commencement speech

he had received, one calling for noblesse oblige and reminding them of their
responsibilities, to the one his young students were receiving.

They were told thus:

You are the fruits of meritocracy, and you deserve this and more. The world belongs
to you by right. You must take of it. So eat, eat and never be full, and feast until the
world's ending - this is the truth of the world and what is right.

Anyways. On to the upper class. More cheerful! The upper class is schooled and
socialized to be affable. Their schooling is not as intensive, generally, because the goal
of their education is to make them good members of the upper class: socialites and
networkers.

For the upper class, the world can be treacherous, so school networks can be some of
the most honest and true sources of friendship. In addition, a lot of their education
doesn't just come at school, but exists passively, in their upbringing.

The upper middle class is cultured and sophisticated by education and training, the
result of 10 hour school days. The upper class absorbs knowledge by osmosis. They
end up with a passing knowledge of fine art because everyone knows it. They read
books by whim.

The goal is to create that charming affability and the perfect manners for which the
upper class is famed. Imperturbably fine spirits, level moods, and a willingness to
cover. Generosity befits an upper class person.

This leads me to manners, but that's a matter for another day.

CLASST: Money and Debt

A subject conspicuous in its absence from the Fussell book. Money and class are not
the same thing, but, of course, they are related. Without money, one cannot maintain
the expenditures needed to live above low proledom for long. So then money.

For proles, money is a means for consumption. Proles convert money into goods or
services and then consume them. For the lower sorts of proles, this consumption is
primarily for survival, but the higher proles enjoy many (very expensive) luxury
goods like jetskis and boats.

Why is this so? Precarity. @acczibit has a concept "Hood Post-Scarcity", where one
can satisfy all one's needs, but a single emergency would wipe out any savings.
Luxury goods are expensive but "cheap" compared to wealth. Money is here today,
gone tomorrow. Spend while you can.
As you move into the middle class, incomes are not necessarily higher, and often
lower. But the tone is different. The watchword of the middle is "comfortable". 90%
of the time, when you meet someone who self-describes their upbringing as
comfortable, that's middle class.

If they describe themselves as upper middle class but have low class consciousness,
they're also middle class. Twitter is a very middle class place - most of its users are
middle class. The middle class no longer fears starvation - here is the source of its
comfort.

Instead, the middle class uses its spare cash for *status*. The middle class is always
attempting to keep up with the Joneses, because its key value is respectability. So the
middle class is in an arms race to maintain its status. It buys trends because it is
forced to *conform*.

And why must the middle class conform? Because little separates them from
proledom. Certainly not their income. Respectability means keeping up the habits
that keep you from becoming another "deplorable", who often have lots of personal
and life drama. Middles live by codes.

Because of these material realities, the middle class plays the role of morality police.
Their main asset is their home, and the patrolling of morality helps preserve the
niceness of their neighborhood - and their net worth.

Remember: Class is downstream of material conditions.

Above this, the upper middle. Here, many living expenses are permitted to fall, since
the UMC does not have to follow (expensive) trends, while income drastically
increases. This creates an inevitable and perpetual surplus. Within a year of
graduation, I had >100k.

Here begins the accumulation of capital. What is money here? Money is a tool. Money
is power. Money is not hoarded, but deployed to useful ends. The UMC readily uses
money to solve its problems. But it primarily is a means of accumulating more money
and projecting power.

Money can be donated to buy influence, and influence can be used to advance the
self. Every investment begets further investment. The UMC is funding political
movements, research, etc. Bill Gates was born UMC. As Burnham says, the UMC is
the strongest part of the ruling class.

Now, let us digress.

Imagine the classes as celestial spheres in the firmament. Hydrogen gas is capital.

The life of the underclass is fragmented, bizarre, full of misadventures, prison, and
drama. They go from gig to gig, and sometimes prison to prison. They are space
debris.

If the space debris can cohere, if some semblance of order can be brought to life, then
there appears a terrestial planet out of these space rocks. The proletarian has a
functioning life now, a routine, and steady work. But no savings. No capital. That can
change.

When a proletarian internalizes the disciplined living of the middle class, the need to
live respectably, it begins to save. It develops a small capital buffer, which is the
"comfort" of the middle. The middles are gas giants. They have capital, but it is inert.

However, the process of saving is long. Eventually, a successful middle accumulates

enough gas that something changes. The capital begins to work upon itself. The gas
ignites.

A star is born.

A Novus Homo takes their place among the Nobiles.

Which, finally, leads me back on track. The upper class. While the process of entering
the nobiles is slow, the ascent of a lesser noble to the greater is exceedingly fast. It
happens in the "liquidity moment". The UMC have, on average, a few million. They're
multimillionaires.

In the liquidity moment, one very quickly experiences an increase in wealth in an

order of magnitude or multiple orders of magnitude. A critical point is passed and
explosive growth occurs.

A star becomes a giant.

And what is money for these giants? Everything. Nothing. What is water to a fish?

Money is merely the reality they dwell in.

Fundamentally, the upper class does not understand money. In this, and many other
ways, they are the most alien class of all.

When I met @babs11111111, he asked me how much my Camry cost. His guess?
$500,000.

But at the same time, the upper class can be quite frugal. I make money. For better or
for worse, the upper class is beyond making money. That means no more is coming.

The Banana Test. I do not know how much a banana costs ($10?) and don't care to
learn. By contrast, Babs knows how much a banana costs, down to the cent, because
the principal must be preserved, but for big prices, he has no understanding, while I
am shrewd and haggle.

The upper class just has money. It's always there. Like the tap, you turn it on and fill
up a glass. But it has to be respected carefully, because one day it might go away
forever and never return.

That's the balancing act. The principal must be preserved, at all costs.

From this, we see a material reason why the upper class is fundamentally anti-
consumerist (whereas the upper middle is minimalist but can spend a lot).
Consumerism would devour the fortune and return them to the lower nobility from
whence they came.

Not that that happens often.

In the act of rising, the upper middle class striver builds ideologies and movements,
which become funded into small NGOs, which grow into large bureaucracies of power
in triumph. But what happens after the rise?

The NGOs, finally, begin to do their ostensible goal.

Where the UMC spends to create power, the UC is beyond striving. The NGOs stop
being a front for a machine (or at least, not their machine), and become real
charitable endeavors. The main living of the UC person is to be a socialite, and that
means charity, charity, charity.

For a long time, the upper class family exists in this kind of philanthropic stasis,
throwing many fantastical and spectacular charity galas. But eventually, all things
end. At long last, the star's fuel burns out.

Things begin to change, once more. The final change.

An upper class family, spending all its time socializing, builds up deep and wide
connections across an entire civilization. Normally, it exists in torpor. When the
money ends, it wakes. In its waking, it stirs, and it moves the world. Activity goes out
across the connections.

This causes the entire civilization to shake. When an UMC family ascends to the
upper class, that makes the news.

But the decline and fall of an upper class family? That makes world history.

The conditions which create and sustain an upper class family are fundamentally
rooted in some reality about material conditions. When those are invalidated, the era
is changing.

The liquidity moment is so explosive because its agent becomes an avatar of world
historical trends.

The ending and undoing of those world historical trends is not only as spectacular, it
is more spectacular.

The giant goes supernova.

Elements are scattered to the far solar winds in vast, billowing clouds.

In some distant cloud, the fragments begin to cohere again...

So why does Fussell not talk about money? Part of it is that money played a much less
central role back then. And why is that?

Something has happened since the 80s.

Let's talk about consumer debt.

Do the proles have debt? Yes and no. Many of you are familiar with payday lenders,
which charge hundreds of % in interest a year. Now that people have cottoned, they
are evolving into "social justice microlenders" that... charge hundreds of % in interest
a year.

But that's not the only scheme. Witness CreditOne and other shady credit card
companies which charge fees for carrying a balance, fees not carrying a balance, a fee
when you pay, an annual fee, etc. Like the NASCAR card (NASCARD). Scams.

Or rent-to-own, which started with furniture and appliances, but has actually
expanded to housing, with the same exploitative terms. In this context, Walmart's
layaway program, with an APR of 7-20%, like the rest of Walmart, is exploitative but
relatively benevolent.

Subprime car scams involve setting exorbitant payments and luring customers in
with promises of zero or almost zero down, then repossessing the car when they
inevitably fail to make the payment. Or they might, like the others, charge really high
interest.

Which leads to the other side of prole debt. No debt. Proles come to distrust this
usury, and for good reason. So the other side of proles is movements like Dave
Ramsey and going totally debt-free. It makes sense. The kind of debt they run into is
almost all totally predatory.

Leaving the proles behind, how does the middle class interact with debt? The middle
class believes in having a sanitary credit score. Why? Because it wants debt. But only
some debt. Instead of all-or-nothing, like the proles, the middle class separates out its
debts.

There is good debt and bad debt, and these differ primarily by category. Good debt
includes house debt and at least used to include student debt. Car debt is also
considered good debt. Bad debt is debt for frivolous purchases and other things.
Credit card debt is bad debt.
 https://www.youtube.com/embed/u4EC2aNGGoA

This is a middle class credit card ad. Let's analyze it, shall we? The card level is fairly
basic, but it is treated as an aspirational goal (gotten after building credit with a
pointless card). This is topped off with the symbolism of climbing a mountain.

This act of climbing a mountain on vacation, a status expenditure, is treated as far

more important than the boyfriend (not husband). Marriage still carries a lot of
cultural cachet with the UMC while it is slowly dissolving in the middle. Class matters
in how things are marketed

So to transition to the UMC, let's look at an ad for a similar product, but for a higher
class. Same thing, different culture.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LB29bnJU7ME

Like the previous ad, it has a travel motif. But the vibe is artsy. Furthermore, the card
opens the beginning of a journey, not the end. While the Gold card is the result of
building credit for middles, I got offered one (and similar cards) as a broke, 0 income
college student.
 https://www.youtube.com/embed/zQuK23p4uqE

In this ad and the next ad, we see the principles of amusement and countersignalling
the high - shows you don't hold it in awe. One of my friends, descended from a
colonial governor, wears work boots and T-shirts smeared with truck grease to Whole
Foods.

The card the Vikings are pitching is one of CapitalOne's top cards.

Here we have big deal Wes Anderson treated with humor and irreverence.
Countersignal the high.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rbO3BS0Uzm0

Before I forget - note the importance of family in the sincere commercial! What is the
end of the journey she undertakes? A good marriage! Striver middles, take note.

So how does this tie into UMC relations with credit? First of all, everything is cheaper
for the rich. As mentioned with Costco, the prices are lower. When I shop on Amazon,
I get special Amazon Business Prime discounts not available to the hoi polloi.
You apply corporate discounts, that's another price cut. But the credit cards play into
this. When you spend, you get money or points. These programs synergize. On
UberEats, I pay with a Samsung wallet discount offer on UberCash, and those
purchases earn Marriott points.

So I get cashback on the underlying credit card in the wallet, points with Samsung,
points with Uber, points with Marriott, and all of these get redeemed in my normal
life - on top of cheaper sticker price to begin with. All in all, my prices are probably
20% less.

The rich do not go into debt on the same terms as the poor. Like many things, it's
cheaper to be rich.

But the relationship with debt, like money, also differs. Money and debt are both part
of one pool, liquidity. It's all lumped together. What matters is the cost (opportunity
cost + APR, cash has APR 0%), availability in crisis (cash is perfect), and liquidity
needs.

In that sense, debt is not necessarily a meaningful concept. Debt becomes part of a
general pattern of money deployment to maximize asset efficiency. It's not debt, but
leverage, to be used wisely. It's all of a kind.

Now, for the upper class, which has money for everything, why would they need debt?
And generally, they don't. But there are exceptions. When an upper class family
begins to decline, they still need to maintain their social and philanthropic
obligations. It's all they know.

In those times, you begin to see noble estates take on debt. And as these estates
become increasingly indebted, they reach a crisis point. They have to act. Let's take a
look at an example.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, a grain glut and economic shifts led to the
collapse in value and income of vast landed estates, a ruinous event for great
magnates and small alike. In Eastern Europe, the result was communism and
collectives run by these very nobles.

But in Britain? The great lords decided on marriage. They went across the pond and
found wealthy heiresses.

The birth of an Anglo-American empire.

The birth of its champion.

Churchill was the fruit of such a union.

His old (American) home is down the road from my lake house.

Like I said, the decline and fall of upper class families? That shapes world history.

That's all for today.

If you want more abstract, read my fucking blog

Theory!

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