Luxury beliefs are status symbols
robkhenderson.substack.com
Luxury beliefs are status symbols
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#2Huh, I've only heard about luxury beliefs in the context of trans people. I'm sure the social cachet of blue hair and pronouns outweighs all the other stuff.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#3I don’t think the author understands what people mean when they say “defund the police”.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#4I don’t think the author understands what people mean when they say “defund the police”.
What do they mean? I’m guessing your answer is something like “reallocate police funds to other services”, but without your own explanation, this comment has little value other than signaling political belief.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#5Aren’t all publicly avowed beliefs signals of some kind?
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#6I find it hard to take this seriously. The author mostly talks about the elite and the working class while ignoring the middle class.
In most wealthy countries, the educated middle class is about as large as the working class. There are often massive cultural differences between the groups. Many of the things the author attributes to the elite can also be attributed to the middle class. The same ideas the author found at elite institutions such as Yale and Cambridge are also prevalent in most middle-class universities.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#7I think the author misses the point that often those poorer people who are victimized by criminals are then ignored or even endangered by the police response. Police budgets keep increasing and outcomes including percentage of solved crimes keep declining. A good portion of that money could be much better spent on eradicating poverty, treating drug addictions instead of incarcerating users, keeping people in schools, keeping parents in homes, and having mental health resources for people before they are beyond help.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#8I don’t think the author understands what people mean when they say “defund the police”.
What do they mean? I’m guessing your answer is something like “reallocate police funds to other services”, but without your own explanation, this comment has little value other than signaling political belief.
It means reallocating funds and responsibilities to social services.
Or, firing entire police departments and building a new one from scratch with a different mandate - like the wildly successful Camden NJ experiment.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#9Huh, I've only heard about luxury beliefs in the context of trans people. I'm sure the social cachet of blue hair and pronouns outweighs all the other stuff.
I can see supporting trans people but not being trans yourself as a luxury belief.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols
#10Rob, you seem to be about 30. Maybe slow down and consider that you don't know everything yet. Having servants is purely a status symbol? Just because Veblen said it doesn't make it true. The rich of his era owned palatial estates with hundreds of rooms and acres of topiary. How the hell were they supposed to maintain all this property without servants? A mansion needs a staff, and those staff are servants of the owner.
They clearly don't need the actual mansions, but calling the servants themselves nothing but a status symbol is a stretch. Heck, I employ a maid today. Do you know how many people know that? Zero, including the people reading this comment, because none of you know who I am. How can this be signaling if there are zero people being signaled to? How about I already work a full-time job, have ten screws in my spine, and got tired of constantly cleaning my own house, so hired someone else to do it?
The graphic you get to at the bottom about defunding the police doesn't even truly support your claim. The top income group supports at a 32% rate. The bottom income group supports at a 22% rate. That isn't some massive discrepancy. Support for this position is clearly not only coming from people living in gated communities with private security.
Enough with the arm chair psychoanalysis. Why does every somewhat smart person on the Internet think they know the true inner desires of every other person on the planet that they hide from themselves? I would imagine support for the variety of policy positions represented by the slogan "defund the police" comes from quite a large number of different reasons. Saying the only reason anyone holds this belief is as a status symbol is nonsense. At best, it's a symbol of allegiance to popular-on-the-Internet leftist beliefs. That may be a "status" of a sort, but it isn't an indication that you're a Yale legacy. Indeed, it can't be, as your own graphic is showing it is not a majority belief for any income segment at all. Why would you solidify your belonging to a group by holding a belief that most of that group doesn't agree with?