I haven't finished reading the article, but I just wanted to note that most of the secretaries at a certain institution of higher education make more than "instructors" and at least some researchers.
Woo, unions!
Reading further in the article, I also want to note that every time I see a Louis Vuitton bag my fugly receptors overload and send random chemical impulses to other areas of my brain and I start doing a little spastic dance in the middle of the street. This happens with distressing frequency. Okay, not really, but they are awfully ugly.
Woo unions! But "instructors" notoriously get screwed; they might be one step up from invisible adjuncts.
This inequality has been coming for a long time. Believe it or not, Micky Kaus' book on the subject is well thought of, and it's what, twenty years old? I read excerpts. Christopher Lasch's True and Only Heaven delves into some of the same issues, and that's where I got the idea that Kaus' book might be worthwhile.
The stuff mentioned in the article may sting but you can live with it. It's when actual life chances--college, travel, internships effect you and your children's lives that it hurts. I can handle the social stuff with bravado, not so the other.
Yet he feels compelled to keep quiet when he finds himself across the table from a friend who orders three glasses of wine to his tap water...
Don't keep quiet. Look him in the eye and say, "More than two by the glass is tacky. Order a half bottle." But if the guy has friends who do this sort of thing to him, he has a different definition of "friend" to mine.
I'll end up spending about a week's pay in the next two nights, probably more. It'll feel worth it while I'm hanging out with them without any of the unpleasant reminders that our lives have seriously diverged since high school, but it's going to sting when I get back."
Boy do I have trouble feeling sorry for this guy. Get some better friends, dude. Mansion? There's no way your friendship with these guys was originally based on a shared love of going to insanely expensive clubs full of douchebags. Your high school friends got rich and have since become tools. Let them go.
Delurking to comment on that article - thought it was completely ridiculous. Gasp: some people earn more than others - shock horror! Kid asks for a cellphone and gets snapped at??? Calm *down* Ms Gilbertson. (We got our 9 yo a mobile phone for her last birthday - it cost 40GBP and that wasn't the cheapest we could have bought. And she's really not one of the rich kids!)
I did read an article last year about how people are mostly happier when those around them are poorer than they are - apparently envy is not good for us. Another shock horror moment. Seems to me like some people worry too much about what their so-called friends think of them.
My $0.02:
1) College suppresses small but significant class differences. (Before everyone jumps on me, please note the 'small but significant' part.) You probably won't find the kid who's working the dining hall dish line palling around with the Juicy sweatsuit and Louis Vuitton handbag set, and I'm pretty sure my freshman-year roommates didn't like me because I dressed poorly and my daddy didn't golf (or, more charitably, because I thought they were a bunch of spoiled, self-absorbed MRS seekers), but smaller differences, like who's paying the car insurance are flattened out by the pressure of classes and papers. My friends generally went to private high schools and took no loans for college, but like that matters in college? I was at least their equal in coursework, so we were study buddies and classmates, and while I worked 15-20 hours a week, it wasn't really obtrusive and most of them worked 5 hours just to have something to do. And it's college. Who talks about loans? Everyone runs around in jeans and college sweatshirts. Their spending money came from their parents, mine came from my job, but we were all mostly broke.
You notice little differences, but it doesn't matter so much when you're all drinking. So we get this idea that really, we're all equal. And then..
2) We graduate. Some people have loans. Some people have no loans. Some people's parents buy their first house and cars. Some people have a hard time making ends meet. Other people's parents only gave them $10K to start up. Etc. But since you're all friends, there's a tendency to assume everyone else must be in the same position. What, doesn't everyone's parents buy them a car? But we were all the same in college.
On the list of lifetime grievances, this is pretty small. We'll see if it stays small when all of our kids go to college in 20 years.
Yeah, what kept on hitting me about that article was "Haven't any of the richer friends ever heard of picking up a check?" If you want to do something your friends can't afford, you pay for them. Or you suck it up and do something else.
My third cent:
It's more noticeable due to the ease of meaningless connections due to the Internet and cell phones. If I had to keep track of all of these college friends with letters, I probably wouldn't.
I like what Sommer said in comment 6. My ex-husband's college friends are almost all intellectual-property lawyers and make loads of money; whenever we went out with them they would suggest these expensive Brazilian steakhouses and at the end of the night would insist on splitting the check evenly, for simplicity's sake, even though they knew we weren't wealthy. You couldn't get them interested in more low-key get-togethers. Everything had to be a big expensive event.
After a while, we were like, you know what? These people are really rude and obviously don't care about our company.
On the subject of class-mixing in university: even if we accept that higher education in general is more "meritocratic" that it was before, that doesn't necessarily mean that there is class diversity within universities. I go to a fancy private university and all of the people I know reasonably well are from upper-middle-class, professional families.
In Canada, because almost all the universities are publicly run, you do get class diversity. At University of Toronto, the so-called "Harvard of the North," I knew people who were children of the elite, as well as people (like myself) who grew up on welfare.
To LB's 9, the article has the following quote. I can't tell if Johnson wanted to pay for it all or not. Also, it is almost as if he blames the anxiety of the rich on those who aren't.
Perhaps the most fraught social ritual of all when it comes to money and friendship is the settling of a restaurant bill. "I know wealthy people who are extremely troubled by the whole idea of who's going to pay the bill," Mr. Johnson said. "They're terrified for hours before it happens."
He said he has found himself arguing over the check with a dining companion who was not as wealthy. "Sometimes people feel obligated to buy me dinner because they don't want me to think I'm expected to pay for the meal," he said. "I don't really appreciate it. If anything, I think it's unfortunate that people feel that uncertainty."
Amongst the people who we spend most time with irl, we're all very open about money. We've taken friends out for meals because they couldn't afford it and we wanted the pleasure of their company. It seems like some of those in the article weren't actually talking about *friends* - otherwise why was everything such a problem? - but rather acquaintances.
The public sector/private sector choice after college/university has a massive effect on income too. My partner works for a wellknown university and is doing really well there (and I don't work atm because we home educate), but compared to so many people we both know in soulless careers in merchant banks or huge corporations, he earns fuck all.
Well, that's what it is. In a different world, you would be just acquaintances; you probably wouldn't have written weekly letters to your friends who all moved off to New York and Chicago while you were in grad school. But now you stay in touch more tho' you have little in common.
every time I see a Louis Vuitton bag my fugly receptors overload
Fucking right. Especially the white ones. Don't people understand that they're ugly?
Also, there's not only a difference in the amount of money people make but their attitudes towards money. When Ellie came up to visit from Texas, we had plans to get together with one of her friends from high school for a night out. Her friend was planning the evening and she emailed me to get an idea for the type of budget to give him. She suggested $200 a head as what she considered to be a reasonable sum. We both make around the same amount but that's sure not what I consider the budget for going out on a Friday night.
The white ones are by Takashi Murakami. He sucks, too.
I've tried to have earnest discussions about LV bags with a few (female) fans, to try and decipher why exactly they like these things. I've heard a few silly comments about "quality" (as in durability, which is a hilarious rationalization for spending $700+ on a handbag) and similar such nonsense, but I really do think in the end the attration comes down to "they're really expensive" and "everyone knows they're really expensive", which makes them a pure status symbol. It's really not much different from jewelry; there may be some correlation between pure aesthetic beauty (to the extent this can be measured independantly of "that which will make others envy me is beautiful") and price, but it's surprisingly low.
15, 17: Try to butch it up a little, guys.
11: Also, it is almost as if he blames the anxiety of the rich on those who aren't.
That was one of the things that struck me about the article; there was a fair amount of angsting from rich people who were uncomfortable dealing with those who have less money. Is there a slight flavor of "This is an equal society, and we must all treat each other as equals, which in this case means ignoring the very real advantages I have while I do nothing for you?"
To what dagger aleph in 12 said about class diversity, the article is definitely about tension between the middle-class and the upper-class. Or the upper-middle class and the upper-class (if you want to look at social status, assistant professors, book editors, and journalists are all high-prestige jobs if relatively low pay). Styles couldn't handle real class diversity, I bet. And what Conley says about meritocratic admissions at elite institutions doesn't check out AFAIK; they're still heavily skewed toward the top end of the income distribution.
(apostropher, the discussion about making fun of feminine women is thataway.)
One of the improv groups around here last summer staged a 'Louis Vuitton' support day, where they painted the little fleurs and diamonds on the sidewalk and then said it was in support of this Louis Vuitton guy.
At least, I'm hoping it was an improv group preying on gullible passersby (a la the Jaywalking 'Stop Women's Suffrage'). Otherwise...
Well, anyone spending $700 on a 'durable' handbag is probably someone I don't have much to say to.
I've always found it quite disturbing how having money at one point in your life makes it possible to save a lot more for the future. I had no loans from college and enough money to make a down payment on an apartment to live in during grad school (still took a mortgage, which I was able to get because I had no loans). So I'm not paying rent in grad school (and mortgage payments That seems to be the problem with inequality in our society- if you have money, you have a good credit score and can pay less for loans, etc., when you're the one who can most afford to pay more. Even worse is this crap about assigned risk, where a bad credit score increases unrelated things like auto insurance rates because poor people are bigger risks in general. That shouldn't be legal.
Hmm, using less than signs makes half of the comment go away...
So what do you guys think about the knock-off Louis Vuitton trend? I've known women--fashionable but not, I would've thought, particularly brand-beholden women--who were upfront about their bag/wallet/suitcase being a fake, and I just had to boggle. Why bother?
26: They get mistaken for HTML thingies. If you want to make a <, type <
I just had dinner the other night with a friend from my cohort and his lawyer wife (conveniently, it turned out to be on them; thanks, lawyer wife!), and she I asked her if her bag were a genuine Burberry, and she just admitted it was a knockoff—but confronted with a question, why wouldn't you? I suppose it's more of a mystery in the Vuitton case since, as established, they're ugly, whereas I, anyway, like the Burberry pattern.
I guess I can understand paying $10 or $20 for a fake $100 Kate Spade or LV purse or something on the street but I remember an article in the NYT a while back about people paying $500 for fake $5000 Hermes Birkin bags. That's truly mindboggling - paying more than any sane person should for a real purse for a counterfeit.
But think of the craftsmanship that went into that thingy.
I assume most of the women I see walking around with them are carrying knock-offs, and that just makes it worse. If you're not getting status out of it, you must actually think that...thing is attractive, and that makes me weep; it probably means their sense of aesthetics is totally inseparable from their sense of what looks statusy. When I first started noticing them around NY, I didn't understand that they were designer, and I filed them under "tacky, like big gold jewelry" in my mind. Only when I got up close to one and saw that the pattern was an "LV", and thought hard about what "LV" could stand for did I realize the truth.
And, on preview, w-lfs-n's right. Burberrys usually look decent (though not on that golf bag).
I work in the fraud dept. at ebay, and it takes me back a bit to see how many people are willing to buy the knockoffs out of Asia. It's also a bit mindboggling, although quite amusing, to see how many people don't realize that an "authentic Luis Vuitton" out of China or Malaysia for half price or less means it's a knockoff. Ditto for the Rolex's, Burberry, Omegas, and so on.
Thirteen burberri pandas lovingly flayed, their skins tanned by eunuchs, stitched together by two feuding tailors from Madagascar…
No, what was strange about one friend's fake LV...was it a wallet?...was that she volunteered the information about it's being fake. She was almost proud of it! I would have suspected her of perpetrating some kind of ironic social commentary if she weren't usually so earnest, um, in her own inimitable way.
But from what y'all have said, isn't having a fake LV better than having a real one?
Maybe that goes along with the pretending-to-not-be-able-to-afford-cabs thing in the Times article. Or perhaps she's saying that while she may be taken in by the current fashion trends, at least she is not so foolish as to spend a ton of money on it.
Guys, let's stop kidding ourselves; the real class distinction is between those who can identify all the references in this, and who's just frontin'.
37 is sort of what I was reaching for. One could make an argument that having fake LV was morally superior to having real LV, but I'm not really buying it, so to speak.
I totally want to see that movie. Also, I used to have a $10 knock-off Kate Spade bag, which I refused to put the fake label on, just b/c I liked the style of the thing but who the fuck is going to spend a ton of money on a purse? I'm proud to say, though, that I do have a pair of Prada shoes ($40, on consignment) that I wear constantly so that they're actually kind of filthy and scuffed. Somehow it pleases me to have my knock-about summer shoes be Pradas.
The friends with money thing is interesting, and I actually do have some sympathy for the fact that being the one who has it can make one feel awkward--there's a fine line between being generous and making someone else feel bad, sometimes. But of course, that said, the penultimate anecdote really is the way to go: "ok, let's go to X (cheap place" vs. "really, I'm not crazy about X, how about Y (expensive place), my treat?" is, I think, a nice balance between frankness and tact.
It's easier, of course, if your income relationships with your friends shift about over time, so that everyone gets to be the one who makes more money sometimes and everyone gets to be the broke one. A more difficult problem, I think, is when the disparity isn't just one of income, but one of class (?) norms and expectations: eating out at all vs. "who spends money at restaurants?," visiting friends who live in suburban fancyland when you rely on public transportation, that kind of thing.
I had to google "Louis Vuitton handbag" to figure out what y'all were talking about and yes. Yes, they are extremely ugly. I've oft wondered at the appeal.
And the main page photo at the Louis Vuitton site makes me cringe.
39: I got GR, Gatsby, Ulysses, Prufrock, Raven, and ToTC, but then I'm done. I am a pleb.
I've certainly struggled with money issues when going out with friends who are no longer grad students and earning the big bucks.
It's fine is there's just two or three people, then everyone is OK with doing something affordable. Once you get big groups together though, it gets harder if the low income people are in the minority.
Title s/b "Friends With Benefits"
I found it by googling. I was like 15 when I read it. I don't remember it well enough to get quotes.
Oh. Is there more Streetcar than just the "Wilma!"?
There's apparently some Updike in there as well, but I can't be bothered to care.
50: No, that's it.
Also, I think one of those is "Rabbit, Run", but it's been a while.
Oh, is that the bit about "See Dino run"? More stuff I read when I was 15.
DFW's review of Updike in Consider the Lobster is fucking hilarious, and I've never even read any Updike.
I, anyway, like the Burberry pattern.
B-dub's a chav. I knew it.
Burberry is disgusting. How cliched prep can you get?
There isn't anything inherently wrong with the Burberry plaid; it's a perfectly inoffensive pattern, or at least it was, before the company decided to hire young hip designers to broaden its appeal to Japanese schoolgirls and New York socialite pretenders. It's the connotation-denotation problem we're getting sidetracked into here.
And the main page photo at the Louis Vuitton site makes me cringe.
Might make a nice hat. For a clown. I can't help it though. Everytime I think of Vuitton though, I think of that scene in Bonfire of the Vanities where McCoy's mistress's Vuitton bags signify her social climbing vulgarity.
Anyway, if I were going to drop 700 on a bag, it would be this one. Generous lurkers, you know where to reach me.
60: Is Burberry still prep in the States? I foresee some wonderful encounters.
61: Style is about both denotation *and* connotation. It's an unavoidable dialectic.
I bought this handbag (have we stopped called them "purses"? Are "purses" only what your mother carries?) a while back and felt like it was a ridiculous extravagance.
I was only dimly aware that some people spend $700 on such things.
B, it's more that w-lfs-n's comment seemed to tend towards the denotative and your rejoinder to the connotative; I thought I'd take a shot at disambiguating.
And then there'sthis:
...I used to have a $10 knock-off Kate Spade bag, which I refused to put the fake label on, just b/c I liked the style of the thing...
65: Every single bag on that page is actually nice.
I hope Burberry drops its connotation-denotation line so I can feel okay about finding it so attractive.
Well, I also think the Burberry plaid is, eh.
My main association with Burberry is that the Raincoat in Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincaot was a Burberry which makes me like the brand. But the ads in the New Yorker are terrible.
In my group of friends the flip side of the "friends with money" problem is that the friends with less money tend to have more free time (I realize this is not necessarily true in society as a whole). So the friends without money are sensitive to making plans that are, to them, a waste of money, and the friends with money don't want to make plans that are, to them, a waste of time.
Similarly the friends with money are more likely to show up late to gatherings and be tired / distracted.
I agree with BPhD that it's an advantage if people switch roles. I used to be in the friends without money category and lately I'm sliding into the friend with money, but I'm glad the relationships aren't fixed.
I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn't go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne's loft in NY sometime suring the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end.
Many of my friends come from/have more money than they do, but the friends I'm thinking of are pretty uniformly sensitive to the fact that I don't have it. If they weren't they just wouldn't be my friends. We're still pretty young though. Sometimes I think I see one of them, who comes from and aspires to have the most money, morphing into someone I don't like. I've heard her complain about the onerousness of tipping and saying she doesn't feel guilty anymore now that she donates $30 a year to charity. She meant that last bit to be sort of ironic, but it just doesn't fly any more. You don't get to be selfish just because you know you're selfish. I started to see this process, in fact, when I first learned that she bought a Prada bag. It was a pretty nice bag, but come on. All those bags on the site dagger aleph linked to were nicer. It's not so much the extravagance that bothers me, but the commodity fetishism. I've seen $3000 dresses that I can imagine wanting to buy if I had that kind of money to spend on a dress, but that's because they were really fucking gorgeous dresses, not because of their label.
I hate hearing Leonard Cohen explain his songs. It spoils them. I'm still holding my hands over my ears and singing "Lalala, I can't hear your 'Suzanne' back story."
Tia: And when one buys a handbag (or anything else) from Elsewares, a portion of the sale goes to charity (you get to choose from among five). Takes care of the spending-too-much-on-a-handbag problem and the not-giving-enough-to-charity problem.
73: Apologies.
The quoted bit comes from the liner notes to the greatest hits collection, and I enjoy those notes because they don't explain the songs exactly, they just comment on them.
75: Huh. I thought the Suzanne notes I read were from the Greatest Hits collection. It was saying that Suzanne was a woman he had a one night stand with that spoiled it.
Burberry is disgusting. How cliched prep can you get?
My only association with Burberry is with trenchcoats (one of which my dad has, and he's not preppy, so you'd best back the fuck off). Whenever I walk past a Burberry store I'm always dismayed to see it filled with crap (I recently walked past one at the stanford mall on the way to a butcher and discovered all sorts of pastel shit) and not wall-to-wall trenchcoats.
have we stopped called them "purses"?
You know what word I really, really hate? Pocketbook! (pronounced pock-eh-book). thank god people don't say that anymore. purse is kind of icky too.
also, handbag/NY~car/LA.
so vuitton bag ~ hummer, except no gas.
77: Yeah, Burberry to me looks like my grandfather's raincoat. 'Prep' isn't my first reaction. Same thing with madras pants, they're what my great-uncle Ben used to wear golfing. It was a bit strange when I started seeing them at J. Crew. Old people's fashion is the new young people's fashion, apparently.
my dad has, and he's not preppy, so you'd best back the fuck off
Your dad is so prep that the only way I'd be scared of him is if he was with his lacrosse team.
I call them 'purses', usually, unless they're expensive, in which case they're handbags. But I'm from sorta the Midwest and too trashy really to know what the cool kids are doing in these sorts of things. $20 is plenty for a purse, since my cat will probably just eat it.
Burberry does the coats in the hideous plaids, right?
Old people's fashion is the new young people's fashion, apparently.
Actually, that's not too far off, I'd say.
handbag:NY :: car:LA
Yes, absolutely, which is why I feel like my only real option is a hearty "fuck all that": I tote around a canvas bag from my local independant bookstore. I know, I know. it's the last-ditch snobbishness of the genteel poor. Still.
Much more talk about handbags and shoes and y'all will force SCMTim and I to start marathon-commenting on the NBA playoffs.
I'm just sayin'.
I wanted to talk about money, but the Unfoggetariat cannot be tamed.
Anyone here troubled by excess money can go to my site and click on the Paypal tarsier.
82: I tote around a canvas bag from my local independant bookstore.
I use a jute bag from the library - do I win the snobby genteel poor prize?
Nice to hear all you Americans talking about handbags and not purses. Now if we could only get you playing football with a round ball ...
82 - I recently came into posession of a canvas bag from the Strand and it's just such the perfect size and shape bag for carrying aroud the city. It makes me feel like a total yuppie tool, though. I've been internally debating whether it is more or less obnoxious than the proverbial NPR tote bag. I kind of hate myself for having it, but it's just so cute and striped.
do I win the snobby genteel poor prize
I never carry more than will fit in my pockets.
Just get one of those hipster shoulder bags. Bad for your back, though.
87: An NPR bag is lamer than a Strand bag. In fact, I don't think a Strand bag is particularly lame. My two cents.
I had a prof at the University of Toronto who carried his lecture notes, student essays, etc., in plastic grocery-store bags that looked pretty heavily-used.
89 - I've got a couple of those, too. I'm a sucker for bags. Not for typical girlie fashion reasons but due to my engineer's mindset. It's like knowing you have the perfect tool for the job. I have all kinds of cheap, utilitarian bags in every shape and size. God forbid I actually have to look nice or match an outfit, though. Then I'm SOL.
It's like knowing you have the perfect tool for the job.
I get that sensation constantly. For some reason, though, almost everybody at the mall gets a little freaked out when I show them.
I never carry more than will fit in my pockets.
I don't even have pockets.
if you want to look at social status, assistant professors, book editors, and journalists are all high-prestige jobs if relatively low pay
I'm no regular hereabouts, and so don't know where you are. I can sure tell where you're not, though.
I don't even have pockets.
Try wearing pants sometime, Ficke.
I still carry my backpack almost everywhere. It has a place for my laptop!
83: Apo, I plan to make my millions with a new bumpersticker—"My Boss Is a German Power Forward"
95: Not in New York, are you saying? What I mean is, insofar as we have a class system in the US (and we do), those jobs are all higher-status than you might expect from their salary. A fair number of my classmates from a Fancy College have gone into those professions. I don't think that many are driving subway trains for (not necessarily reliable source) a similar salary.
And this is not a complaint about my pay. I'm just saying that the New York Times's selection of poorer people still reflects a restricted social milieu.
I have a Burberry terench coat that I bought in 98 or 99 before their current revival really got going. I bought it at a charity shop, so it was nicely worn and didn't look gawdy. It fit me perfectly. It's even cooler, because it has an Ausetn Reed label too.
I have a friend from college with whom I've recently gotten in touch who's making big bucks as a lawyer. I'm basically broke right now and living on a grad student's salary--though I don't have the excuse of being a grad student.
We went out once in August, and I was planning to split the bill, but she wanted to treat, and then she took me out on my birthday, so I let her treat. Then we spent Thanksggiving with her in-laws. I had tea at her house last month. I had sort of said that money was tight, and that I didn't like mooching off of her, but that I'd love to do a potluck or something.
Now, I'm wonderign whether my wanting to do something "in" ratehr than "out," --I also wanted to see her place--was my being sensitive to cost and not her time. The baked goods were store bought, so it wasn't a huge deal.
If I were really rich I'd send a Nigerian-spam like email to some stranger offering $10k, but I'd actually give it to them if they responded.
MW, I didn't just mean geography. But it's a fine start -- I'm in DC, and with the exception of the few journalists who are highly paid, your list doesn't resonate with me. We have high status but underpaid folks here too, of course, especially in the public sector.
The other meaning of 'where you are' I had in mind is placement on your life's path. I'd guess, based on the occasional lurk, that many readers of these words can expect to be earning quite a bit more 15 years from now than they make now -- and at a rate much higher than the national average. And know from experience that perceptions about money and status are pretty different as the decades go by. One's own and others.
To change the subject, something I've always wondered about the Llano Estacado: are any of the stakes extant? I wouldn't think they'd be in place, of course, but are any in museums? How big are they? What do they look like?
(For those of you who did not grow up in Texas, the country around, and especially to the west of Lubbock is known as the staked plains, because the landscape is so flat and featureless that Natives put up stakes to find their way from one place to another).
The stakes are apparently a myth based on a mistranslation.
One learns something every day, whether one wants to or not. Thanks.
Okay, CharleyCarp has made more than ten comments. It's time to give him a fruit basket!
Welcome to the crackhaus, Charley.
I'm 35 and a new assistant professor (this is pretty old to be a new assistant professor) -- I'll probably be making a decent amount more in 15 years than I am now, but it won't be like the transition from visiting assistant professor to tenure-track, when my salary went up 40%. (Though I had taken a pay cut for a lighter teaching load; it was only a 25% raise over my first visiting job.) But on the other hand I haven't changed my lifestyle that much from graduate school. And my current salary is about exactly what that link gave as the base pay for a subway worker.
As for "high status," I guess I'm not claiming that the book editor would be the class equal (whatever that might mean) of the hedge fund folks; but still, that those professions don't capture the full range of classes in the U.S. Would you say that's true in DC? Isn't a low-paid journalist more likely to have gone to Ivy U. than someone making the same salary at the Dept. of Agriculture? (I don't know what people make at the Dept. of Agriculture, so the answer might surprise me.)
Okay, CharleyCarp has made more than ten comments. It's time to give him a fruit basket!
Ah, that's my job.
Fruit baskets also for dagger aleph and Stanley; anyone else I'm missing?
I suspect, in my totally obvious and ex recto way of suspecting, that social status and economic status have come apart in a way some upper-middle class types are unaware of. ('Oh, when you get your Ph.D., you can write your own ticket!' they say. Ha ha. 'But it's a Ph.D.!" Indeed.)
Since highly educated types have a similar social status -- will like the same things (e.g., Bostoniangirl has a thriftily acquired Burberry, I have a thriftily acquired pair of expensive boots), have heard of the same things, have similar concerns, have similar expectations of what is a normal life -- they tend to assume similar economic status. I know I think of a journalist as probably a higher-wealth career than it is, even though a promising young journalist may indeed be outearned by a promising young strapping carpenter.
I was just about to ask where my goddamn fruit basket was.
I have an outsized sense of entitlement, for a lumpen.
Don't take it personally, dagger. I know CharleyC from lighter drugs and am very happy to see him freebasing here.
I was going to make a similar point to Cala's 112. In talking about class, at least how the NYT sees class, education is the determining factor, not income.
One thing I've noticed lately is that with respect to some professional fields, you have to be rich to be poor. That is to say, most people I know who work for non-profits were only able to take such low-paying jobs because they had wealthy parents who could support them through long periods where they did non-paying internships, and helped them through the lean years when they first started working for low wages. These people take such jobs because in the future they'll have real prestige jobs that allow them to travel, etc.
I don't know if the decoupling of high income and social status is a new thing. Think about those Somerset Maugham novels full of characters who are "upper-class" but struggling to make ends meet. It seems that there have long been people who travel in certain circles but have to fake how wealthy they are.
Think about those Somerset Maugham novels full of characters who are "upper-class" but struggling to make ends meet.
Trollope too. Only in his novels nice parsons bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with racy aristocrats. People used to go into debt hosting royalty; now the royals are much more sensitve to this and try to do the entertaining themselves.
In DC, at least in the cartoon version, where you went to school doesn't mean much, except to the people who went to elite schools and haven't moved the ball downfield. What matters is power, and proximity to power.
Now there are plenty of cases where school ties get you a chance at proximity to power, but it's only a foot in the door. You still have to perform [fill in choice of unnatural act] to actually have power, either direct or derivative.
As for being underpaid, I guess that's relative. I don't think that the principal aides to the congressional leadership are very highly paid, nor would I consider Mr. Addington highly paid. Then again, I don't consider myself excessively paid either -- I know a bunch of people who make more, and countless others make orders of magnitude more -- but I make plenty more than Chief Justice Roberts. (I'm not counting capital gains here). I've got under 30-year-old associates in my firm making more than Karl Rove. And these folks (Rove, Roberts) are at the top in their institutions -- there are plenty of people at the WH who make plenty less than Mr. Rove, but nonetheless have high status jobs. I don't know where Mr. Rove lives, but on his salary, he couldn't buy a house in my neighborhood, and it's not all that, you know, rich.
For all the money, and all the status, though, it's the fruit basket that really makes it all worthwhile. If I'd known that all I had to do to get one was comment a certain number of times, I'd've assigned someone to write some comments long ago. How many do I need to make to get to the Silver Elite level?
Charley, you're shitting me: what do you think Rove makes? He couldn't afford a house in your neighborhood? I assumed he was a master of the universe.
Re fruit basket: It's not so much the fruit basket per se as the uptake given to my speech acts.
116: What's-his-face too. Uh, Chekhov.
One thing I've noticed lately is that with respect to some professional fields, you have to be rich to be poor.
Good point; something similar came up a lot in the earlier discussion. And it goes right to the example of Saiselgy, who I cited as a low-paid journalist in 110; if he had come out of Harvard with massive debt he probably couldn't have taken that job. And the average kid, if they go to Harvard, comes out with massive debt. (Though I don't know what kind of background the other TAPsters come from.)
Cala, I think you're right about education. (Journalists' pay: The daily newspaper reporter I knew in Pittsburgh made considerably less than I did at my lower-paying visiting position; it got discussed here somewhere, but Saiselgy made just about what I made at the higher-paying visiting position. Which amounts you can calculate from 110 and 101. Answer: Not much. Maybe the W. Post and NY Times pay more.)
[On preview: Charley, when I talk about underpaid I mean relative to prestige, pretty much. And if you have any power at all you're pretty much above the stratum that I was thinking of as invisible to the NY Times style section.
Dagger, was your speech act preemptively taken up?]
there are plenty of people at the WH who make plenty less than Mr. Rove, but nonetheless have high status jobs.
Isn't this exactly what everyone's been saying, just with a different example?
118: 161. Times 2.5, that's just north of 400, and nothing 'round here.
He wouldn't want to live here anyway: The hate spewing boggle eyed conservative up the block moved away, as did the more reasonable guy across and down one -- a now-former WH lawyer who's been on Nightline talking about WOT legal policy, for the design of which he will burn in all the hells, but who was also a decent employer of my daughter as a babysitter. And no, he didn't buy the house with his WH salary, but what he'd gotten at a big firm before taking that low pay high status job. It's all blue now.
Just refreshed my Austin memory via Google, and insofar as I have never informed, ordered, warned, or undertook on this site, my usage of "uptake" isn't quite right.
Goddamn philosomophy edumacation didn't take.
Here is one one fruit basket.
Here is another.
And here is a third.
What is the most phallic appropriate for newcomers?
Jackmormon: those are some lovely fruitbaskets.
Charley: is Rove's salary dictated by some rule? Because I just assumed GWB paid him whatever he thought he was worth. I don't think of Rove as a public servant. Funnily.
I would say that asking where your goddamn fruit basket was would've counted as an order, had the fruit basket not been supplied before you asked for it.
What s/b which.
No, gov't employees have a fairly strict payscale. They'll be paid outrageous sums the instant they leave public service, but while they're officially governmental emplyees, their payscale tends to be no more than upper-middle class.
127: See, to my way of thinking, "Where's my goddamn fruit basket?" is an inquiry, not an order.
128: I guess I never really thought of Rove as a public employee but rather as a personal employee of GWB, like a valet or something.
Did Edgar Bergen work for Charlie McCarthy?
There's a song by Joe Henry about Edgar Bergen.
Hook 'em CharleyCarp woo! Another Texpatriate in the District and the Mineshaft.
As for Llano Estacado, well, I dunno whether any of the stakes have been preserved, but there's a museum called the Panhandle Plains History Museum that would surely be the most likely place to find them. Also, weren't the stakes because the Spanish couldn't find any trees for tethering their horses? Beautiful country all the way through New Mexico; lived there for a long time when I was a kid.
There really should be a single link that gives the worthy newcomer a fruitbasket, gives the worthy newcomer a fruit basket, IYKWIM, and then gives the newcomer a hearty admonition to check out the archives.
Did Edgar Bergen work for Charlie McCarthy?
No, he didn't. If Rove is Beren, then why Rove be able to live wherever he wanted or make as much money as he wanted? That's the point, yo. Rove is the puppetmaster.
Here's a dKos entry, which I don't vouch for and in fact haven't read past the first paragraph or so, about Rove's wealth and real estate holdings.
I love me some tortured syntax.
Just commenting on autopilot.
I should be one of these, actually:
??
Too small to see, but that's the point.
I should have put "should be" in quotes, because I meant to suggest that proper verb to use is "is".
The important point here is that the President lives in public housing.
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/05/post_333.html
Saiselgy is pwned by †?! And it's the supposed expert, Dal/ton Con/ley, who made the error about equal access to elite colleges. Though Conley also did catch the importance of the explosion of inequality at the very top of the income ladder.
Another thing I wonder about: To what extent, as the article claims, does gentrification mix the "professional" and "working" classes? The article describes it as "an urban movement from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn to downtown Los Angeles" which I supsect is also misleading, as there may not be much pressure to gentrify at points in between where there's no housing bubble; Texas Tech professors don't have to buy houses on the East side of Lubbock. And they didn't manage to interview any people who'd become friends because of gentrification.
125: Those fruit baskets are a little lacking in the testicle department.
Re: gentrification. I too was pretty skeptical about the claim that gentrification brings people of different classes together socially. Gentrification just seems like a process of pushing the boundary between neighborhoods further and further; the professionals I know who live in the heart of Harlem or Bushwick don't socialize there. They just go home to sleep, really.
The article claims people in gentrifying neighborhoods get to know each other because their children go to the same schools. Whether or not this really leads to friendships, I have no idea.
And though (as noted above) the article does focus on social relationships between middle class folks and upper class folks, gentrification supposedly brings the middle class in touch with the working class. The article is all over the place.
There are good reasons for skepticism whenever the NYT trumpets a new social trend. Remember that article that claimed that men felt anxious about going out for dinner with another male, lest observers think they're gay? (I thought I saw that blogged here, but I can't find it).
And the average kid, if they go to Harvard, comes out with massive debt.
I'm curious about this. Because at Tia's college, the average kid, i.e. me, came out with around 20K of debt, i.e., the full federal student loan load, and the rest was picked up by the school, and some (but not much) my mom paid. Is Harvard really different?
147- I can talk about Harvard:
(1) the "average" student comes out with no debt (because parents pay), if you mean median or mode instead of mean.
(2) those who receive financial aid will take on about $25k in debt per year, and either their parents (if the school deems them able to pay) or the school (if the parents are poor) will cover the rest.
(3) If the school thinks your parents can pay but for whatever reason they can't, or if god forbid your parents decided to put your college savings in your name (in savings bonds or whatever -- BIG mistake!), then your are likely truly FUCKED and will have more like $40k debt per year.
I knew a lot of kids at my UC who had hefty student loans. Not Harvard level, but something like $20,000 by the end of four years. These were kids with California residency, even. Since I graduated, in-state tuition has gone up by some astronomical percentage, so I'll bet the problem is much worse now.
Oh, and Weiner (144), I don't think it's so much a question of our pwning Sausagely as him lifting stories and arguments from here serving as our conduit to the broader world.
I just realized 148 is completely full of shit. Or, rather, that those numbers I gave are for the law school, and that the college might have somewhat different policies.
Though, in my defense, I've seen numbers on the debt burden of Harvard undergrads, and I think they're pretty close to what I said (most people=$0, those with debt average about $100k, while a few unluckies end up with $160k+), so I'm guessing the policies don't differ too much.
I guess my college was much better than Harvard for financial aid. And my family even had more of a problem than usual, since they counted income from both parents when only one was contributing (though that's a common problem). But they didn't expect anyone to take on more than the FAFSA loans.
147 & 148 are about my experience, too. Basically, if your parents are very well off, you're fine; if you're very bright and not as well-off, you're fine; if you're moderately bright and middle-class, you're hosed.
if you're moderately bright and middle-class, you're hosed.
And the absolutely worstcase scenario is parents with a reasonable middle-class income, but unable or unwilling to make any contribution. I knew a couple of people like that (married one) and boy it sucks.
Look if you people don't want me to comment here anymore please just say so and I'll go away. That would be much nicer than this passive-aggressive approach you've been using of programming your site to give me nasty error messages every time I try and post.
Well, I (and my mom) got slightly screwed by the "unwilling" thing, but Tia's college wasn't asking anyone to take on any 20k of debt a year, unless their algorithm got way less generous up the ladder.
Harvard did suck for financial aid in the late 90s, it being a big deal to meet 100% of a student's FAFSA need. I've heard they've gotten better.
If you're sufficiently poor, you can attend Harvard for $4K a year (maybe even less now), and wind up with maybe $15-20K in federal loans afterwards.
154: Wait till the pizzas we ordered start showing up. Better hope you like anchovies.
158 - if true, this is indeed different from the law school. And good news.
159 - I LOVE anchovies -- how did you know?
The title of this post is now "Friends With Monkey".
147-8 etc.: I meant "average" to mean "from an average-income U.S. family," not "average for a kid who goes to Harvard." And I was actually speaking ex recto about debt at Harvard; I'm a bit shocked by Urple's $100K figure, maybe because back in my day the total load wasn't much over that. But Tia'scollege can stand in for elite institutions too, and from what Barbar and Cala say Harvard may have been exceptional and got better. So, that part of 120 is retracted.
161- ew, yuck...!
163- my "average" was in response to Tia's question in 147, though I see now that was derived from your 120. Regardless, I don't think the average kid (in the 120 sense) does well at Harvard, from a financial perspective. Though maybe they do less unwell than they did 10 years ago.
Oh, oh, I see, LB, you try to welcome Urple by passive-aggressive banning me, what with your pineapples and salty worms on your pizzas.
Urple, did you ever officially get a fruit basket?
167. No. That's probably why I feel so unwelcome.
Hey, you know, I never got a fruitbasket. There weren't no welcome wagon back in the bad old days.
There should be an extra-special fruitbasket for whiners.
During his college search 3 years ago, my brother was looking at Princeton for his "stretch" school, and found out that not only do they meet 100% of your FAFSA need (which is pretty common, and usually accomplished with loans), they do it all with grants. So if you go there, you have no debt when you graduate (or at least shouldn't according to the official definition of "need", which can be rather inaccurate). Easy to do when you have an $11 billion endowment, I suppose--although Harvard's is larger, and apparently students there still need loans.
I wish I'd seen this 140 comments ago. (Link to blog originally from Smasher.)
Actually Tia, your welcome gift will be Fontana (wearing a "Hi My Name is Darren" nametag) grabbing your ass.
Well, the thing is, 100% of FAFSA need means you graduate with about $17,500 in debt (assuming four years of Stafford loans) right off the bat. The rest the school can either make up in grants, or loans, or expected family/student contributions.
173- Princeton is notoriously generous, believing (correctly) that the crushing debt loads that non-rich kids take away from the Ivy colleges were seriously compromising their career choices (more lawyers and business-persons, fewer journalists and high school teachers).
It's a great policy.
My impression of Princeton is that it's more, uh, WASPy than say Harvard or Yale. Unfair?
You never can never be certain what's in the fruitbasket. On the other hand, many fruitbaskets are nicely bouncy.
Tia's college worked like Princeton. That's why Tia had around 20k in debt. And 174, I get that all the time anyway. That's not special.
And 174, I get that all the time anyway. That's not special.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: he'll be wearing his Edwar Penishands costume this time.
177 - that's my impression too, though I'm not sure whether or not it's fair.
177: They have eating clubs instead of fraternities. You're on the right track, I think.
Harvard has final clubs, Yale secret societies, don't know that the eating clubs are WASPier. (Though I'm still under the impression that Princeton is the WASPiest or at least preppiest of the three.)
And the absolutely worstcase scenario is parents with a reasonable middle-class income, but unable or unwilling to make any contribution. I knew a couple of people like that (married one) and boy it sucks.
This happened to my high school girlfriend. She ended up dropping out of UNM twice and eventually moving away. It really does suck.
