‘Rich’ Ain’t What It Used to Be

Green got clobbered from critics across the ideological spectrum. It was like America’s leading economic commentators were a 1990s Los Angeles street gang, and the only way to leave the gang was to be punched and kicked by each member on your way out.

Our own indispensable Scott Lincicome wrote a fantastic roundup of the pile-on. But he went further, which is why he titled his piece, “The $140,000 ‘Poverty Line’ Is Laughably Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?”

I think Scott is asking the right question, and I think all of his answers have merit. But I think he’s missing one, admittedly partial, explanation for why people feel poor and are pissed off about it.

Let’s revisit the concept of positional goods. Simply put, a positional good is a zero-sum good. If I have it, by definition you can’t. It gets more complicated than that, but that’s sort of the way to think about it for now. If you’re elected prom king, no one else is prom king. 

There’s another kind of good that is similar to a positional good and can sometimes also be one. These are Veblen goods (the concept was popularized by economist Thorstein Veblen). Part of the attraction of having a fancy car is the “signal” it sends that you can afford a fancy car. That’s a Veblen good. (In the 1990s, a good friend of mine had a used Honda Civic. We called it the “stealth mobile” because it rendered its passengers invisible to girls.) 

The Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut Coupé” is the rarest car in the world, with only two ever made. Not long ago, one sold for $140 million. That purchase is not only a classic example of conspicuous consumption (a Veblen good), but it’s also a positional good. Since the other one wasn’t for sale, buying it meant that nobody else in the world could have it. 

Veblen goods are always about wealth but can sometimes be about status, too. Positional goods—at least in the way I am using the term—are always about status, but can also be about wealth. If the richest kid in the senior class is a paste-eating loser who constantly smells like old socks, he’s not going to get elected prom king. But the funniest, handsomest, most athletic kid, or simply the most popular—regardless of how much money his parents have—is an odds-on favorite for the title. 

Both goods involve scarcity to one extent or another.

Now, obviously, the two overlap and can be conflated to the point of being indistinguishable from afar. That’s because you can buy a lot of status if you have enough money, and you can make a lot of money if you have enough status. Membership in an elite country club is both a positional good and a Veblen good.

Supermodels and movie stars don’t get to skip the line at clubs because they’re rich. The bouncer lifts the red rope because they’re famous, and fame is definitely a form of elite status in today’s culture. I know some very rich people who’ve literally waited decades to become members of the hoighty-toighty and mysterious Bohemian Club, while many prominent writers and artists can get admitted almost immediately. 

In the real world, rich people tend to have very high status simply because they’re rich. Other people only get rich because they have very high status. It’s sort of like one of my peeves about the term “oligarchy.” Contrary to Bernie Sanders et al., oligarchy doesn’t mean rule of the rich. It means rule of the few. But, for kind of obvious reasons, rulers in oligarchical states find it very easy to make themselves rich. Vladimir Putin may be one of the richest men in the world, but he didn’t get that way via his KGB pension, his presidential salary, or a side gig as a chinchilla rancher.

Metaphorically, and in some ways literally, there are two ways to fly first class. You can simply buy a full-fare ticket, Veblen style. Or you can have sufficient “status” with the airline that you get to sit up front on points. 

 Okay, so I took way too long explaining that. But I think it’s useful and important. The economist Fred Hirsch coined the term positional good and wrote a book called The Social Limits to Growth, in which he argued that rising prosperity—not widening inequality or deepening poverty—was putting the American Dream out of reach. Economic growth makes nonpositional goods—food, basic housing, a serviceable car, common electronics—more available. A century ago a car was a luxury, and 150 years ago having indoor plumbing marked you as well-off. Now these are the basics. But economic growth makes positional goods more scarce, i.e. more expensive. As Hirsch puts it, if everyone at a parade stands on their tiptoes, the advantage of being on your tiptoes disappears.

So as society gets richer, more and more people get “taller.” This leads to what Hirsch called “congestion.” When only the rich had cars, there was very little traffic. When more than 100 million people have at least one car  (and there are nearly 300 million in total), you have lots of traffic. When only the well-off can enjoy a nice house in the suburbs, the suburbs aren’t crowded. And so on. When societies get rich, positional goods become more valuable because once you’ve checked the material boxes, you care more about status and less about putting food on the table. 

So let’s briefly talk about status. For deep evolutionary reasons, humans crave status. We crave it as individuals and as groups. We want to be respected, personally and collectively. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this craving, and there’s even much that is noble and valuable to it. Professional ambition, the pursuit of greatness and glory, the desire to be remembered by history or to make a difference, stem from this desire. But this desire can be corrupted, channeled toward selfish ends. “Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold,” Aristotle tells us. 

That humans—and especially the males (sorry ladies)—hunger to have status in the form of honor or fame is one of the most commented-on sociological and psychological observations in history: from Tacitus (“Even for the wise, the desire for glory is the last of all passions to be laid aside”) to Hume’s “love of fame” to Rousseau’s amour-propre, the form of self-love that can only be realized through the esteem of others, to virtually the whole of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, to the writings of a slew of sociologists starting with Max Weber.

Weber is particularly interesting because his observation about America reveals something important. “Very frequently the striving for power is also conditioned by the social ‘honor’ it entails,” Weber writes. But he goes on: “Not all power, however, entails social honor: The typical American Boss, as well as the typical big speculator, deliberately relinquishes social honor.”

I’m not sure that was true then, but I’m sure it’s not true now. I think the American Boss—he meant a successful businessman, not a Boss Tweed type—has a lot of social honor, as do speculators. But the point Weber reveals is that what confers honor or prestige or status in one era or culture may not in another. Well into the 19^th century in Europe and to a lesser extent America, actresses were seen as profoundly low class and essentially glorified prostitutes. Today, they are people to be celebrated, i.e. celebrities. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the left has spent the last decade or two complaining about “privilege.” I’m not a big fan of identity politics, but I think it’s irrefutable that being a minority gives one an extra insight and sensitivity to social privileges and status rankings that are largely invisible to the majority culture. Christians say harmless things that catch the ears of Jews, Muslims, and atheists. The same happens with whites and nonwhites, men and women, rich people and poor people. The rich kid who talks about just getting a new pair of sneakers may not intend to offend his poorer friend, but the poor friend is offended all the same. This is the stuff of life. 

 I could go on (and on). I think there’s much to say about this subject. But I should get to this $140,000 poverty line thing. Again, I agree with the critics. It’s nonsense. 

We are a very rich country, with an enormous number of elites. Indeed, in the economic sense, we have a massive elite surplus compared to other countries. There are just shy of 1,000 billionaires in America, just more than 10,000 centimillionaires, and 24 million millionaires. By one estimate, America created 1,000 new millionaires every single day in 2024 alone. And they tend to cluster in certain regions. 

With so many rich people, there’s a lot of congestion. 

More importantly, we live in a culture in which nearly every kid is told they are special, exceptional even. A lot of them believe it. But they hunger for evidence of their specialness, particularly evidence that is recognized by others. And that evidence can be hard to come by. 

An enormous amount of our politics has less to do with issues, including economics, than it does about status and status anxiety. Economic growth increases happiness to a point, and then sort of stalls out (this is called the “Easterlin paradox”). In the 2016 election, according to some studies, “status threat” played a bigger role than economic hardship in driving the results. The boats in the Trump boat parades in 2020 were not captained by sans culottes. The loudest and most passionate voices fighting both for DEI and against it are driven by fears of losing status relative to other groups. Rob Henderson’s work on “luxury beliefs” is a perfect illustration of the point. Being able to speak fluent intersectionality is simultaneously a Veblen good and a positional good. Like speaking French in the old courts of Europe, it is—or at least was—an extended linguistic shibboleth of your status. I thought it was embarrassing that so many right-wingers whined so much about Hillary Clinton calling them “deplorables.” But, in their partial defense, they were venting legitimate frustration about the scorn certain elites had for people like them. 

Add in the fact that we’ve taught two generations of Americans that being a victim confers status, it should not surprise anyone that so much of our politics is a thinly veiled argument over who gets to claim cultural victim status. That’s what a lot of right-wing identity politics is now: an attempt to “elevate” white men and Christians as “the real victims.” 

The rise in the attention economy is a profound real-world experiment about the most coveted positional good of our age: the attention of others. It is valuable because attention spans are finite. It is also valuable because in a very rich country, fame is becoming more desirable than wealth. Few people want to be very poor but famous. But many people, having attained sufficient wealth, would rather be famous than merely more wealthy, which is why so many rich people run for office and why some famous people will debase themselves just to stay famous.

The passion the left brings to the issue of economic inequality isn’t about economics so much as it is about resentment and envy. But couching such resentment in the language of economics is socially acceptable. So it is framed in economic terms.

I’m not crying for billionaires. There will never be a society where people don’t envy the superrich. I just don’t support bad economic policies aimed at scapegoating or eliminating them. (Zohran Mamdani is just one of a long line of lefties who think we shouldn’t have billionaires.)

The real danger in a democracy isn’t about envy of the very rich. The real danger is envy of your fellow citizens when they have slightly more status than you. Economic prosperity and political equality are breeding grounds for such envy. And this has always been the case. Alexis De Tocqueville noted this in Democracy in America:

Households that make $140,000 a year are not “poor.” But it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that they feel poor. And in some cities, as a cultural and psychological matter, I think they are poor in significant ways. But the reason—or one of the reasons—Green’s claim went viral is that an enormous number of people feel poor in terms of status and express that feeling in the form of economic resentment.

There are many economic policies that would help—fixing the congestion-fueled problems of housing, is an obvious one. But I think the more important fixes are cultural. We need more avenues for people to feel honored and respected other than fame and money. In short, we need a culture that creates opportunities for “earned success” at the ground level. A society that heaps praise and honor on being a good parent, teacher, nurse, friend, priest, etc., creates honeycombs of success and status. A culture that heaps praise and honor on people like Andrew Tate creates young men who are neither praiseworthy nor honorable. You can tell me that Tate is not being praised or honored by decent people, and with the exception of confused young men I’d agree with you. 

But the tragic fact is that our culture today confuses fame for honor and attention for praise. Integrity is seen by too many as a waste of time at best, weakness at worst, while “success” is defined as gratifying your desires on your own terms. Envy, which is one of the deadliest of sins, is just another feeling, and feelings are granted an authority independent from, and oblivious to, the very concept of sin.

I have no idea why, but Pippa has been more willing to go out in the mornings without demanding excessive belly rubs. I mean, I still must pay the toll, but it’s not as laborious a negotiation. Though Zoë still finds any indulgence on this score to be outrageous. Pippa’s snoring is now a kind of constant background noise, like the hum of the AC or the heater. It’s a little annoying that the Fair Jessica thinks it’s cute when the spaniel does it but not when her husband does. We haven’t had to pay the Chestergeld too much this week because it’s been too cold for him to loiter on the front porch (and sometimes too cold for me to take pictures outside). The dogs don’t really mind the cold, but like their human, they don’t see the point of it unless there is snow. Gracie meanwhile is constantly demanding affection.

Member Name: Curtis Edmonds

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I started reading The Dispatch when Jonah started it, and I subscribed when Kevin Williamson joined. I’m always in the market for sharp, reality-based commentary—and I learn something every day from The Morning Dispatch.

Personal Details: I am a retired attorney, formerly specializing in disability rights and now working as HR manager for a disability organization in Newark. I’ve written five law review articles, four novels, and an adorable children’s picture book called If My Name Was Amanda.

Pet’s Name: Max (aka Mr. Max, Maxwell, and You Stupid Cat—as in, “Get down from there, you stupid cat.”)

Pet’s Breed: Max is a silver tabby who has convinced himself that he is a border collie. He is polydactyl (meaning that he has extra toes on his front feet, like the cats at the Hemingway house in Key West).

Gotcha Story: Max was born a stray kitten on the mean streets of Trenton, New Jersey. He was rescued and fostered by the nice people at the EASEL Animal Rescue League in Ewing, where we adopted him and his twin brother, Grayson.

Pet’s Likes: Fuzzy blankets, climbing on furniture, running on his cat-sized hamster wheel, and a purple feather attached to a metal rod that he has somehow learned to carry up and down the stairs. Max also self-identifies as a border collie and enjoys herding people when they are in disparate rooms in the house.

Pet’s Dislikes: The tyranny of the spray bottle, getting his nails clipped, arbitrary rules about which items of furniture you can climb on and which you can’t.

Pet’s Proudest Moment: Max is an ambitious climber, always looking to scale new heights. He once managed to jump from his perch on top of my wife’s dresser to hang from a picture frame, from which he had to be rescued.A Moment Someone (Wrongly) Accused Pet of Being Bad: We have twin daughters, and they have had to live with the burden of being called by the other one’s name. Max has the same issue; whenever his twin brother Grayson gets in trouble, we tend to assume that it’s Max, and then he’s the one that gets yelled at. (Grayson looks very much like Max, but he doesn’t have any extra toes.)

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