Wealth and risk
Dec. 22nd, 2004 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinMatthew Yglesias and Mads Kvalsvik have good things to say about wealth, risk and American society.
Discussions of wealth and economic class in the US often go off the rails because people start talking about the purchase of things perceived as luxury goods. It's a mid-20th-century notion of wealth, the source of all the jokes in which the rolling-pin-wielding wife badgers her husband to get a raise so they can buy a dishwasher or a TV. Dishwashers and TVs aren't all that expensive these days. They're available to the masses, and that's nothing to sneeze at; I think that's great. But housing is expensive, and, especially, security is expensive: by which I don't mean safety from robbers and terrorists, but things like health insurance, (as I've harped on before) reasonable maintenance of your teeth so they don't all fall out and give you infections, and savings for education and retirement and not being kicked out on the street if you end up out of a job for a year or two. Scoffing at people who say they're poor and have big TVs is dumb, since the cost of big TVs (if you're not too picky) is minute compared to this stuff. Foregoing the big TV is not going to help you a whole lot.
Discussions of wealth and economic class in the US often go off the rails because people start talking about the purchase of things perceived as luxury goods. It's a mid-20th-century notion of wealth, the source of all the jokes in which the rolling-pin-wielding wife badgers her husband to get a raise so they can buy a dishwasher or a TV. Dishwashers and TVs aren't all that expensive these days. They're available to the masses, and that's nothing to sneeze at; I think that's great. But housing is expensive, and, especially, security is expensive: by which I don't mean safety from robbers and terrorists, but things like health insurance, (as I've harped on before) reasonable maintenance of your teeth so they don't all fall out and give you infections, and savings for education and retirement and not being kicked out on the street if you end up out of a job for a year or two. Scoffing at people who say they're poor and have big TVs is dumb, since the cost of big TVs (if you're not too picky) is minute compared to this stuff. Foregoing the big TV is not going to help you a whole lot.
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coffee is kicking in now
Date: 2004-12-23 07:40 pm (UTC)This diversionary reasoning bit is extraordinarily common with humans. Somehow I was involved in a discussion about women's urinating behaviour yesterday (specifically squatting over public toilet seats, which is kind of an absurd thing to do because you can't really get infections from it). I learned that there are parts of the world in which something like 65% of women think that they can contract HIV from public toilet seats, and 88% of them don't use condoms during sex! I have also witnessed plenty of tinkled-upon seats from squatters, and correspondingly terrifying handwashing habits (wherin dabbing a bit of water, and no soap, on the fingertips is considered 'washing').
So I think what we're seeing is a basic human urge to be placated by inane crap rather than actually consider the scary and very complex situation in fuller detail.