A good essay by Paul Graham on cities and ambition:
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.
Here in St. Louis, the message is "you should have met the right people in school." The cliche here is that the first thing St. Louisans ask when they meet each other is "what high school did you go to?" The answer tells them about the speaker's social class and often his religious background. Also, if you want to be successful in Missouri you don't don't go to the highly-ranked Washington University, but to the University of Missouri in Columbia, which is where the kids of other rich and powerful Missourians go to school. Needless to say, moving to St. Louis in your 20s isn't a brilliant career move:
No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
When I lived in DC and I told people I worked at a think tank, virtually everyone knew what that was and many were interested to know which one and what I did there. When I go to a party in St. Louis, the people I meet not only don't know what a think tank is, but a lot of them don't know what public policy is. I've taken to just telling people I'm a writer, which is something most people have heard of.
Here's Graham's take on DC, which he admits he hasn't lived in long enough to be sure of:
In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There's an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even that is not that different.
I'd like to associate myself with the remarks of my esteemed co-blogger regarding diamond engagement rings. I got engaged last fall, and after reading a variety of articles on the subject, including the Atlantic article Conor mentioned, Amanda made clear that she'd be happy with a non-diamond engagement ring, as she wasn't keen to have me sending thousands of dollars to African despots as a way of proving my love to her. She was also unenthusiastic about perpetuating a "tradition" that was manufactured by the diamond cartel within our grandparents' lifetime.
I investigated getting a cultured diamond, which are identical in every way to "real" diamonds except that I can be sure there were no child soldiers involved in extracting them. Most cultured diamonds are yellow diamonds, which are rare in nature but no more difficult to create in the lab. There's some beautiful jewelry available with cultured diamonds in them. Unfortunately, the closest cultured diamond shops were in Chicago, and the makers of cultured diamonds have focused on catering to the high end of the market, which made most of the options way out of my price range.
So instead I chose an engagement ring with a cultured ruby as its centerpiece. She liked it. And because we're believers in gender equality, we decided it would be good if she got me an engagement ring too.
I, for one, am looking forward to the impending commoditization of the gem industry. Cultured diamonds are still rare enough that they haven't put much downward pressure on diamond prices, but it's only a matter of time before the technology improves to the point where almost any diamond can be manufactured for a couple hundred bucks. And without the option of spending thousands of dollars on a garish status symbol, men will be forced to exercise more creativity in choosing tokens of affection.
August 27, 2007
Consumer culture
Last night I went to see King of Kong, a documentary about a middle-school science teacher who tries to unseat the world record holder in Donkey Kong:
It's really a terrific movie. It's also a great sociological treatise for anyone who's interested in status concerns. In response to those who are worried that economic status competition is making us all worse off, people like Will Wilkinson have argued that modern society is so excellent precisely because it offers us proliferating status hierarchies in which to excel. Or as Tyler Cowen once told me, the secret to happiness is alternative status hierarchies, combined with self-deception.
The common rejoinder is that there is a meta-status hierarchy that comports with money:
Wilkinson’s claim implies, unless I misunderstand him badly, that it doesn’t matter very much to me if I’m a despised cubicle rat who can’t afford a nice car and gets sneered at by pretty girls, because when I go home and turn on my PC, I suddenly become a level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass! Now this example is loaded – but it’s loaded to demonstrate a serious sociological point that Wilkinson doesn’t even begin to address. These indefinitely proliferating dimensions of status competition are connected to each other in their own implicit meta-ranking, which is quite well understood by all involved. Being a world-class scrabble-player isn’t likely to win you much respect among people who aren’t themselves competitive scrabble-players; the best you can expect is that someone will write a book that pokes fun at your gastro-intestinal problems . It’s a very different matter if you’re a world class soccer player; you’re liable to be invited to all sorts of fun parties, hit upon by beautiful people, stalked by the paparazzi and the whole shebang. Being a world class blogger is somewhere between the two, albeit certainly much closer to the scrabble-player than the soccer star. Even if you’re king of your own mountain, you’re likely to be quite well aware of the other mountains around you that make yours look in comparison like a low-grade class of a gently sloping foothill, or perhaps even a slightly upraised knob in the middle of a steep declination. You’re similarly aware of those less well-advantaged foothills or knoblets whose owners you can look down upon…. In short, people are highly aware of the relative rankings of their obsessions.
This movie seems like the perfect illustration of these competing claims. It involves a guy named Steve Wiebe, who's been laid off and never really hit the big time career-wise. He decides, naturally enough, to become the world's best player of Donkey Kong.
Unless I very much miss my guess, Seth Gordon, the director, would agree with Henry Farrell. There's a strong undertone of "OMG, what amazing losers" from start to finish, and the very fact that these guys care about who is the world's best Missile Command player gets repeatedly played for laughs.
But a lot of the time, that's just an assumption of a certain sort of elite who has already climbed fairly high on the status hierarchy they identify as the central one.
If you've ever spent time around competitive rock climbers, for example, you'll know that they really do believe that being the world's best alpinist is superior to being, say, Secretary of State, even though most people would rather meet Condi Rice than Reinhold Messner. Indeed, in many cases, their status hierarchy is inverted; being a total loser is better than being a certain sort of corporate cretin. And these aren't people who have chosen to opt out because they can't make it elsewhere; they're not noticeably less popular, intelligent, or competent than people who seek success in more traditional ways than a sub-four-hour solo of the Eiger.
Okay, one might argue, but there will always be weird little-cultlike pockets existing outside of normal society. Nonetheless, most people recognize the rough status pyramid that Henry Farrell is talking about. But even on that point, I'm not so sure. As I wrote last year:
Much status comparison is localised. Rich people don't compare themselves to the folks in the housing project ten miles away; they compare themselves to their neighbours. The poor, likewise. All the upper middle class people I know, including ones who make no money, like journalists and academics, believe that the working and middle classes secretly envy us our high social status. All I can say is, having recently spent several years at a working class job, if this is true, then the working classes must be extraordinarily good at keeping secrets.
Among print journalists, television is widely regarded as second-class (albeit, high paying) work. But try telling that to my relatives in western New York, who had never heard of The Economist, but woke up at 5 am to see me go on a now-defunct farm-team talking heads show on CNNfN.
Many of the people in the movie probably are conscious of having failed in the world outside video games. But the tendency among the coastal elites is to assume that the failure they experience is not having gotten a good book contract from Knopf, and I'm not so sure. I'd bet that for most of them, the failure is rather more brutal than not making it to a high prestige job: approximately 100% of them seem to be afflicted with pretty severe Asperger's--which is hardly surprising, given the superhuman concentration and obsessive attention to detail that is required to master those kinds of video games. These are people so socially disconnected that virtually all of them still dress as if it's 1982; would they really feel less alienated and unsuccessful in Sweden? Are they seeking refuge in video games because they'll never get tapped for the Supreme Court, or because they never get a promotion--or a second date?
Which is why ultimately the movie is inspiring. If there really was a unified status hierarchy, or even the kind of orderly meta-ranking that Mr Farrell posits, most of us would be completely screwed. Only a few people can be the smartest, richest, or most athletic guy in the world.
But having failed, like the rest of us, to become Bill Gates (or anything close), Steve Wiebe had an alternative: he could use his obsessive, socially awkward personality to become the best Donkey Kong player in the world.
Imagine Steve Wiebe's life in a world where Americans didn't work long hours producing soulless frivolities like video games.
