Get Out More

Is there seriously somebody out there in blogland who thinks it's "a great testament to economic progess that, walking round the city center these days, say, it's very hard to differentiate the rich and the poor in the first instance" and that "in this sense, things have indeed become a lot more egalitarian?"

In my gentrifying 'hood, I feel like it's extremely easy to sit on your porch and tell the gentrifiers apart from the working class. Arguably, I suppose, that's because class divisions in DC tend to correlate highly with racial ones, but even so it at least seems to me as if members of the black middle class are readily identifiable as such. Of course the trouble with any contentions one might make about this is that they're hard to falsify since I'm not running around asking people whether or not they went to college or how much money they make.

Comments

Do it. On digital video, and then post it. What the Yglesias brand needs now, after the recent contraction and consolidation, is something New! for us to chew on.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | September 2, 2006 8:03 PM

Matt, I love ya. But you gotta do something about this font.

Posted by Uncle Bunny | September 2, 2006 8:25 PM

Its just one of those stupid David Brooks BoBo comments. Software designers are rich adn they look like their poor! Well except for their $200 sunglasses, Ipods, sidekicks, $4 coffee and imported sports car.

Posted by Rob | September 2, 2006 8:47 PM

As a brooklyn gentrifier, I'm fairly certain I'm easy to pick out in my neighborhood. This morning I took a trip to the post office next to the housing project. I was the guy with the cargo pants and white headphones. One thing I had going for me were my new pair of Starbury shoes. I got a compliment on them from the guy in line behind me. Of course my cred was gone after he asked me how I heard about them. My response? A blog.

Although my roomates and I sometimes refer to the middle-aged working class guys in our neighborhood as the "landed gentry" because they stand to inherit sizable real estate holdings from their aging parents.

Posted by tomboy | September 2, 2006 9:22 PM

A good way to see this isn't the case is to come to Philly and first walk around Penn for a while and then go walk around Temple. It's _obvious_ that there is vastly more money to be found among the Penn crowed then the Temple crowed. It would take anyone with eyes five minutes to see it. (This is mostly among the undergrads, of course.)

Posted by Matt | September 2, 2006 10:00 PM

I posted one font solution here.

Maybe Matt will do a post linking to it while he's waiting for his tech guy.

Posted by ogged | September 2, 2006 10:05 PM

The guy's comment makes a lot more sense out here in the suburbs, at least putting race aside. Some of my neighbors have homes which appear quite wealthy. But when you see them walking along...well...I won't say they look like bums but they certainly don't look wealthy. And it is easy enough to look relatively wealthy if one wants to, noting that the context is walking down the street, not sailing (or not sailing) a yacht...

Posted by Tyler Cowen | September 2, 2006 10:44 PM

Well, it's true that no one looks much like a peasant anymore, but aside from this, this seems absurd. And, if it is true, then wouldn't that be a testament to the irrationality of all these people spending so much more money on clothes to look good? If the clothes don't look any different, why do people spend so much to get "nicer" ones?

Also, I'm fashion sense-less, and I can tell the difference. Now, it's true that I'm probably not that much poorer than my former roommate in grad school, but everyone always assumed I was because he wore much nicer and more expensive clothes. So, I think if you're trying to differentiate within the upper middle class, clothes might be misleading. But when I moved into my apartment in NE DC near Shaw, everyone could see that my clothes were those of a professional.

Posted by MDtoMN | September 2, 2006 11:30 PM

One point in this fellows favor...

A lot of Americans have been living well beyond their means in the last few years, running up debt. I suspect as the housing bubble pops we'll see the pretenders living standards fall considerably. Or maybe I read too many blogs.

Posted by tomboy | September 2, 2006 11:52 PM

Not exactly relevant, but just as good a place as any to bring it up, I say. Yesterday I went to Compton for the second time that I remember (the other time was for the jazz festival at Drew University), and I have to say, what I've seen of it actually seems pretty nice.

Posted by godoggo | September 3, 2006 12:02 AM

Look, Castro wears the same clothes as an enlisted army man. Cuba must be so egalitarian!

Posted by Andrew Edwards | September 3, 2006 8:15 AM

In a gentrifying area, picking out the rich from the poor is easy. And you probably wouldn't have any problems picking a needle out of a haystack, because you don't have any hay.

Distinguishing among the classes is not so easy elsewhere. At 14th and Constitution, the center of Tourist Land, it would often be difficult.

Posted by ostap | September 3, 2006 10:10 AM

Of course the trouble with any contentions one might make about this is that they're hard to falsify since I'm not running around asking people whether or not they went to college or how much money they make.

Of course.

Everyone's talking out of their ass on this one.

Not surprisingly, my experience in my gentrifying neighborhood (while being one block from the projects) confirms everything I think I know.

Posted by Al | September 3, 2006 11:08 AM

The author known as "The Old Oligarch," or sometimes "pseudo-Xenophon," in what is probably the oldest preserved piece of continuous Greek prose, makes exactly the same point about the inability to tell rich from poor by dress. And adds that it's a bad thing, because you don't know who you can slug with impunity.

So maybe it isn't so much of an advance at all.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | September 3, 2006 12:12 PM

It would help black-white relations if white people would learn the clues that indicate which black males are middle class (and thus not a threat to commit crime), such as those small wire-framed prescription glasses that became popular among college-educated black men after Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" (although Malcolm wore thicker plastic frames). There is also a particular black male accent that has evolved in the last couple of decades to indicate "I'm black and proud _and_ I went to college."

Posted by Steve Sailers | September 3, 2006 6:32 PM