What I remember finding the most curious on first glance is that people in the lower-upper income group are the most likely to be bankrupt within five years of hitting that income band. Bu the explanation made sense to me: at that income level, you begin to compare your lifestyle to those who are much wealthier than you are, so you feel poor by comparison. Therefore you're more likely to start spending at rates that the income level can't actually sustain, in an attempt to live like the wealthier people you have begun to compare yourself to.
> The Diderot Effect is a phenomenon that occurs when acquiring a new possession leads to a spiral of consumption that results in the acquisition of even more possessions. In other words, it means that buying something new can cause a chain reaction of buying more and more things because the new item makes one feel like one needs other things to go with it or to keep up with it. This can lead to overspending and accumulating more possessions than one actually needs or uses.
This didn't have disastrous effect as most purchases were smaller kitchen tools (<100 dollars) and most expensive was computer ( < 2500 dollars). After that I've been little more conscious.
The insight on mirrored surfaces was especially interesting. I remember seeing a staged photo of some Trump kid & spouse with their own kid playing in a living room with a spotless mirrored table and was like "oh, hey!" Lots of fun bits like that.
... Actually, the entire Trump thing was fascinating with Fussell's instruction guiding one's experience of it. "Prole" fit on expensive suits. Middle-as-fuck taste in home decor ("if you're rich it means everything's huge and covered in gold, right?"). Still haven't figured out how much of it's genuine and how much of it's an affectation for marketing/personal-branding reasons.
He got his hope-for-the-future "Class X" all wrong—just an upper-middle youth fashion wave, mostly—but otherwise it's still a surprisingly-useful tool for analysis, considering how old and half-jokey it was.
Looks shitty if it's even slightly dirty, gets dirty if you so much as look at it, requires very thorough cleaning to make it look good (no smudges or streaks).
Means you don't do your own cleaning—like, at all. Once-a-week housekeepers can't keep a mirrored coffee table looking tidy. Probably also helps if you have whole rooms you barely use, but even dust'll have it looking shabby faster than, say, wood. If you buy such a piece and do your own cleaning—and especially if you actually use it—you'll probably regret it in a matter of days.
It's the kind of thing someone without that can only own (without it looking way worse than almost any alternative material) if they're so dedicated to it that it'll be the thing people remember about them. "Aunt Gertrude and that damn table. You remember that? Wouldn't let anyone touch it, and damned if every time you came to visit, she wasn't cleaning it. She had a whole process. Drawer of different towels, three or four cleaning bottles she had to put on in order. One time my kid touched it with a cookie-greased hand and she saw me getting the Windex, nearly bit my head off."
the only thing they have in common is they have a bunch of money and assets!
It's the humungous branding that makes the LV and Gucci goods tacky.
They're still veblen goods though even if they're table stakes. Because they became table stakes due to their price.
On the other hand, I can absolutely imagine that a lot of the people who buy supercars would be less likely to buy a Lambo, given it's downsides, if it were something any upper middle-class household could afford if they wanted to.
I think I agree with your point about who’s consuming positional goods, but… iPhones are a weird entry in your list of luxury goods.
It is not actually possible to directly buy the fancy Ferraris. No matter how much money you have. It's a whole thing. You don't call them, they call you.
Also...every major wireless company offers iPhones free or heavily discounted. iPhones aren't the luxury goods anymore, they're the cheap alternative. If you want quality, you get a Samsung Galaxy. My Galaxy SIII still works (note: I use a Galaxy S22 for my day-to-day; the SIII is my hiking/biking computer.); while every iPhone user I know has had to replace their iPhones an average at least once per model, under warranty, in the decade since then. iPhone build quality is so bad that even Apple doesn't bother to actually fix problematic phones, they just straight up replace them. iPhones are the equivalent of dollar store brands: they seem like a good deal upfront but you end up paying way more for them over time.
When Apple do entire device replacements, this is simply because for weird issues it's a quicker and easier on-the-spot resolution for both the end user and the Genius Bar than spending days depriving the owners of pretty vital devices trying to reproduce odd issues. Articles abound detailing how exacting Apple are with suppliers, e.g:
https://www.theverge.com/23743095/apple-watch-band-release-x...
Samsung Galaxy A14 5G - £15 per month + £9 upfront
£563 in total (3yrs no inflation)
Apple iPhone 11 - £32 per month + £19 upfront
£1191 in total (3yrs no inflation)
https://www.boostmobile.com/stores/offers?intcid:HP:BF:Banne...
Yeah all those food stampers buying Corvettes and Teslas is so annoying. Lolwut
As an ex-Android user who held out as long as I could: these aren't a Veblen good.
1. iphones aren't meaningfully more expensive than android alternatives, except at the very bottom of the market, and even then the difference isn't huge, even for lower income earners, when you finance.
2. There are actual product differentiators between Apple and Android. There are very real issues like privacy and app availability/quality; even when an Android version of an app exists, it's not always as functional.
3. But far more importantly, the newest range of Pixel phones are absolute garbage and barely work. After two top of the line androids in less than a year, I got sick of missing text messages and dropping phone calls because of shitty software. I was forced to switch to a (cheaper!) iphone.
> ...as soon as you hit the upper-middle class, these disappear in favor of the more practical/functional items of similar prices.
iphones are also an exception to this rule.
However we may be able to educate people that 'you cannot buy class'.
Its interesting how many lower income people have iphones, Jordans, Teslas/Mustangs/Corvettes but as soon as you hit the upper-middle class, these disappear in favor of the more practical/functional items of similar prices. Not to say that some in the upper-middle class don't waste money on a Ferrari/Lambo, but I imagine its the same thing, 0.1ers don't buy those products.