To say that "the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest" by using Coke as an example is a significant oversimplification and is cherry picking examples to prove a point. The richest consumers buy plenty of consumer goods that the poorest cannot even dream of buying or even renting.
If there was a truffle-infused Coke with edible 24k gold flakes that cost 10x as much (and actually tasted good) you can be sure pretty much only the richest consumers would be drinking it, and that everyone who couldn't afford it would be doing everything in their power to keep up with the Joneses.
What percentage of "the poorest" own their own home or go on international trips more than once a year let alone owning multiple homes, luxury cars, and private jets?
The implication is the lack of a rigorous class hierarchy in America. Not that the rich don't live different lifestyles or consume more. But that niche luxury products were considered effete and un-American.
(Andy Warhol was almost certainly also being ironic - that the richest people in America publicly shared the same trashy taste as average Americans).
The closest analogue today might be an iPhone. Rich or poor, if you want the "best" phone you have an iPhone. Sure, there are gaudier and more expensive phones out there. But you're essentially using the same product as the richest Americans.
What about cars or houses?
Doesn't the fact that the original quote literally acknowledges "bums on the corner" imply that he wasn't referring to housing at all?
Where I live pretty much all new houses are being built with granite counter tops and hardwood floors. Whether that's a good thing is a whole other topic ...
When land and labor (and fees leveraged by the city, state, etc.) are extremely expensive, the additional cost for these "luxury" items is very low by comparison. The buyers for these homes are buying everything new and it makes little sense to save $10k or so on such a visible amenity that is expensive to retrofit afterwards, on a home that costs $500k.
It is the same reason why crank windows are gone from cars. They aren't really status symbols.
Like car colors, new house design decisions tend to be driven a lot by various current fashions because they're the low risk for purchasing reasons whether by developers or perceived resale by buyers.
Personally, I didn't care. My new color schemes are muted but not neutral. And my kitchen/dining room choices were, I think, practical for the most part.
That has more to do with automotive engineering being tightly coupled to academic engineering and the latter having gone through a "people are idiots, rob them of the ability to put force on anything at every opportunity" phase.
The F-150 extended range is 3.8 as you state, but then the Tesla Model 3 performance comes in at 2.8.
https://www.0-60specs.com/tesla/model-3-0-60-times
https://www.fordoffeasterville.com/blogs/4896/ford-lightning...
I presume that F150 ain't getting round the corners very quickly.
I reckon optimising for straight line speed is a strange goal.
Regardless, optimizing a pick up for 0-60 time is a strange goal, unless you have some express desire to launch 2x4s a great distance in a complicated way.
Someday, commentators filling air time on ESPN's "Need to Yeet" may bring up this comment as "the Casual Remark That Started it All".
We bought it mostly because we wanted an EV for power backup for the house. We get ice storms in the winter and it can knock out power for days, and we need to be able to keep almost 1,000 gallons of aquariums running during them. The F150 extended range has that in spades and was cheaper than the equivalent power wall system.
It's basically a whole house backup generator that we can happen to drive around.
It's as capable, if not more so, than your standard F150 at truck duties in everything except towing. And it's a bit of a mixed bag there, it can tow way more than a standard f150, but it cuts the range to 1/3 so you have to charge pretty often. Still, 100 miles towing 10,000 pounds is nothing to sneeze at.
As for the generator aspect, with its 135 kWh battery pack, I can power the aquariums for weeks and weeks.
Claims presented without evidence. My slightly modified Subaru Wagon from '05 "out-accelerated" base Teslas - dead even in 1st gear, started pulling once the shift to 2nd happened. (Most) EVs cannot shift gears to get torque multiplication, so they start fast, but fall off as speeds get higher. My Kia gas car will outrun all but the model 3 performance - which the average person is NOT driving. Neither of those cars are "niche".
Slightly modified is doing some heavy lifting there. No 2005 Subaru wagon in stock config is anywhere close to beating a Model 3.
> (Most) EVs cannot shift gears to get torque multiplication, so they start fast, but fall off as speeds get higher.
Pretty much irrelevant, because they’re still blisteringly fast up to 60 which is where most of the acceleration happens in day to day. Nobody really cares about 60-80 or 60-100.
> My Kia gas car will outrun all but the model 3 performance - which the average person is NOT driving.
What Kia is that? Even the stinger GT (which is definitely a niche car) is slower than a regular dual motor model 3.
'19 Stinger GT AWD. jb4 (piggyback) - dual model 3 couldn't pass me on track (he had more experience than I did) - he cornered a little better due to low center-of-mass, I pulled on him in the straights. Repeatedly.
I'd believe it. I wouldn't call adding 20%+ horsepower to a car 'slightly' modifying it though. The original point still stands that your niche car (a performance version of the Subaru Legacy, with a tune on top of it) still barely manages to go toe-to-toe with a stock Model 3. If you left it stock, it would definitely be slower.
> '19 Stinger GT AWD. jb4 (piggyback) - dual model 3 couldn't pass me on track (he had more experience than I did) - he cornered a little better due to low center-of-mass, I pulled on him in the straights. Repeatedly.
So, you're proving my point? Stinger GT is already a niche car. You then threw a tune on it, which is even more niche. Compare it to a performance model 3 if you want to be fair in that case. I guarantee there's more performance model 3 owners than there are Stinger GT owners.
It’s not particularly noteworthy that the road version a vehicle used by Subaru’s WRC team can keep up with a Tesla if you modify the ECU and add more boost.
The current Model 3 and Model Y are properly built competitively priced cars with many luxury features (such as huge trunks, rear climate control, all wheel drive, etc) and gadgets (Netflix on huge touchscreen, self-driving, etc).
[Honda Fireblade: throttle open and in the red, eyes closed and smiling.]
Being rich is better than being poor. The Warhol quote has nothing to do with that fact.
As someone who started out very poor, and is now ~ 30x above that. I strongly subscribe to the idea that happiness from income is very logarithmic. The first 2-3x income was life changing. I'm talking going from eating pasta, rice and beans for most meals to fresh fruit and veg, lean cuts of meat. From renting a room in a noisy apartment with 4 other people to having my own place that was both safe and quiet. My reading list was suddenly more constrained by time instead of price or library backlog.
I suppose it's down to my starting position, a content disposition and a boring lack of imagination, but my expenses have now ~ 5x'd what they were when I was on the strugglebus, but still very modest, and I honestly can't identify any spending that would make my life better or make me happier long term.
This is very rarely the case. For tailored or custom clothing, sure, but that doesn’t end up being the most expensive. Silly designer brands with lower quality do.
/s
In other words, it's still perceived as a sign of status.
the people who have the real money are flying in private jets.
Toto survives by brand name reco only nowadays.
I personally developed a feeling for things which are at the edge of "diminishing returns" curve. I get the things which are high-end enough, but not in the "pay 3x more to get 1% more" region.
Buying high quality things is a thing, but buying things just because they are high end and flashy is something else.
If I failed to convey what I tried to say in my first comment, let me give another examples.
Personally, I'll pay pretty penny for a bass guitar, if its build quality and features is worth it, not because of hype or it's a signature model of someone else's.
I'll buy a high end computer or a car with all (meaningful) options installed, not because I want to show off but I'll need the features or processing power.
I buy high end audio gear (for listening or recording), not because to brag about it but to use it.
And when I buy these things, I use them until they run out of steam, not until they're out of fashion.
(And for servers and other business machines, well, other criteria apply, but owning something in the Top500 has to count for something in terms of prestige.)
Admittedly that’s because he’s an overgrown child, but what the hey.
Or, hell, go on trips period, let alone once a year. I went a couple states over last September to visit a friend and it damn near broke my wallet. I didn't even fly either. Just drove.
Witness Erewhon fruit juices/smoothies.
The mantra was sell more, more, more and more, and to do that, you need to sell things to poor people to. A French enterpreneur would be happy selling phones only for the upper middle class and above. In America the idea was to install as many landlines as possible and gain with scale.
I think it's important to call out that the "capitalism = more stuff" idea is a bit of historical revisionism.
Soviet leaders very specifically saw the goal of Communism was to create abundance and a post scarcity society. There are lots of quotes in particular from Khrushchev about this:
“The socialist system will outstrip capitalism in labor productivity. It will provide the people with more goods, more cultural benefits, and ensure a higher standard of living.”
“Communism is the highest form of organization of society for labor. On the basis of powerful productive forces, it ensures the highest productivity of labor and abundance of material and cultural values for the whole people.”
And it's worth pointing out that that this isn't a Soviet invention. Marx himself made it a central point that material deprivation was an ill (not a feature) of captialism:
"After the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety…”
“The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially… but guaranteeing them the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here.”
When communist abundance failed to materialize, there was a concerted effort to reframe the promise of communism to be purely one of egalitarianism and turn overconsumption against the West as a criticism.
To wit, that end stage capitalism has become an ouroboros eating its own tail that profits off artificial scarcity, while communism's primary defect (an inability to execute economic planning at a pace, scale, and granularity required to run a country well) is now technologically-feasible.
Though the greatest enemy to communism was always the people who made up the party and their fallibility as human beings.
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
But it surely looks to me like they are accelerating a movement towards a giant crisis of the capitalist system.
For Marx, capitalism is historically revolutionary precisely because it expands productive forces at a scale impossible under feudalism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly say the bourgeoisie created “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than earlier generations, and then argue that capitalism becomes self-contradictory because those productive forces outgrow capitalist property relations, producing crises of overproduction and destruction of wealth.
We can even say, that is a strict reading of Marx, communism is impossible if the problem of scarcity hasn't been solved before.
Marxism requires abundance as a material precondition for higher communism
and then left this thought (every system outgrows itself and becomes self-contradictory) applied to communism as an exercise to readers, which gave us Lenin and Stalin's (and Mao's) permanent bloody revolution as a pupil's halfbaked attempt at a solution, because their attempt to create communism contradicted itself way before it succeeded.
As always with communism, there's the lofty ideals and quotes on what it should be, but then there's the contrasting reality of Continental Europe's run at communism producing way less stuff.
When a company can make more profit by catering to the ultra-rich-only than selling a quality mass-market product at a reasonable price to masses, that says a lot about the economic segmentation of those masses.
Coke is a great example. There’s no product more useless and unnecessary than that flavored fizzy sugar water. Or should I say, high fructose corn syrup water. If you drink it, why? Probably because you were indoctrinated since childhood. Same goes for pretty much all fast food. There’s nothing good or desirable about any of it unless you’ve been indoctrinated into thinking that.
One: It's terrible that you're shopping at a big box hardware retailer instead of a local hardware store and drinking high fructose mass market soda.
The other: Home Depot usually has what's needed, at a decent price, nearby. And Coke from the cooler next to the cash register is convenient, cold, and delicious.
Neither of these are wrong, and they're both worth keeping simultaneously in mind: life should be both aspirational and satisfying.
As you say it’s not one or the other.
I just wanted some landscaping rocks. I didn't think I was asking for much....
At least the grocery store sells cups at the register and there's delicious fountain Coke to be had on your way out the door.
https://shop.yokesfreshmarkets.com/store/yokes-fresh-market/...
...also WinCo Foods. Or at least the closest one to me does, right next to the in-store pizza counter.
How can you be so sure you've broken free of the indoctrination, when what you have written is also the product of indoctrination? The only practical difference is the banner under which the indoctrination happened under.
Ah, that's too harsh.
Sugar water tastes good. Fast food is made quickly and it tastes good. There's no "indoctrination" that happens to make people realize that.
I agree that coke has 0 nutritional value. However, the flavor is agreeable to most people.
> However, the flavor is agreeable to most people.
Only because most people have undergone that indoctrination.
You can't imagine that people could try Coke and think "what is this ridiculously sugary shit?" The reason you can't imagine that? Indoctrination.
I have a son with severe autism. Indoctrination doesn't work on him because he doesn't even understand it.
We have actively kept soda away from him because it's bad for his teeth.
And yet, he absolutely loves the stuff (family members gave it to him). He even has severe food aversions limiting what he's willing to try.
You can't convince me that the only reason people like sugar water is because of indoctrination. That's just silly.
You are replying to someone saying "agreeable to most people" (emphasis mine).
Very clearly, they are perfectly able to imagine what you claim they can't imagine.
Wikipedia dates the popularity of soft drinks to the medieval middle east, but the origins of sweet fruity water are thought to be ~400 BC Persia at least.
you'll get a kick out of this. one concrt hall i went to recently was charging THIRTY THREE DOLLARS for a single shot of Whistle Pig. Not even the good stuff.
I don't find it unfortunate, but I also think this is a bit of a misdiagnosis of the problem.
Coke is a bad example of this because it's mostly unchanged (and when they did try to change it, it became infamous. The "new coke" change). For almost all other american consumer products, the old time well known brands have decided to cut corners and cheap out on production. It's particularly obvious with restaurants where so many of the old chains have moved over to pre-prepped microwaved foods instead of actually cooking in house.
Americans have learned that brands can't be trusted to maintain quality. If a company can get away with it, they'll use any sort of deception to raise the price or cheap out on the ingredients. And they relied heavily on "it's X brand" to keep selling the lower quality goods.
That, IMO, is what's driven americans to brand fracture. People have learned that for a lot of clothing there's no difference between what they get from Temu and what they get from Old Navy. In fact, there's a real good chance those goods were made in the same factory.
I drink water. Which means I'm just like Cristiano Ronaldo[1].
Unfortunately I think America is starting to lose this way a bit, with the influx of newer premium brands and the fracturing of American consumers into endless lifestyle personas. But there's still some truth left in it.