Notes from the Salon: Social Class

[Editor’s note: this piece was ported over from Less Wrong on March 13, 2020, and backdated to the original publication date. Minor edits were made for clarity.]

This is a write-up of some interesting points raised at a ~~tea party~~ “literary” salon I held on October 6th, 2019. It is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the topic. It is conventional for attendees to do all the suggested readings before salon starts, so some parts of the write-up might not make sense without that context.

Assigned readings: Siderea on Class, Thoughts on the “STEM” class

Economic Class vs. Social Class

Economic class and social class are not the same thing. The two are decoupled, but only partly. You can be wealthy but lower class (e.g. a skilled tradesman making 6 figures) or poor but upper class (e.g. an adjunct professor at a prestigious university). Everyone at the salon was in the same social class: the class that attends semi-ironic and entirely sober literary salons, likely G2 on Church’s ladder. But it would be a mistake to assume that everyone in the room belonged to the same economic class – there is a much broader distribution of economic classes in attendance.

Performing upper-(middle)-classness grants you privilege. It costs some amount of money, but not as much as you would think, to perform professional-classness. The harder part by far is knowing what to buy in the first place. To a first approximation, a blazer is more middle-class-y than a hoodie. But a clean-ish hoodie emblazoned with your university seal is a much better signal than a polyester blend leopard-print blazer.

Most people want to make more money, but few people are interested in climbing the social ladder. When you find the class that you belong to and join it, you tend to go “ew” at the people in the classes below you, and “yikes”* at the people in the classes above you.

*Or the equivalent of “yikes”, if you’re in a class that doesn’t say “yikes”

Everyone is “Middle-Class”

The middle class is the only virtuous class – both “lower class” and “upper class” are insults. This results in basically everyone except billionaires and the homeless identifying as middle class. Premium mediocrity is what middle-classness could look like for millennials.

Class is a culture and a performance. For example, someone who makes six figures may choose to get their morning coffee at Tim Horton’s instead of Starbucks or an indie coffee shop. They might make this decision even if they like their coffee not terrible, because it’s more important to them to be seen as a salt-of-the-earth sort, and salt-of-the-earth sorts here in Canada drink Tim’s instead of Starbucks.

A more extreme example of this was outlined in this piece, where a Yale student who was actually broke didn’t realize that all of her classmates were only pretending to be broke. In one incident, she offered to buy a classmate that she knew for 3 years a sandwich, because she thought he was actually on the verge of starving. The classmate graciously broke the act and told her that he actually has a trust fund and was just carefully cultivating a starving artist image. In another incident, her classmates shamed her for not donating to a charity, because they perceived her to be only faking her destitution like the rest of them.

Scott’s cellular automata model of fashion talks about something similar, but what the Yale piece adds is that performing poorness gives the elites an unfounded confidence in knowing how poor people live, which is terrible for society.

That “STEM Class” Piece

The makeup of this Salon session was something like 60% STEM folk, 20% non-STEM folk who work or socialize with STEM folk a lot, and 20% non-STEM folk who don’t interact with STEM folk on a regular basis.

The only thing that the Salon agreed on was that STEM class people pretend more than other classes that they don’t care about class and just wear things they like.

Things we disagreed on included:

how accurate the tumblr post was about STEM folk
how accurate the tumblr post was about the connection between STEM and the military-officer class
whether any single person in the Salon has a good idea of what a representative sample of STEM folk would look like
how much STEM folk cared about art, politics, and sports
whether the r/uwaterloo subreddit is a decent representative sample of STEM folk
if this is the class that’s responsible for the existence of the alt-right
whether this is a class or a subculture (e.g. could a similar tumblr post be made for “the lawyer class”?)
if “STEM folk” is a real and useful category

Diversifying

People generally don’t deliberately seek to hang out with other social classes. When it happens, it’s usually as a result of another shared interest or trait. You can run into people in another social class at a comic con, or your sports league, or your very small local queer community. Or if you’re doing a substantial amount of going on first dates with people from dating apps. It still won’t be the entire range of social classes, it’s just a wider range than who you would hang out with by default. Talking to a person in another social class is generally more unpleasant than talking to a person in your own, but this shared experience of being at a con/being queer/trying to date/etc can act like a social lubricant.

Many activist organizers come from the middle- and upper-middle classes. One common trap that they fall into is modelling working- and lower-class activists as sharing the exact same set of aversions that they do, to the upper class. So they think, “as long as we’re not doing fancy dress codes and caviar and country clubs, we’re inclusive”. In truth, working- and lower-class activists often have an aversion to middle-class norms as well — things like tofu, women who don’t shave, and non-hierarchical meeting structures. To make meetings and spaces welcoming towards everyone, middle- and upper-middle class activists should reflect on their own cultural norms, and to what extent it is necessary to impose it on other classes.

Betsy-Leondar Wright, an activist-scholar, suggests distinguishing between essential and non-essential weirdness, where essential weirdnesses are defined as practices that can’t be eliminated without doing great injustice to someone. In other words, essential weirdnesses must be kept, even if they seem offputting to some attendants, because discarding them causes greater harm. Essential weirdnesses are things like “the practice of always speaking out against racist comments” or “having your meetings be secular”.

Non-essential weirdnesses, on the other hand, should be eliminated as much as possible because pushing lifestyle choices onto disinterested working-class people is a misuse of class privilege. Because classes are hierarchical in nature, this is especially important for middle-upper class people to keep in mind. An example of non-essential weirdness is “only having vegan options for dinner”.

Effective Civic Action, Inside and Outside the System

I read Teardown by Dave Meslin for a book club here in Ottawa, and it is the weirdest thing that I’ve read in some time. I’ve described it to some friends as the most milquetoast call to radicalism that I’ve ever read. But a more charitable interpretation, perhaps, is that it is a book that excludes all theory to focus single-mindedly on praxis, and how to do it well in the Canadian political context. Meslin has a wealth of experience as an activist, and his book reflects that.

Would I recommend the book? Yes, especially if you’re Canadian. The tactics that he describes does have their limitations, and don’t try to look for any sort of coherent ideology (but again…. pracccssisssss is where the book shines), but there are enough nuggets of wisdom to mine that I think it’s likely worth your time overall.

I took lots of notes during my read-through, but of course focused on the chapters that are most useful and insightful for me personally. Key takeaways:

Useful ideas for local planning/advocacy:

4 rules to create engaging public notices: be pretty, highlight important info, highlight engagement opportunities, finish with a call for action: “Your voice matters.” “This is your chance to be heard.” “We want your opinion.”
Use less planning jargon. Specifically called out examples: “podium”, “mechanical penthouse”, “below grade”, “amenity space” (be more specific – what’s going in that amenity space?)
City hall should have open doors (literally), council chambers should have open doors (literally).
Dress codes should be loosened, requiring ties in 2019 is ludicrous
Spontaneous consultation meetings on transit buses, giving free bus tickets as incentive
Providing pizza to citizens who want to host informal focus groups in their own homes
Interesting awareness campaign idea: put price tags on everything. Fire hydrants, bus stops, playgrounds. Show cost to build and to maintain/operate. Could be in lead-up to public budgeting session.
Paper newsletters in people’s physical mailboxes are still an incredibly powerful way to involve community

A very well thought out section on ways to clean up campaign money and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each solution:

(going in, it should be recognized that governments are already in the habit of giving out rebates, so none of these solutions are like, unrealistically radical)

tax incentives by way of rebates
- Toronto already does this, you get a 75% rebate on all small donations
- One drawback is that since the refund is delayed, you discriminate against lower-income donors.
matching grants
- 1:1 ratio used in presidential primary elections: if you give $50, govt will kick in $50
- 6:1 ratio for first $175 of each contribution in NY program, i.e. govt will give $6 per every $1 you donate – completely changed culture of campaign finance in the city. Before, 30% of popn donated, after introduction in 2009, 90% donated. Jump concentrated in neighbourhoods w higher poverty rates, higher concentrations of minority residents. System credited w electing a much more diverse council. In 2018, ratio raised to 8:1.
per-vote subsidy
- annual allowance given to party based on how many votes they got in the last election.
- introduced in Canada in 2004, each party got flat 1.75/vote in prior election
- all voters (not just the 1% who donate) help direct funds
- strategic voting becomes more meaningful
- honestly a pretty decent option, but they get cancelled and don’t stick around because politicians hate them
democracy dollars
- “bold experiment” in Seattle, each voter is mailed 4 coupons worth $25 each. tripled number of campaign donors; 84% of donors were new to political process, donors were more reflective of general popn (e.g. more donations coming from youth, women, PoC, low-income residents). % funding from small contributions went from under 50% to 87%
- provides candidates large incentive to knock on doors, talk to voters
- amplifies new and emerging voices
- allows all voters, regardless of disposable income, to participate

Misc takes:

In runoff elections, things get friendlier because if you’re nice to another candidate then their supporters might vote for you second
Billboards erode our sense of collective ownership and social identity. Neighbourhoods gain their character from small businesses, public art, local architecture, and historic landmarks. Billboards create a monolithic aesthetic. It’s kind of ridiculous when neighbourhoods allow billboards but don’t allow local postings from actual people.
Disclosure of donations to politicians need to have more information than just a name and address, because that makes it harder to connect the dots between where lobbyists work and what the donate as “private citizens”. But possibly more importantly, we absolutely have to stop releasing them as useless PDFs, and instead release them as actually usable data sets
Lobbying is a good thing, as long as there’s a level playing field. Maybe the government should provide lobbyists to community groups, the same way that courts appoint lawyers to low-income defendants. They can do this by providing direct funding to community orgs that cross a support threshold, or corps can be forced to pay for opposition’s lobbying costs, or govts can create an office of public lobbyists staffed w full-time advocates. (That last one sounds a lot like Davidoff’s advocacy planning which I’m a large fan of)

“War stories”:

Olifas Marketing Group (OMG) offered city council thousands of free garbage cans. In exchange, all OMG wanted was permission to put advertising on the cans. The sign bylaw, of course, doesn’t allow advertising to be installed directly on our sidewalks, so the company was asking for an exemption. But OMG couldn’t simply offer the city millions of dollars in exchange for that exemption. Imagine how that would have looked! The optics would have been terrible because everyone knows that policy shouldn’t be for sale. But because OMG offered “free” street furniture, no one saw it for what it is: a company getting special treatment in exchange for financial incentives. Institutionalized bribery. Under this new financial model, the advertising was more important than the garbage can. So the free bins were themselves pieces of garbage, built with the structural integrity of an empty pop can. They began breaking down as soon as they were installed, metal doors flinging open and blocking the sidewalk or a bike lane. And the bins were often installed perpendicular to the curb, which blocked pedestrians but made the advertising more visible to drivers. These weren’t really garbage cans with ads on them at all; they were billboards with lousy garbage cans attached. (216)

[Toronto] has a donations policy that is explicitly designed to ensure that “donations occur at arm’s length from any City decision-making process.” But “when I filed a complaint with the city’s integrity commissioner, she ruled that no rules were broken because the ten-year-old policy regulating donations and community benefits astonishingly doesn’t include a definition of “donations” or “community benefits.” Without clear terminology, no one can actually break any rules. It’s the wild west. (218)

Tribar created the ultimate bundle: if the city gave permission to install a two-storey television screen above one of North America’s largest urban green spaces, the company would (are you ready for this?) contribute $3.5 million towards the construction of a suicide barrier on the same bridge. When the proposal was presented at city hall, the two items were bundled together, so if you were against the video screens (which I was, of course), then you were portrayed as also being against the suicide barrier. Politically, it was a nightmare situation. And that was intentional. (219)

Groups with charitable status are required to follow strict rules that limit their ability to do advocacy, while non-profit groups (without charitable status) can be much more innovative, politically vocal and effective when it comes to advocacy and community organizing. So why would any group choose to be a charity? Because charitable donations are tax-deductible. Under the existing rules, certain kinds of non-partisan advocacy are permitted, as long they account for less than 10 percent of a charity’s resources. But because board members often don’t understand these rules, they tend to take a risk-averse approach. “We have weak and confused sector organizations,” explains charity law expert Mark Blumberg, who’s calculated that more than 99 percent of charities conduct far fewer political activities than are allowed under the current rules. In fact, Blumberg estimates that the sector as a whole is spending only one-thousandth of its permitted threshold. (248)

When Ford went to rehab for two months, we literally had no mayor. As a community activist, I noticed a big difference during those strange years. Before and after Ford, it was absolutely necessary to secure the support of the mayor’s office in order to get any proposal approved by council. But during the Ford years, I was able to win significant political victories both with and without the mayor’s support. The councillors were in charge—as they should be but rarely are. (276)

Rants I won’t attempt to summarize because they are things of beauty you just kinda had to be there for:

“Tricks of the trade”, how politicians hide things from public eye
The one on billboards
The one on the increasing legibility of campaign running, and especially Get Out the Vote (GOTV)

…Okay, fine, a small quote, because this very specific type of Ra-driven (archive) driven institutional rot is exactly my jam:

“If they don’t trust their own caucus members to serve as ambassadors to the public, can you imagine how terrified they must be of having random volunteers knocking on doors and saying something that might be off message? This leaves campaigns with a dilemma: how do you distract dozens, if not hundreds, of volunteers and make sure they aren’t trying to talk to voters about issues?” (156-157)

Articles of Interest, June-July 2019

Articles of Interest is a bi-monthly retrospective on the five or so most interesting things I’ve read during the titular two-month period. The intent is for there to be a few weeks of “lag” time between when I first read the articles and when I curate this collection, so that my selection isn’t biased by ongoing hype or sensationalism. The articles aren’t necessarily published during this period, although many of them are – I choose my collection from what I’ve bookmarked over the two months. Here are my picks for June and July:

The Privilege of Property (Kondo and the Bibliophibans, Part 2a) (archive)

(The other parts of the sequence are also very worth reading; they are linked at the top of the post.)

“If we keep it real for a minute, Trudeau is not the first (or last) white male to darken their skin in supposed jest. As someone who has spent the last 10 years studying blackface in Canada, the one thing I know to be true is that blackface is as Canadian as hockey. It literally was (is) performed everywhere.”

This piece gave me a lot of feelings. In the beginning was the especially ugly type of anger that comes from feeling entitled to something you’ll never have. From knowing that twenty years ago, people who were making less than you got away with having expensive hobbies that you can’t afford and living in spacious homes in the middle of dense, lively American cities, and that you’ll never, ever be able to do that, so you were being cheated in some way.

And after that burnt away I was left with a lot of sadness and resignation. This thing that was good for us was taken away for some incredibly shit reasons, and there’s no way of talking about it that makes me not come off as a spoiled, entitled millennial, that allows me to be taken seriously. I feel like this is a thing that more people should know about because not knowing your history means that you have a worse grasp on what’s possible to change. But fat chance of that happening on a large scale, yeah?

But it also left me kind of hopeful? To know that this kind of lifestyle was possible at all, as recently as the nineties. It’s not a pipe dream.

Brought to mind a professors’ lecture tangent, about how if Japanese couples were able to raise a family in cramped Tokyo one-bedrooms then we should re-examine our desire for large amounts of space, because maybe it was just some American extravagance that has no place in a warming planet. Suddenly that doesn’t sound like the entirely correct reasoning. Smaller spaces won’t give you enough room to build a more self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle and a community. Space is necessary for us to plan and prepare. Space is necessary for us to thrive.

“The Minnesota Diet” (archive)

There’s a new etiquette, which spreads via people’s Savants and Flings. Don’t talk about food in front of other people. But if someone else talks about food in front of you, don’t lose your shit at them. Don’t try to make anyone watch a movie, or Virtual Immersive Scenario, in which people are eating. Talk quietly, and above all don’t yell. Don’t be fatalistic. Don’t proclaim false hope, or insist that everything is going to be fine. Don’t judge other people’s weird food rituals: the way they hold food in their mouths for a long time before swallowing, mix it with water, or even cradle a piece of food in their arms like a baby. Don’t blame your partner(s) for lacking sex drive, or for being uninterested in romance. If people need to be alone, leave them alone. Most of all, don’t judge people for listlessness or apathy, or the inability to get out of bed—but do try to keep other people moving, at least enough to avoid muscle atrophy.

A short story about a food shortage in a post-scarcity smart city. I haven’t really gotten the hang of summarizing fiction pieces yet, but I really liked it. It got me thinking about how like, the word “hunger” has a place in our vocabulary still, right? But when was the last time that you’ve seen it to mean the actual, bodily sensation of starvation, instead of some dumb “be wanting things” precariat/consumerist slogan? The story hangs in an interesting space, in the space of the nine meals that it takes for society to collapse.

Why Privilege Discourse Predominates (archive)

Today, privilege discourse is the dominant framework for discussing racism. It’s a multi-million dollar industry, as universities, corporations, and the US military institute privilege courses. The dominant position this discourse occupies—especially its patronage by white supremacist institutions like the military and big business—indicates that large segments of the ruling class find the overwhelming focus on privilege discourse to not only be non-threatening, but valuable.

A good piece from 2016 that outlines where the Social Justice Brigade is probably heading in the next decade.

The Phantom Men-ness (archive)

Most men have an inarticulate understanding, way down in their guts, that this is how things work for them. I think most women don’t. Just as it’s hard to really get the feeling of being constantly objectified, when you’re not, it’s hard for a valued person to get the feeling of being completely disposable.A man can do things to make himself valuable. He can become strong, wise, rich, accomplished, creative, charming, lots of options. He can fill any of a thousand roles. But doing so will always require talent or effort or luck or some combination of the above. And it’s always very, very contingent on demonstrated success. It is not a default. It cannot be a default.

And a man who can’t call upon a substantial degree of excellence, in something, is worthless. There’s nothing he can offer. There’s no role for him to play. There’s no real reason for anyone to show him any respect. If you want to get anything at all out of this life, you have to earn it, you have to carve it out for yourself. No one will love you, or even pity you, just for being yourself.

A man can do things to make himself valuable. He can become strong, wise, rich, accomplished, creative, charming, lots of options. He can fill any of a thousand roles. But doing so will always require talent or effort or luck or some combination of the above. And it’s always very, very contingent on demonstrated success. It is not a default. It cannot be a default.

The opposite of objectification is subjectification, the idea that you alone are responsible for every single thing in your life. This is an interesting dive into how that feels, and as someone who is AFAB, it sounds frankly terrifying.

The Show Horse and the Work Horse (archive)

At a comfortable distance from the country club set and elegant homes on leafy hillsides there’s a working class town where I accidentally stumbled on a flea market the day before. It’s composed of an old asphalt parking lot, tents, and portable shipping containers. There isn’t anything about the place that cost much to build or maintain yet it functions like a traditional human scaled Main Street lined with mom and pop shops.

Granola Shotgun does really great photo essays about urbanism for the non-yuppie set. E and I had an interesting discussion over whether or not Johnny was right about why cities don’t encourage these sorts of flea markets more (not enough tax revenue for city hall even if it’s good for city citizens), but as usual, we got sidetracked and started talking about Seeing Like a State instead.

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Interestingly enough, although I’ve bookmarked maybe three times the amount of content than usual during these two months, I didn’t really have a harder time picking out my faves, nor do I feel like the overall quality of these links are higher than previous links posts. I think some of this comes down to the fact that this bookmarking increase is more “bookmarking a greater % of what I’ve read” than “reading a greater number of things than usual”, although that happened too.