Middle class isn't too grifty itself, but is often forced to navigate pervasive grift to sustain its lifestyle. Buying cars, dental services, home contracting... everything is exhausting grift-detection/mitigation. And that's assuming you can at least filter for competence.
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PNW seemed less grifty than SW. Midwest is middling-grifty. DC was also middling. I think for grift to become a big force in the economy, there has to be a disproportionately bigger local wealthy class and smaller middle class.
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Replying to @vgr
Where are the low grift regions?
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Like, take something like dentistry or hair-styling in LA. There's a lot of rich people here for who are willing to pay big premiums to get exactly the service they want. Everybody wants that business. The cost of being a producer gets indexed to serving the premium market.
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But then, those who can't get enough of the premium business are forced to serve the larger but less profitable middle, and resent it. So they turn to grift. By contrast, regions without a large ultrarich market get structured to serve the middle class.
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Pick 2 of 3: affordability, trustworthiness, competence. If you try to have all three under high inequality, you get griftonomics.
In Nevada, competence fails. In LA, trust fails. For the rich, affordability fails.
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In traditional societies, the way people resolve this is to replace impersonal trust (yelp ratings etc) with personal trust (the doctor or dentist is also a family friend etc) and sacrifice some competence (the family friend may not be the best at stuff)
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The only way to get all 3, and drive down grift levels (and thereby, cortisol levels and vast amounts of hidden transaction costs) is to a) expand the middle class b) shrink the inequality span, so that the bulk of any service sector orients towards serving the middle.
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The ultrawealthy have a distortionary effect on consumption that everybody participates in. I'm fine with the yacht market getting oriented around the wealthy and their indifference to cost. But you do not want things like healthcare, groceries etc. to be 1% oriented.
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The problem is there is a part of America -- and not just the Trumpy part -- that thinks obscenely priced luxury consumption plus grift-ridden, sketchy-quality general consumption is a good condition for an economy to be in. It's not. This condition tends to kill wealth creation.
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Replying to
Have you written a recent essay on these topics? You’ve done a few threads on this in least year or two which are great.
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