Conversation

Median cost of common middle-class identity goods: House: $270k College education: $25k New car: $20k* (guess) Phone: $580** Video game: $60 TV/movies/music: $50/mo Novel: $10 News: $0 * mean is actually over 40k now 🤯 ** also mean, but here reasonable to assume mean=median
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Uncommon identity goods Pickup truck/SUV: $50k? Gun: $500 (median =1? mean is like 4, and 3% own most of them) Gender reassignment surgery: $30k Boat: $20k
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Many medical conditions/disabilities could also be called identity goods, but out-of-scope for this comparison because the identity effect is incidental and presumably nobody would choose to have them, though I’m told many with conditions often refuse treatments seen as “fixing”
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Others I won’t bother to lookup: eating out, live music, travel, there’s a long tail here. The reason I went down this bunnytrail is that it struck me that most culture war revolves around fairly low-priced identity goods. That has causes and consequences...
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Hypothesis: inequality leads to identity anchoring around cheap/free goods, which in turn leads to formation of much larger and more homogenized/flattened identity groups. Think TV show fandoms vs neighborhood Christmas decorations as identity contest grounds.
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To solve the culture war, give people enough discretionary income to build identity around more expensive, material stuff. That fragments identity groupings into much smaller, more localized groups. Interactions necessarily get unflattened in richer media or meatspace.
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