Happiness among natives vs. transplants: A partial solution to the "wealth and happiness" paradox

In an earlier comment, DdR brought up the topic of whether transplants are happier from the higher incomes they enjoy by moving away to work where the grass is greener.

Fortunately, the General Social Survey asks a question about how happy you are in general. I've also created a GSS variable for transplant status at the regional level, which looks for a mismatch between where the respondent was living at age 16 and where they're living now. It uses the Census regions (Pacific, New England, East South Central, etc.). So transplant here doesn't mean you moved from the suburbs of your upbringing to the nearest city, but moving across entire regions. I'll be restricting the focus to whites only, to remove race as a muddying factor in the analysis.

A simple comparison between natives and transplants shows that their happiness levels are indistinguishable: 35% of natives and 36% of transplants are "very happy," while 10% of both natives and transplants are "not too happy" (the rest being "pretty happy").

That is despite the transplants being more educated (33% hold a college degree, vs. 20% of natives), and earning a higher average income ($58K in current dollars, vs. $47K for natives). Any boost to happiness from being upwardly mobile is apparently cancelled out by not belonging to the broader culture of the place where you live.

The picture gets more interesting when we look separately at natives and transplants, and see how upward mobility affects happiness within each group. You can be upwardly mobile without leaving your regional culture, or leaving it behind may be part and parcel of your upward mobility.

The graph below shows how education affects happiness for natives and transplants separately. More education gives only a minuscule boost to happiness, and natives and transplants are indistinguishable — not only how tiny the boost is across education levels (same slope), but also in how happy they are within each education class (same height).

OK, education may not make you happier, but who would doubt the power of money to buy happiness — at least somewhat? The next graph shows how income levels affect happiness, for natives and transplants separately.

Natives and transplants are now only indistinguishable at low and medium levels of income. The lines more or less overlap, whether you earn next to nothing or $100,000. But notice what happens when we compare upper-middle and upper levels of income — natives pull away from transplants in happiness, and the gap appears to only grow and grow.

The transplant line is relatively flatter, whereas the native line has a much steeper slope. Transplants are more or less equally happy (or unhappy), while natives range from kind-of happy to very happy, depending on their income.

This finding provides a partial solution to the paradox of greater income not bringing in that much more happiness. People who earn more are happier, but it's been known that this curve flattens out with higher and higher income. Each jump up the income brackets buys you less and less additional happiness. The econ, psych, and sociology lit has tried to uncover why this is, though usually without focusing on how the big-earners get their money. Like, did they have to leave behind their connections to people and place of the environment that they grew up in?

But perhaps more income does get you the same boost in happiness — that certainly shows up among natives, whose line in the income-happiness graph doesn't flatten out. But only so many upwardly mobile high-earners are going to be drawn from the nearby region. For those who move away in search of higher-status jobs and bigger incomes, upward mobility requires sacrificing other sources of happiness such as roots in family and community, and these losses offset the gains from higher income. The net effect for transplants is a diminishing marginal return of income on happiness (a rising line that flattens out).

In future posts, I'll dig into what those losses are (I speculated it has to do with family and community, but we need to investigate).

For now, though, the upshot is that the best of all possible worlds is to be a high-earner without moving away from the general region where you grew up. But if you're only going to be earning a low or medium-level income, you might as well stay put. You'll be just as happy, plus you won't have to pay all the costs of moving and adapting — not just financial costs but social and cultural costs, too. You'll have a support network already in place.

Happiness is an individual measure, as opposed to social measures like corrosion of community, disintegration of norms, pidginization of language, and so on. I think the most important objections to the transplant phenomenon are social. But this investigation shows that even at the me-first level of happiness, it doesn't pay to leave behind your roots in search of greener pastures.

GSS variables: happy, regtrans (created from region and reg16), educ, realrinc, race

"Debt up to my eyeballs" — the growth of a telling phrase

You may remember that commercial from Lending Tree, where the suburban father shows off the upper middle-class wonders that he enjoys — large house, riding lawnmower, country club membership — and asks how does he afford it. "I'm in debt up to my eyeballs," he confesses warmly, sounding like he's cracked and about to go on a calm shooting spree around the office.

That attitude of self-aware yet dismissive humor toward debt came way before the humbling Great Recession, back during the housing bubble. Even during that heady euphoria, the typical Boomer realized how illusory much of their status symbols were.

Could it be found, then, farther back still, say during the Clinton years when every Boomer styled themselves as a wise investor in the stock market just because they bought a subscription to Money magazine?

The graph below shows the prevalence of the phrase in Google's digitized print media library (Ngram). It doesn't matter whether the phrase was "my" eyeballs or "our" eyeballs.

Surprisingly, the phrase goes all the way back to the origins of the current debt bubble, taking incipient form in the '70s and exploding from the '80s until today. That makes them part of the status-striving and inequality cycle.

I thought it would've come some time later, after the naivete toward credit cards had worn off and consumers sobered up to the reality of compound interest. But nope, the Me Generation took the glib, joking tone right from the beginning. They knew what they were getting into, but waved away the consequences. "Fake it till you make it," but since you never really make it, keep on faking it.

This tone showed up elsewhere in popular coined phrases during the '80s. "We'll just charge it!" Oh, OK, nothing to worry about then. Money just grows on trees. And the synecdoche slang of referring to credit cards affectionately as "plastic," e.g., "Don't worry, honey, I'm sure they'll take plastic."

The unapolegetically open tone that the Me Generation has taken toward their status symbols being financed by debt rather than their own achievement reveals the relative balance of forces at work in their minds. Are they so competitive because they want to WIN WIN WIN at their "career" (job), or so they can finance a separate but related contest over conspicuous consumption?

It looks like the latter, otherwise taking on so much debt to purchase the status symbols — and especially being so open about the money coming from creditors rather than their own bank account — would have struck them as a failure, an embarrassment. Something they would have tried to cover up.

But if the primary goal is to compete in the game of conspicuous consumption, who cares where the money came from? "It's not as though the NFL players buy their own equipment," you can hear a Boomer rationalizing. "Worthier borrowers get bigger loans, so my millions in debt prove I'm better than you, with your measly little thousands in debt."

To reiterate: I'm not dismissing the well established tendency of the Silent and Boomer generations to want to win at any costs in the career world, so that they can brag about their career (job) on its own, regardless of what particular status items their salaries and debt have afforded them. I'm suggesting that the over-arching concern of theirs is the zero-sum status game of conspicuous consumption, whether that takes the form of blue-state liberal battles or red-state pseudo-conservative ones — Prius vs. Hummer, over-priced walking staff vs. over-priced fly fishing rod, thousands toward Apple products vs. thousands toward a home theater set-up, etc.

Addendum:

It's worth noting in the generational context that the main form of debt that Gen X and Millennials are saddled with is exorbitant student loans. Those are not part of a conspicuous consumption game, but immaterial status contests based on knowledge, coolness, and leisure. See this earlier post on the generational structure of status contests.

Are you college-educated or not? What tier did you get into? Within your tier, did you hang out in this type of environment or that one? What did you major in? That's as close to the contest over career accomplishments that X-ers and Millennials engage in.

Plus, the Silent / Boomer incumbents have rigged the economy so that a $40,000 certificate from a degree mill has become a requirement for even crappy jobs. That makes the student loan more a matter of merely making a living, and not an instrument of superfluous spending like credit cards, home loans, car loans, and the like.

Student loans are taken out by naive half-children who are promised that it'll be worth it when they go job-hunting later in life. At the beginning of the debt bubble, credit cards etc. were taken out by knowing 20 and 30-somethings who cynically used them to acquire more status symbols right now rather than delay gratification until they could afford it.

The Silent / Boomer conspiracy to take over the government has also made sure that the upstart generations cannot discharge their typical form of debt (student loans) through bankruptcy, unlike the Silents and Boomers who have thrown off the burden of their typical form of debt (credit cards, mortgages) with the stroke of a pen. This difference in which categories of debt can be cut loose has served to widen inequality between the generations, and can only be corrected with the death of the Me Generation or their removal from government.

Marriage and divorce trends: More broken homes, more marriages as status-striving tag teams

One of those "debunking" type articles at the NYT discusses the decline in divorce rates among marriages that began in the 1990s or 2000s, compared to those that began in the '70s and '80s. Back in the '80s, there was widespread anxiety about how common divorce had become, but since then it's actually become less common.

So, nothing to worry about then? Not exactly.

It may surprise readers of the NYT, or nerdy consumers of pop-quant articles in general, but marriage is supposed to produce children, who are to be raised by the parents. The integrity of the spousal relationship is not really that important -- sure, falling divorce rates among childless spouses makes society and its institutions look a little less flaky, but childless couples are not being put to much of a test (have kids and find out why). When a group is not being tested, we cannot infer much about what they're like. Who's more athletic and who's less athletic -- you need to run them through an obstacle course to find out.

To reiterate an earlier post as a reminder, children growing up without both parents in the home has become an increasingly common phenomenon, starting with those born circa 1960, whose parents would have divorced sometime in the '70s. This has continued at least through those born circa 1990, although unfortunately we won't have the data in on later cohorts for awhile.

The timing of the trend, starting around the mid-'70s and continuing steadily upward after that, links it to the status-striving and inequality cycle. Parents who put their individual happiness above the integrity of their own family -- including the welfare of those helpless little things known as children -- is a clear sign of the Me Generation's break from norms of social accommodation and toward socially laissez-faire norms.

The NYT author devotes a whole clause (not even a full sentence) to the broken homes phenomenon at the very end of the article, even though that's what worries most folks about divorce -- its effects on children. The commenters were more likely to bring the topic up, not to point out how absent it had been from the article, but simply because normal people associate marriage with children, and don't need to be prompted to bring up family dynamics in the context of marriage and divorce.

What is keeping today's marriages together, then? The article reviews several factors, all of which stem from the status-striving behavior of the spouses -- late marriage (gotta establish your career first), birth control (kids get in the way of your career), and modern dual-earner households (two incomes are better than one).

The article also mentions that the falling divorce rates are mostly concentrated among married couples higher up on the class pyramid, while lower status couples are just about as likely to divorce as they were at the peak divorce rate circa 1980. That follows from the status-striving explanation -- upwardly mobile strivers are the ones who marry late, rely on birth control, have fewer / no children, and form dual-breadwinner households.

Perhaps the most direct explanation of why upwardly mobile strivers stick out their bumpy marriages comes from a crass transplant to DC (where else?), in the comments. She's the wife:

Sometimes the downs are so severe and so prolonged that I want to pack my bags and run away. I don't - partly due to my own maturity, partly due to an intensely stubborn unwillingness to fail - but also because we can't afford to live apart without sacrificing everything we've worked for. Together, we do OK but apart, neither one of us makes enough money to live the way we do. I often wonder what would happen if we hit the lottery jackpot during one of the down periods.

A sympathetic follow-up to that comment:

In cities like New York and San Francisco, where a two-bedroom apartment can easily cost $4,000/month and a beer is often $6, even a couple making $200,000/year would face a dramatic change in their living standards if they spit up.

Now it all comes out: marriage for the striver class is primarily a cynical business arrangement calculated to maximize the individual's standard of living. For those components that are private goods, the striver doesn't need marriage -- he can squander his own dough on an expensive personal gadget, and she can rack up her own debt on expensive shoes and handbags.

But then there are the collective goods and services where economies of scale can be exploited. The people you're trying to impress don't really mind if your house or apartment is occupied solely by you, or you plus your spouse (plus any kids you may have). So why not cohabit and then marry someone who can double the amount going to rent or the mortgage? If you're swimming in old money, you don't need to lower yourself to marriage to accomplish this, but if you're a striver, you're going to have to pool resources with a housemate (as a bonus, a housemate who you occasionally have sex with).

At the high end, doubling the budget will have diminishing marginal returns for how impressive the purchase is -- a Manhattan penthouse that costs $20 million vs. $10 million. Strivers can't aim that high, though. They're thinking more like going from a $250K house to a $500K house, or making the jump from a $500K house to a million-dollar house. Those gains are dramatic, and you get more than you pay for. Double your budget, but enjoy ten times the status boost.

There is also a quantum leap effect, where pooling resources allows you to clear a threshold of visibility and respectability. A single striver can't clear the threshold for owning a half-million-dollar house, but two strivers pooling resources could. A single striver can't afford the upscale refrigerator or the Viking range stove or the fully equipped home theater system, but two teaming up together could.

True, the individual could afford a quarter-million-dollar house, an older model refrigerator and stove, a 30-inch TV without audiophile surround sound or rows of club chairs, but c'mon, who's going to be impressed by that stuff? That individual is not merely less visible or respectable in the status contest, they are invisible and pitiful. Pooling resources allows two invisible and pitiful individuals to form a household that clears the threshold of visibility and respectability (plus that occasional roll in the hay).

What other "club goods" fall under this pattern? Those are goods and services that are excludable (the household excludes those outside of the household from enjoying them), but are not rivalrous among those using them within the household (one spouse's use doesn't really subtract from the other spouse's use).

For goods, there's the residential building itself and its real estate location, landscaping and architecture outside the house (fence, porch, patio, deck, yard, trees, bushes, flowers, etc.), the large kitchen appliances, dining room furniture, living room furniture, the TV, bathroom furnishings (sink, vanity, toilet, shower / bathtub), bedroom furnishings (bed, dresser, walk-in closet -- husband doesn't own enough clothes to rival his wife's use of that space), and on and on.

For services, there's the bills for housekeeping and cleaning (wife works too much), the bills for yard maintenance and home repairs (husband works too much), child care if they have kids (wife works), goods and services they provide to their kids, utilities, and media access (cable, internet, maybe a phone line).

Other infrequent luxury goods and services include the wedding, hosting parties, travel and vacations. Pooling resources allows a quantum leap here as well. The wedding is way more awesome than your friends' weddings. A couple can successfully host a party through division of labor vs. an individual being overwhelmed and unable to pull it off. And a couple can share a cab ride to the airport, perhaps get a couple's discount on the plane tickets, share a room, share cab rides at the vacation site, and so on and so forth.

Married people also get tax benefits, but those are on the back of the minds of most strivers. They're mostly thinking about all the awesome new stuff they can own and experience, not a somewhat lower amount to enter on their tax return once a year.

Marriages are as fragile as ever among the lower majority of society, while it has become more stable among the elites mostly because they're desperate to climb the status pyramid, realize that it's easier / possible at all to do this by pooling resources, and fear the loss of material and immaterial standard of living if they were to divorce and give up their tag team / power couple benefits.

Meanwhile, parents are only more and more likely to break up a family, and let their offspring fend for themselves in the aftermath.

Analysts, especially if they're pseudo-cons or quasi-libertarians, have fooled themselves into fixating on marital stability per se, isolating it apart from the larger gestalt of which it is a piece, and ignoring the purpose of marriage, which is creating a family. When they zoom in on the divorce rate by itself, they see only reasons to be sanguine about recent trends and near-term prospects. But anyone who sees the bigger picture has plenty to be worried about.

Star Wars: The cosplay fanfic sequel

If George Lucas raped your childhood, then J.J. Abrams is going to make sure you get a happy ending. See for yourself in the new trailer for next year's re-launch of the franchise.

Look, it's the original style of stormtrooper armor! Look, it's some kind of speeder bike! Look, a close-up shot inside the cockpit of an x-wing! Holy shit bro, the millennium falcon! And the original John Williams theme! Plus, no five year-old actor, no CGI rabbit, and no midichlorian meter? Well, who's gonna be camping in line one year ahead of release night? — this guy!

Yeah, it doesn't look like the third trilogy is going to be a great big middle finger to the fans or audiences with half a brain, the way that the second trilogy was. This time a stubborn idiot who thinks he's clever won't be directing them into oblivion. But we're still just getting an overly enthusiastic fanboy who's going to make it all about fan service, devoid of plot, character, or visual style.

Hey, he made everyone forget about those awful Star Trek: The Next Generation movies from the '90s. Not by making anything new, but by making reference after reference to the stuff that everyone already likes, or would like if they haven't seen it.

You can't "do Wrath of Khan again," or "do Star Wars again," because the zeitgeist has changed so much. The result is placing contemporary actors with contemporary attitudes in a great big cosplay re-enactment of the original movies, all shot with contemporary camera work, and presented after contemporary editing.

Star Trek now stars a gay Latino Millennial as Spock, the tone is constant frenzy, and the camera is hyperactive. Star Wars is going to star a negro Millennial (hopefully not also gay), the tone looks to be constant frenzy, and the camera hyperactive. Updating the classics for our times, or overly indulgent LARP session?

It's not a nostalgic re-enactment either, as the Millennials grew up long after Star Trek and Star Wars exploded as pop culture phenomena. Non-whites, let alone queer ones, couldn't have cared less about them. A nostalgic re-enactment would star straight, white Gen X-ers. Multicultural Millennials are just going to make it come off as a cargo cult performance.

I am glad that part of this cargo cult approach involves shooting on film and using practical effects (although still tons of CGI, judging from the trailer). If the superior technology doesn't get preserved, it could be lost for good.

Other than that, I have zero interest in seeing the new sequels. It's too late to re-launch Star Wars — and was already too late by the '90s. It would have been neat to see a Star Wars movie in the late '80s or very early '90s, before the zeitgeist shifted so far away from what developed during the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

We got a third Indiana Jones movie in '89, and it wasn't that bad — palpably more self-aware and winking at the audience (watch it again and see how many jokes are blatant asides to the audience), but still a solid Indiana Jones movie.* I didn't bother seeing the fourth movie in the 2000s because I knew it would suck based on the Star Wars prequels sucking, and hearing everyone say so when it came out.

Star Wars missed the window to follow up on a classic from the late '70s / early '80s, and should have stopped before the prequels got made. There's even less reason for these new sequels to get made, other than cashing in on a surefire opening weekend with a sequel to the most popular movie out there.

* Some other sequels worth noting from the late '80s / early '90s, which lagged quite a bit behind the original, which took on a noticeably more self-aware or winking tone, but which were still decent movies:

Back to the Future II and III ('89 and '90, original '85)
Christmas Vacation ('89, original '83)
Ghostbusters II ('89, original '84)
Gremlins 2 ('90, original '84)
The Exorcist III ('90, original '73)

Immigration policy — for cheap labor or cultural replacement?

In the search to track down the traitors who are selling out our country to hordes of foreigners, conservatives can mislead themselves into targeting primarily "cultural Marxists" — those who loathe Western, white, male, hetero culture, and want to replace it with something superior based on its opposites.

Not that that crowd isn't on board with amnesty and immigration, of course they are. But a bunch of limp-dick intellectuals in San Francisco don't have the wealth, power, and influence to control political and economic activity at the highest level. They only serve the powerful by providing an intellectual basis for the policies that were going to take place anyway, to make them sound like a logical necessity rather than a naked power play.

Culture-war conservatives should sober up by looking at the twin policy of immigration — off-shoring, especially of labor but also of tax status. It isn't only hordes of foreigners flooding in, but boatloads of jobs setting sail for far-flung dirt-floor countries. If immigration policy were primarily about replacing the native population with a foreign population more to the liking of the powerful, then why not bring all those beneficiaries of off-shoring right here to the USA?

The answer is that sometimes it's cheaper for their employers to bring the foreigners here, and sometimes cheaper to keep them where they are over there. A contractor who hires dry-wall workers cannot off-shore those jobs to Mexico, India, or China, because the dry-wall work must be done right here. Same with strawberry pickers, meat packers, fast food workers, lawn cutters, and leaf blowers.

But if the work can be done at a distance, the employers are happy to send the work overseas without the whole troublesome business of importing foreign workers to America (like having to pay them based more on the American vs. Indian cost of living). Answering phone calls to customer service and writing computer code naturally lend themselves to distance work. So does manufacturing, as long as shipping the goods here isn't too expensive (shipped in bulk, protected and organized efficiently through modern containerization). This includes industrial products, consumer electronics, and pharmaceutical drugs.

While the cultural replacement view cannot account for such a dramatic split between the twin policies of immigration and off-shoring, it follows straightforwardly from the cheap labor view that we normally associate with leftist or liberal criticism of immigration (such as it is).

There are other clear signs that the powerful don't care that much about replacing the native culture with a foreign one. Why aren't schoolchildren compelled to be bilingual in one of the languages of our new neighbors or trading partners from Central America, China, and India? Foreign language classes are a total joke, are only required for a couple years, and students are not tested for proficiency at all. School boards would eliminate French and German in favor of Cantonese and Hindi. The powerful may want us to be more sensitive and aware of foreign cultures, but not to actually become a foreign culture, which would require a lingua franca.

Deserting the battle over cheap labor, immigration, and off-shoring in this second Gilded Age of ours will earn conservatives a one-way ticket to irrelevance and impotence in the broader culture. So how can they present their criticism in a distinctly conservative rather than leftist way?

I think the main difference is that leftists only blame the shareholders and managers of Big Business for cheap labor policies. As the agents of bullying the government into opening the gates, they certainly deserve a good deal of the blame.

But what about ordinary consumers who clamor for ever cheaper products and services — and the hell if it means that the companies they buy from will employ workers from dirt-floor countries, whether bringing them here or sending the work over there? It's not as though the bulk of the American middle and lower classes would even consider, let alone carry out a boycott of companies that provide cheap junk made by careless foreigners.

"Hey, it's cheap, isn't it? It does the basic thing it's supposed to do, doesn't it? Then who cares if Chinese or Indians or Mexicans had to make it. Now I can buy ten times as much junk. If Americans made it, I could only afford one-tenth of the junk pile that I currently enjoy."

Middle-class callousness toward the consequences of their everyday purchases of goods and services on the demand side is almost as responsible for the cheap labor policies as Big Business greed is on the supply side. Not to mention the phenomenon of middle-class individuals employing cheap foreign labor as lawn cutters, dry-wallers, and babysitters in their own homes. That's not the outcome of a corporate board meeting on Wall Street.

The conservative response in the battle over cheap labor will not target only the wealthy in a class war, but try to humble the middle and lower classes as well, and hold them accountable for their callous preferences that have provided the fuel for the greed of Big Business.

Now, blaming everyone instead of a small easy target may seem like a losing strategy, but as long as it's based on humility and redemption, it can catch on at the grassroots level. An ordinary individual or family cannot meet with a politician the way that a corporate lobbyist can, but they can passively change their consumer practices and actively boycott companies that go against those wishes. "Boycott Chinese junk" would go a long way toward returning that work to American soil.

The leftist response to cheap labor, aimed only at the very top of society, is ultimately more hopeless. It relies on corporate containment policies at the very highest levels of government, or else violent disruption of the shareholders and managers' lives. During the last peak in inequality circa 1920, we saw armed strikers shooting it out against paramilitary armies, as well as anarchists lobbing bombs on Wall Street and assassinating politicians.

During the Great Compression, when inequality reversed and economic and political life became more stable, there were definitely large-scale regulatory programs by the government to rein in the greed and manipulation of Big Business, not to mention much higher income tax rates than we have seen since the '80s. That is the slice of Midcentury life that leftists and liberals can warm up to.

What they don't see is the grassroots change in preferences toward solidifying the culture through excluding foreigners and not buying stuff made in the third world, even if it meant more expensive products and services.

By the Midcentury, the days of hiring cheap servants recently arrived from Ireland, or cheap steel mill workers fresh off the boat from Poland, were long gone. As detailed in this profile from Fortune magazine in 1955, even elite executives chose to live in more modest houses and to employ fewer or no servants, compared to the decadent ways of the early 20th century — then still in living memory.

Middle-class preferences began to take account of the socially corrosive consequences of acquiring as much stuff for as cheaply as possible. And they came to view such pursuits as debasing to the individual. Those who still tried to cling to the old ways, a la Pottersville from It's a Wonderful Life and Norma Desmond's palazzo from Sunset Boulevard, were subjected to shaming in popular culture.

Liberals only see others as selfish, while conservatives see it as part of the human tendency toward sin. Emphasizing this difference will keep the battle over cheap labor from descending into class war against the rich.

Wannabes and absentees: Do it yourself and Pay someone else

During the shift toward status-striving of the past 30-odd years, there have been two huge changes in the way that services are performed. One is to Do It Yourself, the other is to Pay Someone Else. At the level of outsourcing vs. doing something in-house, these two are opposites, so there must be a unifying common theme at a higher level. That's where the link to status-striving lies.

Where have people increasingly opted for the DIY "solution"?

Home improvement — beyond simple maintenance and repairs, homeowners now remodel and build additions. They are also inclined to build their own furniture and fashion their own small decorations.

Specialty mechanics and electronics — modding your car, modding your computer or video game console or phone (perhaps tinkering with the hardware, but usually futzing around with software settings). "Developing" your own digital image captures (hours of dicking around in Photoshop), repairing your own intricate camera and lenses ("a little WD-40 ought to silence that squeaking..."), and photographing something complicated and important. Putting together a full mechanics' workshop in the garage.

Health — except for major trauma, diagnosing and treating malaise or illness is now done through researching a bit online, then drawing up a list of the right mix of foods, vitamins, supplements, and pills. Faddish psychobabble therapies can be added if the pain is mostly emotional.

These services require years of acquired knowledge, experience, and skills, not to mention tools and materials that are relatively expensive, hard to find, and difficult to understand and use. They are done — or used to be done — by artisans and professionals, and confer status on the DIY-ers.

What about the trend toward Pay Someone Else?

Child-rearing — daycare workers, nannies, school teachers (substitute mothers), and coaches and tutors of varying specialties (substitute fathers) now perform most of the day-to-day and face-to-face activities of raising children. That's in addition to parking your kids in front of a glowing media screen, an even more flagrant form of outsourcing your parenting duties.

Meal cooking — hardly anyone makes home-cooked meals anymore, which come instead from fast food chains, microwave meals, and already prepared meals / hot bar items at the supermarket.

Housekeeping and yard work — women who sweep, vacuum, clean counters, and scrub toilets and showers, as well as men who ride lawnmowers and aim leafblowers.

These services are unskilled and require the use of tools and materials that are cheap, plentiful, and simple to use. Their main input is labor (time and effort), so they would subtract status if the Pay-Someone-Elsers were to do it themselves.

The psychology is easy to understand. Status-strivers want to do the professional work themselves, to reap the benefits of branding themselves as artisans. They shed the status deadweight of unskilled work through outsourcing, even if it means neglecting their familial duties.

There are far broader implications for the economy, though, not just changes in how annoyingly grandiose and shamefully neglectful your fellow neighbors, co-workers, and citizens have become.

The DIY movement has wiped out the number of man-hours that could have been done by true artisans and skilled workers, and lowered the asking price of the labor they can still sell to customers, who now expect dirt-cheap services since "I could always just do it myself, y'know." If the service proves too complicated to DIY, the customer will just opt for replacement rather than repair (fueling planned obsolescence). That eliminates the once common fix-it shops as a way of making a living.

The Pay Someone Else movement has swollen the number of man-hours going into unskilled labor, which is already low-paying, offering little to no benefits, temporary / high-turnover, and uncertain job security.

The outcome is widening inequality, as skilled jobs are replaced by unskilled. We usually associate that with heartless managers of large companies decomposing a skilled task into separate rote tasks through mechanization. But here we see just how deep the rot goes — even ordinary individual consumers are such self-regarding skinflints that skilled tradesmen must debase themselves into unskilled laborers in order to satisfy the status-enhancing lifestyles of today's middle class.

Sure, skilled artisans can still find work with the top-top-top level elite, whose budgets are unlimited and who are more inclined toward conspicuous leisure. But that's not a large market. It was the middle class market for skilled services that used to support an electronics repair shop, photography studio, and carpenter's workshop.

Unlike the decadent and parasitic elite, the middle class actually produces for a living, and can't indulge so much in conspicuous leisure. So, conspicuous consumption it is. Middle-class folks have never been more profligate with their disposable income, loans, and credit — yet they would take it as a personal defeat to have to hire a carpenter to remodel their cabinets. All that status item spending has drained the portion of their income that could have gone toward skilled services and production.

After all, why by one good pair of shoes made by skilled Americans when you can buy five pairs made by unskilled Salvadoreans? Owning a single pair of shoes prevents you from participating in the fashion treadmill. So does owning a single professionally made dishwasher for 30 years — if the workers are barely skilled and their product breaks down every five years, that's just an opportunity to UPGRADE DAT SHIT and impress your friends. For status-strivers, crummy products are the gift that keeps on giving.

Zen and the art of trail maintenance

For the past couple weeks I've been spending three to five hours most days on a project to restore an abandoned trail that my peers and I took for granted in middle and high school, but has since fallen into ruins.

Clearing thorn bushes and the ubiquitous invasive vines along the edge of the woods, so that the portal into the trail can be seen and easily walked into. Logging the fallen and leaning trees (and some dead standing ones), plus all the branches strewn along the tread. Re-positioning logs so they don't dam up a bunch of leaves and water whenever rain flows downhill. Dislodging large hanging branches so that every step doesn't feel like you've got the sword of Damocles dangling over your head. Raking away all the debris that not only obscures the tread but makes it slippery to walk over — leaves, rocks, sticks, etc. Clearing leaves out of drains...

I've noticed how abandoned the woods have become for awhile, but now that I've started to try doing something about it, in a place that I knew well as a teenager, my mind struggles to comprehend how many areas need attention, and how effortless it used to be in the good old days when everybody pitched in here and there.

Part of the cause is the status-striving and inequality trend. Government funding for trail maintenance and similar programs has dried up since that benefits ordinary middle-class white people, when those funds could be better used to give mortgages to Mexicans, or to bail out the Jews on Wall Street who bet on the Mexican mortgages.

Status-striving also leads to a withdrawal from civic participation (less time, money, and effort to spend on self-advancement), a la Bowling Alone, so don't expect to see legions of volunteers regularly pitching in. Even the Boy Scouts these days seem to be more about fundraising for the Boy Scouts (how many bags of popcorn should we put you down for?), so they can attend the national Boy Scout jamboree, than practicing stewardship in the communities they live in.

The collapse of deliberate and concerted maintenance wasn't so noticeable in the context of woodland trails during the '80s and early '90s (well into the era of civic disengagement), because the society was in its outgoing phase of the cocooning-and-crime cycle. Every trail-goer who kicked a branch out of their way or bashed up a thorn bush in their way kept the trail in decent shape. Since the return of cocooning and helicopter parenting over the past 20-25 years, though, hardly anybody wanders back through there, so there aren't even the unwitting volunteers to keep it people-friendly.

I haven't been posting or reading comments here during this time because hours and hours of barely skilled labor in the woods is one of the most fulfilling activities I've ever done. It reminds me of my childhood when my Pap used to take me back into the Appalachian woods and we'd cut back thorns, push over dead trees, and take care of other public-space groundskeeping.

Although ideas for posts strike me while I'm out working, and I even elaborate them into fuller thoughts out there, I just don't feel like plugging my brain into the internet when I get home, nor would I feel like plugging in before I left for the day, putting me in the wrong state of mind.

I'll try to write some of this up soon, but in case it takes awhile, here is the gist of several, to get people thinking and talking again.

- Trail creation and maintenance is rooted in transhumance pastoralism (not nomadic). Why don't Slavs, chinks, spics, and blacks seem to care about the very presence of trails through nature, let alone practice stewardship over them?

- The long stretches of unskilled manual labor is rewarding because there's a point, and the effects can be clearly seen and appreciated. Working out at the gym has no point, other than toning your buns to please your gay lovers. Even the paleo exercises that are more in touch with the tasks we're adapted to do, are in the end still pointless leisure. If you want to be really paleo, get some damn work done while you're exerting yourself. It'll give you a sense of accomplishment and pride that you must otherwise force / con yourself into believing when it's just doing X many reps for Y many sets, or the equivalent end-points for a paleo routine.

- The hiker / rockclimber / outdoors culture is also purely leisure-based. Conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption (their "gear" is more encrusted with logos than a middle schooler's). And focused entirely on advancing the self in a status contest, rather than stewardship of shared common spaces. Look at how few tools those stores sell.

- Conservatives who do nothing to preserve, in whatever little way they can, the shared common spaces that made this country great, need to answer for their negligence, or be brushed aside as worthless whiners. "There's no point — the country is being over-run with Mexicans, so what's the point in preserving something that the Americans of 2050 won't appreciate and will allow to fall back into disrepair?" Well why don't we just burn the whole place to the ground, then, including your own house with you still in it? White Americans are still going to be around in 50 years, and they're going to be counting on us to keep things as well preserved as possible. Otherwise they'll just go to what is being preserved, i.e. Walmarts full of lardass spics. Innumerable people before your time shaped the places you connect with, so you've got to do your part too.

- Getting less political, what accounts for the split between woodsmen, woodworkers, and carpenters on the one side, and mechanics on the other? In the hardware section of Sears (burn down Home Depot), I was struck by how much mechanics tools there were, and how little any of it resonated with me (my mother's father was a carpenter). People-oriented vs. thing-oriented? Wood in the shop or in the woods as a natural substance, hence more people-like than exhaust pipes and drive trains? At least there's a preference for natural vs. artificial objects to work on.

- Warning coloration to ward off wildlife that may want to tangle with you. There was a decent-sized buck staring me down from about five yards away, who had a high-ground advantage over me, where I also had no maze of trees or anything to run back into or up into. Usually they'll walk a few steps at a time to see if you back away. This time, I'd taken off my coat since it had gotten warm, and I had on t-shirt with a very busy black-and-white Southwest Indian tribal print. That was the only time so far that I won in a staring contest up that close, at such a disadvantage. He blinked first, turned his head first, and walked away uphill. I wonder if having such a high-contrast pattern, like a skunk or badger on cocaine, played a role in driving him off.

- Why are both the outdoors and hunting scenes so averse to wearing "gear" from animal sources? It seems like they're finally learning about this ancient invention called wool, but it is damn rare to find animal skins or furs at a hunting store, outdoors store, or army/navy surplus store. The answer is not price, since their over-engineered Franken-fabrics cost an arm and a leg. I put it down to the trait of following natural vs. engineered solutions. Animals that have been shaped by millions of years of natural selection to adapt to cold, wet, thorny, outdoors conditions are going to have superior protection compared to whatever the latest lab fad is with consumers who have too much disposable income. We ought to copy what adaptations those animals have evolved — and if we can't copy them, we can just steal them.

Ohio court to queer couples: Drop dead (from viral loads)

In a landmark decision that will hopefully drive most of Ohio's gay-enabling Millennial generation out of the state, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati has allowed four states (Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Michigan) to treat gay marriages as illegitimate, following the sentiment of the people.

This may force a decision with the Supreme Court, and they may rule in favor of gay marriage. But even if that happens, conservatives in the region should not grasp defeat from the jaws of victory. A ruling against condoning gay deviance all the way up at the appellate level is already sending shockwaves throughout the region (see all the whiny Twitter reactions in the Dispatch article).

Now it is official: no matter what the Supreme Court ultimately decides, Ohio and its Appalachian neighbors have chosen to stand on the wrong side of history. Anybody who wants to stand on the right side can defect and join the liberal transplant hive in a more fag-friendly state.

If you think that gays and their apologists are going to forget this decision when/if the Supreme Court reverses it, think again. Look at how well people still remember the resistance in the Deep South to desegregation in the 1950s. That example is instructive: although local resistance was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, blacks still figured it wasn't worth the hassle of living there anymore, and continued migrating toward more liberal Midwestern areas.

Letting a group know that they aren't welcome, or at least that they can't push their agenda over the majority, goes a long way toward not having to live with their problems anymore. On the flipside, letting a group know that they are welcomed unconditionally, and that the majority will take all the narrow-interests abuse that can be dished out by the guests, makes it certain that the hosts will have to put up with the newcomers' problems for a very long time.

Chicago only shed large numbers of blacks when they told them that even better welfare policies awaited them up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. There were also enough micks and wops in Chicago to give the blacks a little boost out of the state, whereas Minneapolis and Milwaukee have only Nordic pansies standing guard.

Ohio, though, is proving to be less and less Midwestern over time. We see that now from a regional high court more or less giving the finger to the number one trendoid human rights cause du jour. There is a fault-line running through the state from southwest to northeast, with the southern and eastern strip being hillbillies, the southwest being more akin to Louisville, Kentucky, the center area drawing a variety of folks, and the northern and western area being part of the freezing industrial Midwest, now the Rust Belt.

Over the past two to three generations, the hillbillies have been leaving the rural areas and settling down more in the center near Columbus, or further south toward Cincinnati and Louisville. Cleveland in the northeast and Toledo in the northwest keep losing population, mostly out of state to transplant havens in Arizona, North Carolina, etc. Slowly but surely the Appalachian influence is on the rise, and the Midwestern on the decline.

It can be hard for folks not acquainted with flyover country to picture where the rough boundaries of Appalachia are, so here is a map of its counties according to the Appalachian Regional Council. Most people know that the country is flat along the East Coast, flat in the Midwest, and is hilly or mountainous somewhere in between, but think only of West Virginia.

Notice how much of Ohio is hillbilly territory. You don't see that out in the Platonic ideal Midwestern states like Iowa or Minnesota. (Also notice how much of Pennsylvania is hilly once you get away from Philadelphia on the East Coast.)

As the me-first impulse carries individuals away from their home town and to wherever they identify and affiliate with, the initial disparities will widen within fault-line states like Ohio. People who want to be on the right side of migration history will high-tail it out of the state toward Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, etc. And they'll take their "right side of history" politics with them.

The remainder who pay no mind to how trendy their place of residence and origin is, will neither care about how trendy their policies are.

Grandiose gravestones in status-striving times

Crossing over to the afterlife is the final rite of passage that we make, and like other such rites, it is marked by a ceremony to publicly and collectively acknowledge the irrevocably altered status of the deceased.

Ceremonies in general are ripe targets for elaboration during status-striving times — we get to show off before a captive audience. When the climate becomes more about accommodating others instead of me-first, ceremonies take on a more restrained and self-effacing tone.

During the Gilded Age and early 20th C., status-striving and inequality were soaring toward a peak that maxed out circa 1920. The wealthy could afford more of everything, and given their impulse toward excess, it's no surprise to see their grave monuments continuing to tower over the others in cemeteries across the country to this day. Visit a few local places that have graves going back through the 1800s, and you'll see it for yourself.

The main differences I've noticed are that they are much taller (easily exceeding human height), have more elaborate working (more than one typeface, semi-circular ruling for the text, images carved on a flat surface, and even relief sculpture), and tend to have bold messages about this life being over but the next one beginning — being re-born rather than truly passing away, triumphant over Death.

Here is a monument from 1879 and a mausoleum from 1911, both typical among the wealthy of their time:

These features begin to dwindle already during the '20s and '30s, and are more or less absent throughout the '70s. Headstones rise no higher than a few feet, are block-like in shape, and have simple working (at most a floral pattern carved around the sides and upper corners of the border), and contain no messages whatsoever — only the person's name (sometimes only the surname) and the dates of their birth and death. Not what their role or status in the community was, not what their status was in their extended family, not their job, or anything else. And no declaration that the show isn't really over / don't count me out just yet.

Those folks didn't lack confidence that the deceased would be thriving in the afterlife, nor did they believe that there was nothing to be said about their various roles and statuses in the domains of life. They just didn't feel like saying it — it would have struck them as vainglory.

Here is a typical tombstone from the end of the humble Great Compression, circa the '60s and '70s. If a cemetery began after 1920 and filled up before 1990, this is the only kind of marker you are likely to see:

Sometime during the '80s and '90s there was a shift back toward the Gilded Age pattern of taller, monumental styles, images and likenesses carved, relief sculpture, copious text, and this likely including a list of their various social achievements and proclamations about how they are too great to submit to Death, and are actually living it up in the Great Beyond.

I can't say from impression when the reversal occurred — I did see a couple like that from the '80s, but it seemed like the real growth was during the '90s. At any rate, by the 21st century, the shift is crystal clear, as seen in this recent example:

Somehow, our neo-Gilded Age climate has revived the grandiose style of grave markers. What are the links?

The taller height and more elaborate working speaks for itself.

Listing their social roles — father, officer, musician — is close to bragging about what they accomplished, even if it's not as obvious as the bumper stickers about "my kid is an honor student at Junior Genius pre-school," or the "fruit salad" decorations that military leaders now wear.

Inscribing a mini-eulogy is a bit odd — it was already said before those who knew the deceased, during the funeral service. Broadcasting it forever to random passersby is bordering on presumptuous. It also feeds an arms race of whose marker has more to grab our attention.

The bold messages about the non-finality of death do not strike me as meant to comfort and reassure those who have survived the deceased, but more of a statement of how great and powerful they were to have risen above death, more like a demi-god than a mere mortal.

This topic could easily be explored quantitatively, and even snuck into a mainstream outlet as long as it had a title like Inequality in the Graveyard. Plenty of folks have researched the temporal changes in funeral monuments, but none that I could find have looked at the link to the status-striving and inequality cycle.

And as hinted at the beginning, this approach could be broadened to look at all of the ceremonies that mark life's milestone transitions. Debutante balls long ago, which then vanished, but have been revived as Sweet Sixteen extravaganzas. Weddings (holy shit). Bearing children — how much stuff do you have to buy to welcome them into the world, and to let the public know that you now have a kid?

These changes have already been noticed and discussed, although not necessarily how they're reviving the ways of the Gilded Age and Downton Abbey period. Now we see that these changes include the ceremonies surrounding the final of life's major transitions.

Addendum: here is an article about similar changes in Germany from the early 20th C., Midcentury, and Millennial periods. It's not just an American thing, but wherever the status-striving and inequality cycle is more or less in sync.