It seems odd to claim this increase is due to keeping up with others' weddings when inflation between 1990 and 2015 was roughly the difference here. The weddings were/are more expensive because everything was/is more expensive. $15,000 in 1990 had the same purchasing power as ~$27,000 in 2015. So this hardly seems related to bigger, more extravagant weddings. People have had to spend more to maintain the same quality of wedding as the previous generation.
In fact, weddings decreased in inflation-adjusted cost between 1990 and 2023: https://ktvz.com/stacker-lifestyle/2024/03/01/how-us-wedding...
I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.
As did I.
90s weddings remind me of the Friends episode where Monica was scoping out her wedding. Chandler revealed how much money he had by writing it on a price of paper (that is, the audience never saw the dollar value), and Monica said something like "oh, we can go with best one, plan A" and Chandler said he didn't want to spend that much money "on one party". I've always wondered what amount of money that was.
I don't believe that's consistent with the data
They take a taxi to the airport, oh to live a life of such extravagance.
They get their newspaper delivered to their door every Sunday? The aristocrats.
There's actual wealthy people in the world, no need to be a crab in a bucket.
As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from The Office; not The Office (US).
*In that the US show made him rich.
AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
Both of those are anemic views of "freedom".
The most robust understanding of freedom is and must be rooted in morality and thus human nature:
Freedom is the ability to do what is *good*, or what one *ought*.
And human nature has a direction. Good acts further human beings along that general axis (neutral acts at least do not retreat or deviate). Eating lead is unhealthy, but doing so intentionally, knowing fully well that lead is harmful, is evil, because a choice was made in light of knowledge to do what one should not.
living in the third world i have seen absurd stuff: early 20s women living in slums that own the latest iphone pro max on a 5 year term loan is a common theme
in london the children of the UHNW (net worth >EUR100m) compete for scholarships and academic achievements, or to create unicorn startups, because the only way they can differentiate themselves from UHNW peers is the academic arena where money doesnt matter. they also tend to make shitty films or own vineyards, or try to become authors, or try to make scientific discoveries, and get sucked in to Mystical Gurus like Mr Epstein and Elizabeth Holmes/Thanos
It’s no different than a national geographic video where the loudest frog signals it can be bold enough to broadcast its location, even though it can be eaten. Wearing gold chains and bragging you have crypto is akin to yelling “come and rob me” in a less safe world.
The reality is that status is just a way to “encourage/compel” voluntary submission of services from other people, who may think they will benefit from your status rubbing on them in some way.
Strangers don’t support you for what you do, but for what you can do for them in the future.
I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
In the US we administer a test at age 16 that determines lifetime "qualifications" and access to "secret and sacred knowledge". How much further is there to even go on that front? Back to inherited nobility?
Eldership, acceptance into a hierarchy based on deeds and demonstrated virtue within a relatively small social grouping that does not recognize the value of money is, I believe, worthwhile. And the socially formal recognition, not easily won nor necessarily expected from anyone who has not been permitted to give it perhaps recognises that our society has values and that you are still expected to grow, even as an adult.
Those institutions are chalk full of secret & sacred knowledge. Good luck becoming POTUS, a Tech Billionaire or Nobel Prize winner through freely available information on the internet.
> Eldership, acceptance into a hierarchy based on deeds and demonstrated virtue within a relatively small social grouping that does not recognize the value of money is, I believe, worthwhile. And the socially formal recognition, not easily won nor necessarily expected from anyone who has not been permitted to give it perhaps recognises that our society has values and that you are still expected to grow, even as an adult.
The point is we already have an extremely rigid hierarchy that encompasses our entire society (the mandarin system would be envious, it was just for officialdom!) and unfortunately unlike your ideal - it is not independent of money & does not expect growth.
We've had only 1 president and 1 supreme court justice in my lifetime who didn't attend the Ivy league. It's already de facto, why expand it or make it de jure? This sort of credentialism is what brought us the Bay of Pigs & the War in Iraq.
Sorry, no offence, but I wish that this was the "problem" with AI.
The "Problem" is actually that it turns known tractable problems into non-reproducible problems.
Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer. So we're not going to AI ourselves into post-scarcity, whitecollar work will just sleepwalk into even further absurdity. (because, the fact is, humans also suffer from this issue; the worst among us give the appearance of competence and fuck it up massively).
AI consumes resources like a motherfucker, to maybe replace white-collar work, but the bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere. It's a harder problem so people (companies) avoid it the same way that they avoid writing native GUIs. Much more convenient to just focus on pretty things and in the digital realm, but farming? agriculture? textiles and everything that society actually relies upon?
AI isn't coming for those jobs, because it's harder and has more definite outcomes. You can't trick people into believing that a pig has been slaughtered, carved and cooked properly.
It's comparatively easy to trick people into thinking that the man behind the curtain is a wizard, however.
> Before making this argument, I want to defend the topic. Utopia is not around the corner; these issues don't have any practical urgency. But I agree with Bostrom that thinking about utopia “can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values.” Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
The 1700s called, regular mechinization already came for that.
And non-LLM AI has been moving into more blue collar stuff for years already, now with LLM logic they are becoming far more capable too.
You must be thinking of the more blue collar service industry, which may not go anywhere, but the time it takes to train, and the number of people that will go into it will ensure earning a living is difficult.
Oh man sometimes I'm like "actually what I just said is wrong"... I have to remind myself to slow down/think over everything before saying something is done.
a lot of agriculture is either about owning a bunch of land and machines, or owning access to a bunch of slave-ish labour. sure the slave-ish labour side isnt all that automated yet, but the up side to automating isnt very high either
What would happen if you just had children?
> But I think this won’t be a problem with a post-scarcity world. So many of the difficulties we face in life stem from our interactions with other people, and these won’t go away even with infinite material resources. So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. On the bright side, our lives will continue to have meaning in a post-scarcity world. We might be miserable, but we won’t be bored.
But why? What is their purpose? What is social hierarchy for?
Let's be frank. Most title chasing is pure vanity. There is no substance in the chase. It's a game that takes schoolyard stupidity and flavors it with "adult" respectability. But underneath, it's generally vacuous and theatrical.
The only purpose of social hierarchy is to serve others. Why does a manager exist in a firm? To serve the workers he manages so that they can do their jobs which are also in the service of someone else. Why is there a king or a president? To serve the common good according to his station. We elevate for service. If someone has more to give and the necessary character to do it well, ideally, we elevate him according to his good so that he can better serve according to the good he has instead of allow that good to rot on the vine. It is service that makes sense of social hierarchy. Social hierarchy is about gift. It's what makes a society a society.
In a tyrannical, upside down world, hierarchy is about domination and exploitation, about taking. Here, the scramble goes by the motto "eat or be eaten". We claw over each other like crabs in a bucket, because we don't want to be "eaten", and because we wish to "eat" others. It is a perversion of our human nature. When Christians speak of "the world" in the pejorative, they mean this systemic pathological condition of human societies. I laugh when people wax poetic about utopia here on earth, as if "resources" could fix the issue, because left to our own devices, it is dystopia that we tend to produce. This is why Christians speak of the need of a divine savior and why our "flesh" needs to be crucified so that we may live, not because the body is bad, but because we are stupid, corrupt, and weak.
> So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. [...] Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
If the satisfaction of all finite desires leaves us with unsatisfied desires, then either there are unsatisfiable desires, or our desires can only be satisfied by something infinite. This is where God as the ultimate good and highest desire and ultimate source of joy comes in. If God is the ultimate cause, source, and sustainer of everything, then our "to be", our being—which is what desire is about—is to be found in this First Cause. All other created beings are in some sense intermediaries and mediators of the desired good. But if you can have the ocean, what, then, is a cup of water drawn from that ocean? Good, to be sure, but not the source.
On this view, many pathologies, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions, then, are misdirected desire.
> But I’ve never met anyone who was entirely indifferent to the opinions of others.
Likewise, if you have the fundamental approval of an omniscient God who knows you better than you know yourself, who willed you into existence with intention, who is the justification of your existence, who loves you more than anyone could and to whom you matter more than you could understand, who can give you joy nothing else can, then the approval of others becomes quite shabby in comparison. Perhaps not entirely meaningless, but not your foundation. Their approval is not your fickle pagan god.
This is what gives martyrs their strength and freedom to endure the injustices and envies and hatred of the world, even unto death. Their soul remains unsold for the measly opinions of others, untarnished by the indignity of desperately seeking the approval of others like a beggar licking crumbs off the floor. It allows one's focus to shift from an obsession over self toward a disinterested concern about the objective good of others. Just hierarchy doesn't bother you, because it exists for your benefit just the same. Even if others despise you, even if they don't appreciate your care, you will be free from the prison of seeking their approval. You will no longer live and act and work for their approval as if burning hecatombs to appease an idol, but serve the objective good.
> But, of course, there’s more to desire—we are often attracted to a particular person. We want them; we covet them. It’s wonderful if they covet us back; it’s agonizing if they don’t. To make things worse, even if we’re lucky enough to arrive at reciprocal desire, we often want the other’s desire to be exclusively pointed our way.
In this life, we guard good jealously (not enviously; envy is the vice of experiencing sorrow over someone else's good fortune that one lacks, while jealousy is a protectiveness over the goodness one does have for fear of losing it). Our happiness may depend on others. But one's joy does not, as the implied good of all things desired is their ultimate source, which is God. Thus, in this view, heaven—for it to be heaven—one would need unmediated union with God (what some call the beatific vision). In this state, love for others is a flawlessly selfless and totally free act of self-giving for the sake of their well-being, not the often tense bargaining and haggling and strife that characterizes much of this life. Indeed, the primary cause of divorce is selfishness. Marriage teaches us and matures us in selflessness. It creates the conditions that make it a lesson that is necessary to learn if the marriage is to succeed. That is life's journey, and marriage is the most typical path by which it is taken.
In summary, according to this view, there is a way out of the predicament the article describes, but many do not know or do not understand, and some despise it having learned of it.