Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 22 май 2023
- Date: 12 May 2023
Mr Henderson will speak about ‘Luxury Beliefs’, a phrase he coined a few years ago that has enjoyed widespread use among opinion formers throughout the English-speaking world.
The idea derives from Thorsten Veblen’s observation that the affluent consumed and displayed luxury products as costly status symbols to demonstrate their economic capital and social rank.
However, economic capital is often converted into cultural capital, in which the struggle for distinction is expressed by opinions, knowledge, vocabulary, tastes, and habits.
He will share empirical research and theory from sociology, economics, and psychology, to suggest a novel approach to understanding social status: luxury beliefs, defined as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent, while often inflicting costs on the less fortunate.
Speakers:
- Rob Henderson, writer, psychologist, and faculty fellow, University of Austin
- Rod Dreher, Visiting Fellow, Director of Network Project at the Danube Institute
- Wael Taji Miller, Visiting Fellow, Danube Institute, PhD Candidate in Behavioral Neuroscience, Semmelweis University
- Eric Hendriks, Visiting Fellow, Danube Institute
- Melissa O’Sullivan, Deputy Director of the Danube Institute
Music Info:
Flying and Uplifting - No Copyright Background Music by LesFreeMusic.
Music Link: • Flying and Uplift...
Outro Music by Coma-Media from Pixaba
Thanks for putting this online.
loved the intro and the discussion.
It does seem to me an interesting and probably useful and important concept, and I'm grateful to Henderson and the others for this introduction to it.
That said, I think the concept's not used in a very disciplined, methodical way here. I mean, several of the examples given don't seem to me to meet all of the criteria Henderson spells out near the start. And there's a failure to acknowledge how people in all echelons of society commonly adopt beliefs for social and image-based reasons, rather than truth-pursuing ones - and that failure makes the concept of luxury beliefs seem more remarkable.
thank you. sound could be better
They seem to speak as if very rich college kids are misguided in feeling guilty about their wealth. I wonder how they can think that. When the very same money that paid for those kids' tennis lessons and holidays in the Swiss Alps and dresses from Harrods could have paid to save the lives of others, or to give those others the basic education necessary to discover and develop their talents enough to escape poverty; and when those kids have obviously not acquired their wealth through any effort of their own, and even their families, in many cases, have acquired it in large part thanks to luck and/or unscrupulous behaviour.
It's so weird hearing Henderson grant that, just possibly, in some cases, progressive taxation may actually help the poor. Though all credit to him for doing that, in the context of an event like this.
I wish they had acknowledged that the same essential belief can be a luxury belief in one person's case and a well-reasoned, entirely unselfish belief in another's.
I mean, for instance: there's a very dumb version of the 'defund the police' belief, but also there's another version that, even if you still disagree with it, is not dumb at all. (You can find such a version of the belief summarised in Paige Fernandez's article 'Defunding the Police Will Actually Make Us Safer'.)
There's a lot of implicit strawmaning going on in this lecture and the following discussion. That doesn't help at all.
And, you know, even the dumb version of the 'defund the police' belief - it's worth giving some thought to why/how that belief has emerged. What human experiences played into that.
Sure, the poorest overall may be the least supportive of the measure, but that doesn't mean a significant subsection of the poorest aren't far more likely to support it, based on their own experiences.
I wish the speakers had shown at least a little interest in such considerations.
I think you left out a couple of the keys to the anti-smoking movement! LOL. Being a conservative, I can see how you would have left them out.