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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Well, by that logic, it should always have been this way. And yet, conspicuous consumption by the children of the ruling class, is not an historically unusual event. Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible.

Whatever the reason, it would have to be something that is not common to all times and places, because the college-age children of the ruling class don't always act this way. One wonders if, for example, the equivalent demographic in China (a rising power) acts this way.

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>Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible

Here's mine: social media and culture in general seeming to centralize around the internet places rich people in the same cultural environment as their poorer counterparts at a scale that is historically unprecedented. The elite have always been inaccessible, now they are within a stone's throw of us. American pop culture is disdainful (or at worst hostile) towards outwardly rich people, and has been legitimized by the popularity of the political concept of privilege. The rich want to participate in this culture but are surrounded by messaging telling them they're somehow lesser or a bad person for being rich. Cause, meet effect.

Yes, that's the superficial explanation. The interesting stuff, and the stuff of the essay, is when you peel back that layer with the first "why?"

I think it’s still a form of status-signalling. It’s like how the ‘old money’ rich turn up their noses at the ‘new rich’ because they’re too gaudy and obvious in how they display wealth. Even if you can make more money than any of the old rich, you can never obtain the level of social capital and political power that being in the club gets you just by making tons of money—you need to be granted access by existing members who will carefully scrutinize your behavior and ideology before deciding you’re one of them.

But that doesn’t mean that the old money folks aren’t showing off their wealth and power—they just do so in coded ways. What the article describes is basically the same thing.

Yalies have been "rich enough to play poor" at least since the 90s. I remember seeing the son of a prominent senator at a picnic with a hole in the sleeve of his old (but probably expensive) sweater and a local friend commenting that those Yalies always want to look poor.

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