Washington Post: "Williamsburg RIP"

where was that repulsive webcomic somebody found about the trust fund kid showing how real he was by bonding with an actual working poor type, both drinking pbr? the kid talked about how he knew how rough it was since he worked 18 hours a day in a record store or something.

still, "pierced." PIERCED, I TELLS YA!

xx-post

point being that the kid was trying to shore up his rep by demonstrating how he wasn't just another middle class hipster type adopting the external characteristics of working class "real" people.

that kinda thing.

Down Bedford Avenue, musicians play electronica on their guitars and a mime troupe reenacts the slaughter of innocents,

???

Someone from SF buying a house in PDX and driving up our housing market? Never!

Which, just in itself, isn't weird: we perceive social class differences between "college boy" and blue-collar workers that -- at least at first -- aren't at all borne out economically. Plenty of college grads start off earning about the same as semi-skilled blue-collar and service-industry jobs.

What's interesting is that the comic doesn't seem to believe that the education helps eventually -- that the advantage the college boy has is that he'll very quickly rise out of that income bracket in a way that most blue-collar workers won't. And you can class that aspect as either telling (it seems like a very common anxiety at this point, and I'm not sure it's entirely without merit: a lot of the systems of employment where you progress up various ranks have fallen apart a bit!*) or just short-sighted and self-pitying (haha yes you make less money than a master carpenter now, but you are 25 and childless, and at the low end of your earning potential).

(* Not to mention the earning-value of a college degree being way down, especially in comparison to what's paid for it: in flat economic terms, a person who's $100k in debt for a masters in sculpture is in a far worse position than a licensed plumber, and it's only his social capital that lets him work around that!)

That money seems increasingly dried up. Someone's middle-class parents might have been able to pony up to send her to a good college without leaving her with much debt, but let's not kid ourselves that that necessarily leaves her set for life, or that a BA from a name school is going to lead to anything better than an office job with middle-class pay. And yeah, that's a privilege -- a secure $50k salary is more than most people get -- but we surely shouldn't act as if that's being spoiled.

Also, yeah, I think it's easy to overestimate how many people are getting subsidized by moneyed parents beyond education, especially compared to the way wealth used to get transferred: people aren't so much getting the family house anymore! So in places like New York, you run into some heavily subsidized people. But by and large, I think it's a statistically small contingent who are paying the rent on their kids' big-city apartments and whatnot.

*holds on to hers tightly, growls*

The "people in their early thirties and early forties buying into those $1m condo units" may be in for an even tougher time.

the sad thing is all this shit seems due to hit the fan during the second or third year of obama's first term! he doesn't have a chance of getting re-elected because he'll be that dude that lets all of us wind up in the poorhouse!

SCHADENFREUDE ROCKS

because they were talking about paying for the baby boomer retirements, the majority of which are still looming on the horizon. and i, for one, certainly will not reach the level of lower middle class "success" that my parents did.