Dancing in a World of Horseradish
Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experience above first class. The Residence isn’t very popular.
The reason The Residence isn’t very popular is because of economics. A Residence flight is almost as expensive as a private charter jet. Private jets aren’t just a little bit better than commercial flights. They’re a totally different product. The airplane waits for you, and you don’t have to go through TSA (or Un-American equivalent). The differences between flying coach and flying on The Residence are small compared to the difference between flying on The Residence and flying a low-end charter jet.
Even in the rare situations where it’s slightly cheaper than a private jet, nobody (except YouTubers) should fly on The Residence. Rich people should just rent low-end private jets, and poor people shouldn’t buy anything more expensive than first class tickets. Why was Etihad’s silly product created? Mostly for the halo effect. The existence of The Residence boosts Etihad’s prestige which, in turn, boosts the soft power of Abu Dhabi.
The Residence shouldn’t exist. If Etihad wasn’t a state enterprise, then The Residence probably wouldn’t exist. That’s because there is a price breakpoint in the airlines’ industry. Below the breakpoint, everyone flies commercial. Above the breakpoint, everyone flies private.
Luxury Products
The word “luxury”, like the word “art”, has been profaned by marketing. Personally, I define a “luxury” product to meet the following criteria.
There is a price breakpoint above which the product is fundamentally different.
A small minority of consumers (for a reference class) use the product above the breakpoint.
“Rich” is relative. In the case of flying, the breakpoint is “private jet”, which costs tens of thousands of dollars. In the case of wasabi, the breakpoint happens much cheaper.
Wasabi is a popular condiment eaten with sushi. Most of the products marketed as “wasabi” are made out of horseradish.
Real wasabi comes from the grated roots of the wasabi plant.
The green paste you squeeze out of a tube markets itself as a luxury product, when it really belongs to a different class of product on the other side of a price breakpoint. I call this faux luxury.
Product Bifurcation
Many production factors can cause a product category to bifurcate into luxury vs mass-market. In the case of airlines, this happens because “private airline” is all-or-nothing. Either an airplane flight is private or it is not. In the case of wasabi, the bifurcation happened because real wasabi plants are expensive to grow, so manufacturers created fake wasabi to fill the demand.
Generally speaking, civilization gets wealthier as technology advances. Private jet flights are at a record high. Real wasabi production is higher today than at any point pre-Industrial Revolution. In absolute and relative terms, these luxury products are more available than ever.
However, other luxury products decrease in use as civilization gets wealthier. “Maid” used to be a major industry. Then washing machines and vacuum cleaners were invented. Labor-saving devices are the horseradish of personal servants. Having a personal maid is better than having a washing machine.
But having a washing machine is much cheaper than having a maid. Super-elites kept their servants, but most people switched to horseradish. For the former-maids now working in the modern service sector, this was a major step up.
In the case of servants, eliminating women’s most common urban job was a net positive. Not all of these transitions were so benign.
The Death of Live Music
Are you single in your mid-20s and thinking to yourself “I’m a decently-attractive man/woman. I have my life put together. I’ve got a basic social competence. So why is it so hard to find a mate? Something is wrong with civilization. I feel like it shouldn’t be this hard.”
You’re not crazy. This is a situation where “the good old days” really were better. It used to be easier to find a mate and technology destroyed the social institution.
Here are the primary systems we’re left with.
Church. This works great except for the problem that God isn’t real.
Dating apps. Dating apps are tailored to man-style filters. Women have a bad experience because they can’t filter properly. Men have a bad experience because there aren’t enough quality women.
Singles meetups. Singles meetups are tailored to women-style filters. Men have a bad experience because they can’t filter properly. Women have a bad experience because there aren’t enough quality men.
Work. You try to flirt with someone and then get fired for sexual harassment.
Now imagine how the perfect meeting-people-of-the-opposite-gender institution would function.
It would be a physical place people go just to have casual fun.
There would be something special which draws everyone to the place.
There would be a social equilibrium that drives an approximately 50-50 gender ratio.
People would interact in short voluntary male-female pairings of approximately 5 minutes. Or you can just hang out.
These pairings would be extremely high bandwidth. Each person would learn a ton about their partner. Each person would learn what the other person looks like up close, how they feel, how sensitive they are, how dangerous they are in a fight, how they communicate, how clean their clothes are, how empathetic they are, and even what they smell like.
Both partners would naturally build a little chemistry or, at the very least, measure their collective chemistry.
You could have plausible deniability of your intentions. Sure, you might meet someone hot, but you’ll have a great time even if you don’t.
I’m not describing an imaginary theoretical utopia. I’m describing an actual social institution that used to exist. It’s called a dance hall and the pairings are called partner dancing. There are many varieties, including waltz, swing, and salsa. Dance halls used to be the place young people went to hang out [and find mates].
Why are dance halls niche these days? There are many factors, but the single biggest one is recorded music. It used to be that all music was live. Live music was a coordination point where everyone could form new social connections. And once you’re there you might as well dance.
Recorded music is the horseradish of dance halls. We live in a fallen world and if we were collectively rational then our civilization would find a way to severely limit the recording and electric transmission of artificial music.
I thought young people still did that, although the outward forms have changed over the years. They call it “going out clubbing” and the “dancing” is unstructured writhing without formal organisation into pairs, but it serves the same purpose. But the music, whether recorded or live, is too loud for polite intellectual conversation, so it selects for people who have none.
Where do jefftk’s posts about playing the music for dance events fit into the cultural milieu? Is that scene only a small niche in the larger scheme of things?
In my experience, going out clubbing is a very different, asymmetrical experience compared to partner dancing. You can quantify this objectively by measuring the equilibrium gender ratios. Popular clubs are constantly trying to get more women into the club and restrict entry by men. Unpopular clubs tend to end up with a gender ratio where men outnumber women. In this way, the unbalanced gender dynamics are similar to dating apps.
As for jefftk’s posts, I believe he writes more about contra dancing than partner dancing. Contra dancing is awesome too. I love contra! However, while contra dancing is still really good for meeting opposite gender people compared to most of modern atomized society, contra isn’t quite as ruthlessly optimized for that target as partner dancing is. Instead, contra dancing loses a little bit on the romance side of things to buy a really strong community.
This explanation doesn’t ring true to me?
The claim as I understand it:
Music, when it couldn’t be recorded, was expensive to produce, and so usually produced and consumed as a club good? The cost of the music creation was amortized[1] over everyone coming to a social event about it, which had the happy side effect of causing there to be social events of this type at all (which had positive externalities on dating).
But when the price of music falls, it becomes much easier for people to purchase music on their own instead of purchasing it collectively as a club good. As a consequence, there’s a much weaker incentive to go to dance halls (since apparently a big chunk of the value was getting to listen to music). So people do that less, and the dance hall scene becomes niche.
Is that right?
This story seems possible, at least. But it seems a little fishy to me that, if dance halls were as awesome for dating as you suggest that a big chunk of the value was getting to listen to music. I’m not clear on why you can’t keep doing the “teenagers go dancing” thing, just with recorded music instead of live music.
Is that the right word? Can you amortize over many people enjoying a good at once instead of over time?
Yeah, it’s not the gramophone that displaced in-person socializing. TV struck first, and then the internet dealt the killing blow.
Yep. This is my thesis.
It can be done, and most partner dance scenes these days do use recorded music most (if not all) of the time. However, the strongest communities and greatest draw are, by far, the live music venues.
Is the “wasabi” listed in the ingredients (8th ingredient) a different part/extract of real wasabi?
Thank you. I have corrected my error.
I love this kind of economic analysis of cultural trends and I’d eagerly consume more of this kind.
I didn’t realize that the reason why house servants largely disappeared in the first half of the 20th century was because household appliances were partial substitutes for them! But that makes perfect sense!
I thought, and a very brief google confirms, that the causality ran the other way. The appliances offered a solution to “the servant problem”. The servant class was going away because of the First World War. In the UK a lot of servants were called up (and their employers nobly made do with a reduced staff for their country’s sake), not just for soldiers, but to work in the factories and on the farms. They would do a day’s work for a day’s pay and the rest of their time was their own. Afterwards, they wouldn’t go back to life in service. They might not be making much more in a job than they had in service, but they had freedom. If you’ve heard the saying, “you just can’t get the staff”, that’s the era it comes from. So does the song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After they’ve seen Paree)”. Then the Second World War and “Rosie the Riveter” did the same thing again.
Servants these days are a much higher class of luxury than in Victorian times, when even middle class families would often have a live-in general housekeeper.
This seems surprising. Did servants not know that they had better-for-them options before WWI? What caused that ignorance and how was it stable?
I don’t know much of the history, but they may not have had such options. A servant in search of another job was absolutely dependent on a good reference from their employer, and if it didn’t work out, there was no public safety net. The government cut out such difficulties by organising their assignment and relocation. Jobs were there due to the war effort, not just production for the war, but women replacing men who had gone off to fight.
Yeah, the appliances are just particularly salient milestone in a general trend. Economists call this trend cost disease.
I’m currently reading a book about mid-20th-century Japan where labor was so cheap that high-end service workers had their own maids. It’s like the servants had servants.
I think you meant Baumol’s cost disease: when productivity in manufacturing rises and new jobs there appear, potential service workers chase those more lucrative jobs, and all the salaries in the service sector increase.
It’s the same reason emigrants to the West from less-developed economies, where the effect is less prominent, are usually surprised by expensiveness of haircuts, extreme expensiveness of dental medicine and low quality of manicure. Dentists and nail masters now offer much better services than 50 or 100 years ago but they work just as slowly, and the hairdressers don’t even have the former benefit.
P. S.
In many Indian cities, as I’ve read, middle or upper-middle class still can afford servants as of now, but that’s likely to disappear soon
Thank you for the market research feedback!
Overall a nice insightful post, but recorded music is like upwards of a century old, so I don’t think the timing works out. I was in a dancing club at one point and we used recorded music and I think that requiring us to use live music would have prevented the club from existing.
I don’t know what you mean by “can’t filter properly”. That isn’t usually how the problems with dating, on the men’s side, are described?
If this were true, it seems like it should be exploitable by smart men. If there are an abundance of women, can the men figure out a method for sorting effectively even if the context isn’t conducive to it?
(I think this is symmetrical, and the women should be able to hack the dating app, if there’s an abundance of quality men. But in-person meetups are much higher bandwidth and so have better affordances for bespoke filtering approaches.)
Yes, both sides are absolutely exploitable. But (like Morpheus notes) you have to be weird and most people are a priori not weird.
If the thing was really symmetrical like the post describes it should definitely be exploitable by someone, not necessarily smart, but with unconventional preferences?
I’m claiming that if the problem is about filtering being hard, in particular, one should be able to munchkin effective filtering methods.
I’m skeptical that that’s a good description of the problem though.
>The exact details of this graph should not be taken seriously. I’m just trying to give a visual representation of how a price bifurcation works.
Nitpick: imo that implies you shouldn’t have numbers on the axes.
That’s a good idea I should use next time.
What bothers me about the graph most is that the distance between the orange and blue lines is too wide. The difference between “can’t afford airfare” and “can fly economy” is much bigger than the difference between “economy” and “Air Force One”.
I think this needs more clarification. On a per-unit basis, yes, but the upfront cost of booking a private charter jet is a lot higher since you usually can’t book only 1 seat, you have to book the whole jet.
For example, The Residence costed around $20,000-$30,000 at release (it’s now more like $5,000, but the essay seems to be written with the former in mind). For a mid-range flight like UAE-Paris, you could book a charter jet for ~$75,000 that seats 10 people, which is a lot cheaper than The Residence at release, but is a bit excessive for one person.
Upvoted. I previously wrote a related post.
I love social environments that aren’t full of lemons even though admission is affordable and they have no formal filters. Social dancing (including both partner dancing and contra) are like this. Something about the profile of people who go dancing selects for general holistic fitness.
This is a good post. I think there are other factors associated with the problems listed, but faux luxury eating away at real luxury and taking away its economy of scale is a very real problem.
Given the airline example we started with, I think two things would be pertinent, here:
Is there a “private plane” equivalent in the space of dance halls? Rich people still have lots of kids, and it might be worth looking at how they consistently find compatible spouses when everyone else is struggling to do so.
Flying used to be vastly more luxurious, and I don’t think increased accessibility is sufficient to explain this. Non-American airlines are still a lot closer to the traditional standard than contemporary U.S. carriers.
Did the rise of private planes ‘sap away’ the customers responsible for pushing airlines to maintain quality of life? If so, why did this only happen in America?
My hypothesis for the airline industry boils down to “commodification”. Airline companies follow incentives, and competition on price is fierce. Customers have little brand loyalty and chase the cheapest tickets, except occasionally avoiding the truly minimalist airlines. The companies see the customers voting with their wallets and optimize accordingly, leading to a race to the bottom.
In my experience, non-US carriers aren’t that different. Maybe just a bit further behind and a bit more resistant to the slippery slope toward enshitification.
My original intended title for this post was “(Faux) Luxury”, but I had so much to say about real luxury that I never got to the faux luxury part.
The rich peoples’ private plane equivalent to dance halls is “good universities”. Rich people often find spouses in college. (Less than ½ of US Americans graduated in college, and even less than that graduated from good colleges.) Rich people who fail to find a spouse in college end up in the same situation as poor people.
What happened to flying is complicated. One really important thing to know is that US airlines were deregulated in 1978. Before that, price competition was basically illegal. You must factor in the effects of state intervention when comparing US airlines before and after that date.
Seems doubtful tbh. I think that being a maid/manservant to a one-percenter could in theory be a much better gig, but society apparently collectively decided that such jobs are inherently degrading and fundamentally conflict with the Egalitarian Spirit, and abolished them on moral grounds instead of economic ones.
As someone who spends a lot of time social dancing (WCS, tiny bit of Fusion) - all of my experiences of doing it to the live music have been bad to mediocre (though I imagine it can be different for other dance styles)
Bit tangential: re: your sequence name “civilization is FUBAR”, I get the FU, but why BAR? Maybe I’m just in too much of a progress-vibed bubble?
I use the acronym “beyond all recognition” rather than “beyond all repair”.