Following up on America's class system in numbers.

Call them yuppies, yippies, bobos, nobrows, or whatever, the consumers of the new luxury have a sense of entitlement that transcends social class, a conviction that the finest things are their birthright. Never mind that they may have been born into a family whose ancestral estate is a tract house in the suburbs, near the mall, not paid for, and whose family crest was downloaded from the Internet. Ditto the signet ring design. Language reflects this hijacking. Words such as gourmet, premium, boutique, chic, accessory, and classic have loosened from their elite moorings and now describe such ­top-­of-­category items as popcorn, hamburgers, discount brokers, shampoo, scarves, ice cream, and trailer parks. “Luxury for all” is an oxymoron, all right, the aspirational goal of modern culture, and the death knell of the real ­thing.

I want to direct your attention to this (for me) unexpectedly interesting piece in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books:

Radical Hope [excerpt] is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies.

The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe's great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."

I'll also remind you of this quote, recently cited in a thread about Ross Anderson, from the French economist Jules Dupuit in 1849:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches ... What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Lux Populi