We live in a time of pretty unbelievable equality, despite what everyone tells us. Sure, some people are really rich — but it's not like they can use that money to buy anti-gravity or time travel or something. What they have are just more conspicuous versions of what we have. I can't have a top-of-the-line BMW, but I can have a Honda, and it does the same damn job — arguably better, since the maintenance also costs me much less. Your Canada Goose parka may have a coveted brand name, but an L.L. Bean version will protect me as effectively, if perhaps less stylishly. My money buys stuff; your money buys similar stuff and adds positional value. Compare that to the middle ages, for example, when your money could buy you food and clothes, while my money … oops, I had no money. I was a serf who lived or died at your whim.
In this sort of modern economy of abundance, conspicuous consumption is about the signal more than the goods themselves. Imagine, for example, that BMW lowered its prices to Honda levels, out of sheer generosity, starting tomorrow. Perhaps they just want everyone to have the joy of driving their cars, let’s say. How long do you think BMW, as a brand, would remain a signifier of status? Less than a nanosecond, perhaps? If you can have one too, why should I bother anymore? All those people who told you they bought one for purely “engineering” reasons would turn on a dime, choosing another brand that would carry the now-lost positional value.
This isn’t really a judgment. I mean, that’s how these things go, after all. People want to signal things like status and affiliation: the brands they buy are as much a part of their identity as their religion or political party or what club they belong to.
Similarly, there's an economy for “smart” as a signaling good, just like for anything else. (Not “smartness” as a characteristic, but “smart” as a personal brand.) Given the incredible growth toward universal literacy in the U.S., plus the growth in college enrollment, we have to invest our time and money on other ways to signal smart, to stand out the way your BMW stands out from my Honda. What we’re honing in on is the kind of smart doesn't add anything to your usefulness, just like the BMW can't really bend space-time or do anything that my Honda can't. (Yes, yes: it has a higher top speed that, for all intents and purposes on public roads, is theoretical.) In economic terms, it's a positional good. It doesn't add any actual value — except to differentiate me from you.
And there is, in fact, a clear professional-class tendency toward a kind of middlebrow smart — one that totemistically collects NPR and New Yorker stories and “I Voted” stickers and other “deep thought” signaling apparatus — the way an upwardly mobile professional signals financial success with a car, watch, jewelry, or clothes. This isn’t measurable intelligence; nor is it experience that might go on a resume. It’s a positional smart that, again, serves mainly to differentiate as a class marker. An appropriately smart citizen is “informed,” we are told. A smart citizen is aware of serious issues related to the value of recycling and the dangers posed by pesticides on non-organically grown fruit. A smart citizen votes and serves on juries, and does it with a furrowed brow to show how seriously they are taking it, how earnestly they understand the importance of it all.
But this kind of smart also treads a fine line: it shouldn’t be confused with expertise; it is definitely not nerdy or geeky. Think of it, perhaps, as a kind of “gentleman’s C” (to use a phrase in great need of a gender-neutral replacement) of sociocultural enlightenment — with an emphasis on the effortless quality of the state. We’re on the trail here, after all, of people who are very likely to wear their undergrad Ivy League-logo paraphernalia thirty years after graduation, but unlikely to have been studying engineering or computer science in their time at Cornell. Rather, this kind of smart shows 1) an agreeable level of 2) a certain kind of knowledge on 3) a particular set of subjects — a state, in other words, of being conversant in the conventional wisdom of the moment. Should the conventional wisdom change (or cheapen, as with our automotive example) all that went before can be easily heaved into the memory hole to make room for the newest de rigeur opinions.
A small example: A certain strain of economic protectionism was ascendant in the Democratic party after 2008. Part of the socially approved explanation of the Great Recession was that cheap imports had gutted American manufacturing, brutally shrinking the middle class. Moreover, it was said, a GOP-driven belief in free markets had left us unable to mitigate the problem. Later, however, when Trump came into office and embraced precisely this flavor of protectionism, Democrats decamped for a free trade stance that they then pretended was of the utmost principle. Not surprisingly, once Biden was in office, Trump’s protectionist tariffs stayed in place, and the Democrats quietly forgot that they had opposed such measures for four years. The smart set went along unblinkingly.
(This tendency in particular is not characteristic solely of the left, of course. Republicans, meanwhile, forgot that they had staked their agenda on free trade for two generations or more and got in line behind Trump with nary a peep. Viewed from the outside, by someone generally without partisan affiliation, I found the whiplash stunning. But Republicans tend not to be, nor care about being seen as, “smart.” I’m still working out what the hell they are.)
What’s going on with this? The late Michael Crichton described a phenomenon he called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well… You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate … than the baloney you just read.
I think this smart-class memory-holing of expired conventional wisdom is part of the same phenomenon. People are generally not reading the newspaper (or watching cable news/talk) for the truth, whatever that means. They are participating in a shared process of gleaning the current shibboleths of their tribe, to be repeated and reinforced the following day at work, at the gym, at a party, while friends and colleagues nod along sagely, reinforcing the practice with their approval. To belabor the automotive parallel, smart is like a logo keychain for your BMW that you can take out and twirl on your finger (absentmindedly, of course) for people to see and recognize.
There was a professor at a prestigious college whom I used to see frequently as part of my job, and every conversation, without fail, culminated in what I came to call the “Did you see that story in the Times...?” moment. It didn’t matter what the story was; it mattered that she read the Times every day. The medium was the message, if you will, and the message was “Here is a new piece of the agreed-upon version of reality for today.”
The very rich and the very poor, on the other hand, couldn’t give a shit about any of this. They read the sports page, the gossip column, the disposable stuff that nobody smart would read — or at least admit to! The two wealthiest people I know read the New York Post, because it makes them laugh. I met an honest-to-god member of minor European royalty at one point in my life. He dressed in the heavy-metal-dirtbag style au courant to the 90s and was more likely to watch Entertainment Tonight than the PBS News Hour. The true leisure class doesn’t need to signal smart, the way the professional class does. Notice that Paris Hilton, whose family has enough money to buy the Sorbonne, never tried to purchase a degree. What's the point? Buy a perfume line instead. Similarly, Donald Trump is not as wealthy as he wants you to think, but he has enough money that you’ll never catch him striking thoughtful poses about the environmental impact of wagyu beef, or some similar nonsense, just because it was on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly. This is a guy who probably never read the book he allegedly wrote. Think of it this way: Trump is exactly as dumb as he can afford to be.
On the other end, there’s a guy from Guatemala loading boxcars somewhere in the Inland Empire: he has no signaling incentive either. What does he care about trying to impress someone with smart? Is his boss going to promote him to management just because he watched a bunch of TED talks? Will his friends or coworkers be impressed by his grasp of the "major issues of our day" when he tells them what he read in the New Yorker? Not likely.