This stuck with me: Years ago, someone on Reddit described their middle school in the ‘70s having to have an assembly to stop a potlatch/arms race between kids stacking Izod/Lacoste shirts. There were well-off kids wearing three or more stacked Lacoste shirts every day, and poorer kids wearing cheap generic polo shirts under real alligator shirts to try to keep up.
A situation where the poor people are trying to keep up is not a “potlatch”. That would be the rich kids trying to outdo each other to see how many shirts they can give to the poor kids.
This stuck with me: Years ago, someone on Reddit described their middle school in the ‘70s having to have an assembly to stop a potlatch/arms race between kids stacking Izod/Lacoste shirts. There were well-off kids wearing three or more stacked Lacoste shirts every day, and poorer kids wearing cheap generic polo shirts under real alligator shirts to try to keep up.
Damn, I’m so glad I grew out of caring whether people thought I was rich or not
I’m actually glad I’ve had so much poverty because it’s allowed me to find the things that actually affect my mood in a consistent and reliable way.
I only was able to find those things because I was forced to manage my mood with almost zero money.
A situation where the poor people are trying to keep up is not a “potlatch”. That would be the rich kids trying to outdo each other to see how many shirts they can give to the poor kids.
I may have an outdated sense of what a potlatch was. I was using the term in the sense of destroying value, per this kind of definition:
“A potlatch involves giving away or destroying wealth or valuable items in order to demonstrate a leader’s wealth and power. “