i think this is obvious to many people. whn i'm driving around dallas i'll see cars with wings, ground effects and crazy paint jobs riding on 4 unlike wheels and bald tires.. that's not to mention the missing window and non-working tail lights. many times, people are poor because they make bad decisions with their money. exacerbating that situation is the fact that many poor people spend their time trying to be appealing to other poor people by demonstrating just how bad of decisions they can make with their money.. instead of driving a car that gets good gas mileage and saving money, they sport purses and rings and fancy hair, burning up the income prior generations would have spent to support their families. they want to feel important and affluent, even if they are incabable of making the decisions that would actually make them so. again, the culture of 'feeling' claims more victims
read on:
Conspicuous consumption is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.
On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)
But the same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households—about like going from South Carolina to California—leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. “Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 person in Boston,” says Hurst. “The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 person in Massachusetts.” That’s why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams “nouveau riche.” It signals that the owner came from a poor group and has something to prove.
So this research has implications beyond race. It ought to apply to any peer group perceived by strangers. It suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today—and why 20th-century Texas, a relatively poor state, provided so many eager customers for Neiman Marcus. Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor.
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