Local (Brinks)Man → van Buren's Folly → Golden Gods

Hey Neighbor. New Fidelity data shows the number of American “401(K) millionaires” up 27% in 2024 due to 25% S&P returns. That’s awesome, but 537,000 people having a lot of money is not the same as 537,000 people enjoying having a lot of money.

America’s prosperity-to-pleasure ratio is off. World’s smallest violin and all that, but still….

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🔎 Stray Thought: If someone steals an egg, is it poached?

🫗 Errata: In the previous email, I used the word “Financifier” a lot and that word kinda sucks. My mother thought there were too many curse words. I went to a bar for the first time in months and woke up on the L train.

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→ In advance of the Oscars this weekend statistician Stephen Follows ran the numbers to see if Harvey Weinstein was thanked more than God in Oscar speeches in the 1990s, the heyday of Miramax and hotel room sexual assault. Follows found that Weinstein was thanked in 5.4% of speeches, whereas God's got namecheck in 6.4%. But – twist ending – Steven Spielberg did get thanked more than God. Mazel to him. (READ MORE)

→ The New Yorker is celebrating 100 years since it was founded to help Tiffany’s advertise. Originally a society gossip rag – albeit a fun one – the magazine was the brainchild of Harold Ross^[1], who saw the opportunity in creating a low-circulation supported by high-end advertisers in service of even higher margins. The mag didn’t really have a house style until ur-editor William Shawn arrived in the early 1950s and created one staff writer Louis Menand later described as  “bemused, but not smug; intelligent, but never smart.” In a sense, the magazine reverse engineered the social performance of its Tiffany’s wearing subscribers. It didn’t create a class; it turned one into an audience. (READ MORE)

Upper Middle Research identifies readers with professional expertise and matches them with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour (probably during lunch) and keep them abreast of what’s going on in their field.

On being a good effective neighbor.

Hell is other people. Purgatory? Neighbors. Some 42% of Americans have clashed with neighbors, and political disputes are on the rise. In wealthy areas these conflicts escalate faster. Quasi-fascistic Homeowners Associations, one-call-away lawyers, and can’t-leave-it-alone alpha types don’t help. 

Fortunately, there’s a solve that doesn’t require being in angelic.

In 1950, RAND corporation researchers Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher proposed the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which you’ll remember from the class on pricing in Econ 101. Two prisoners are given the choice to confess to a crime or remain silent. If one confesses, he gets one year and the other gets eight. If both confess, they get five years. If both stay silent, they get one. It looks like this:

There’s an optimal answer: Confess. Not “cooperating” guarantees the best possible outcome whatever decision the other prisoner makes.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a compelling way to game out a discrete event, but life doesn’t consist of discrete events. No one knew that better than Anatol Rapaport, a Jewish mathematician (and former pianist) who fled Russia to Austria and Austria to America before serving as a Soviet-American liaison for the Navy while stationed in Alaska (which everyone thought Japan was about to invade). After the war, Rapaport made it his mission to avoid the next cataclysm^[2]. He obsessed over nuclear deterrence, Flood, and Dresher.

In 1980, political scientist Robert Axelrod announced a computer tournament pitting different strategies for an “iterated” Prisoner’s Dilemma, a series of dilemmas one after another. Rapaport entered with a simple solution: Cooperate on move one; thereafter, do whatever the other player did the previous move. Axelrod described the approach as "nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear” (and saw precedent in Leviticus).

“Whether game theory leads to clear-cut solutions, to vague solutions, or to impasses,” Rapaport wrote in Scientific American in 1962, “it… gives men an opportunity to bring conflicts up from the level of fights, where the intellect is beclouded by passions, to the level of games, where the intellect has a chance to operate.”

Which brings us back to the neighborhood, where iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas are common.

• Example 1: Neighbor 1 makes a habit of playing yacht rock at full blast, bothering Neighbor 2, who has to decide how to react.

• Example 2: Neighbor 1 doesn’t pick up after his mastiff when walking down the street, bothering Neighbor 2, who really liked those moccasins.

• Example 3: Neighbor 1 puts political signs in his yard, bothering Neighbor 2, who has to decide whether or not to do the same.

Rather than optimizing for the best outcome in a single conflict – the non-iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma approach – Rapaport’s “Tit for Tat” strategy optimizes for better case scenarios. In each of these case, “Tit for Tat” doesn’t lead to the best result, but avoids the worst. No blow ups.

What makes Rapaport’s work so powerful in both a geopolitical and suburban context is that it treats conflict as inevitable, not escalation. As it turns out, that’s how neighborhoods work. All the more reason to take rational approach – a little newfangled, a lot Old Testament – when Bob turns on that fucking leaf blower again.

→ While we’re on the subject of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, consider this: Your attention is zero-sum and your work self (practical) and personal self (appreciative) have competition interests. Both should, logically speaking, behave selfishly. Oddly, this suggests that “Work/Life Conflict” is the likely result of search for “Work/Life Balance.” ^[3]

→ The last sentence of the logline of Michael Cera’s next movie: “Two men confront their anxiety-ridden lives, addressing past mistakes and questioning what their futures hold.” Looks great, but this is all getting tiresome. (WATCH THE TRAILER)

→ Frieze LA, the not-very-presitigious art fair, was a bit of a dud this year, but work by painter Sadie Barnette stood out. In essence, Barnette creates covers for non-existent self-help books. Basically, Ed Ruscha meets Brené Brown. There’s something there.

→ Vogue has incorrectly announced that “The Wellness Club is Gen Z’s Country Club.” This is a classic example of “Continuum Fallacy,” the supposition that because two things exist on the same spectrum they are not meaningfully different. Country Clubs are Gen Z’s country clubs; they just aren’t as popular as they used to be. (READ MORE)

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Naming your house is a pretentious thing to do, but like a lot of pretentious things to do, it’s very fun. Who wants to live in a number when they can live in a “Hall” or a “Manor” or a “Folly.” Still, naming a home can be tricky. That’s why we at Upper Middle – always focused on the practical – have created a guide for newbs.

→ The average cost of a Spring Break trip (March 12-21) is sitting at $8,306, up 26% YoY. The spike is driven by hotel rooms and people wanting to go to Amalfi. (READ MORE)

→ Survey data from financial services provide Equitable suggest that 70% of Americans making north of $90,000 per year plan to increase their monthly savings by $500. Everyone is uneasy. (READ MORE)

→ Recurring revenue business models (read: subscription) are great for business operators, but they can lead to hilarious chaos from a communications standpoint because existing customers must be informed of changes to a product. This week, Who Gives a Crap, which is in the subscription toilet paper and paper towel game, sent a notice to customers containing this gem: “Our lawyers told us to tell you that the sheets will have an updated emboss texture – basically the dots will be different. So, a big day for dot fans!”

[2] One wrinkle: If the neighbor employs the same strategy, it creates a feedback loop that must be broken.

[3] The obvious flaw in this mental model is that work you and life you can know what the other is doing. Fair enough, but I’m not sure that’s really true in practice. Work me and life me have never met. I can’t be both at once.

[4] It’s an edge case, but it can be appropriate to name an apartment BUILDING. That said, the naming process must happen at an event with neighbors and really piss someone off. Otherwise it won’t stick.