Human Guanciale → Dark Pool Party → Xenopatriotism

Hey Neighbor. According to leaks from within the National Science Foundation, keywords are being used by the Trump administrations to identify grants that can be pulled. Among those keywords: “status” and “privileges.”

Presumably, class can’t be removed strictly because it’s a homonym.

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🙋🏼‍♂️ Poll Related to Today’s Feature….

 Do you think it would be in your economic self-interest to vote for the political party you oppose?

 💡 Yes.
 🧱 Probably.
 👔 No.
 🕶️ I Don’t Care. I Don’t Think Like That.

🫗 Errata: IKEA caviar is technically a spicy cod roe paste. I’m pretty sure I’ve been misspelling recidivist for years. I liked the old “Fantastic Four” the first time I saw it. When I was in middle school, I thought Cher was lame.

🥂 Share with a friend: Upper Middle is growing fast. This digital cocktail party has 127,888 attendees (at least half of whom are cool). Please help us double down by sharing what we do with a friend – and get some merch for doing it.

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.

→ This week VCs Sam Lessin and Jon Lonsdale launched MeritFirst.us, a survey-based recruiting company determined to fix the “broken talent filters” that have turned American companies into a “credentialist bureaucracy.” Lessin and Lonsdale want recruiters to stop screening for “Ivy League degrees, FAANG experience, "prestigious" employers,” something that may no longer be happening. That might be a good idea in principle, but this is going to go the way of Harvard in the 1920s. In the 1900s, Harvard, which was 7% Jewish in 1900, implemented testing-based admission. By 1922, Harvard was 21% Jewish, which freaked out the WASPs and didn’t bode well for poorly for the football program.^[1] It turns out that talent is evenly distributed but unevenly cultivated. Lessin ought to know this; his big extracurricular is trying to “fix Harvard.” Good luck boytshik. (TAKE THE TEST)

→ Federal employees occupy a rather odd place in Upper Middle culture. They make 25% less than their private market counterparts and are more than twice as likely to have graduate degrees. They aren’t academics, but… they kind of are, which helps explain some of the rhetoric.

→ Thinkboi TikTok is blowing up with monologues about the “post-luxury” world. The idea is that luxury goods are now common on social media despite being rare in real life. No scarcity. The thinking – at least according to brand strategist Eugene Healey– goes that status going forward will be about expertise, but… it’s more likely to be about affect. TikTokers may not want to hear it, but people can guess others’ socio-economic backgrounds from their accents. The only wrinkle is that is requires a native’s ear. Healey is Australian. (WATCH IT).

Why antelope prefer leopards to ocelots.

President Trump’s hazy tariff announcements over the weekend, which unsettled markets and retail investors before lifting like morning mist off Lake Ontario, heralded the political return of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. That party, the 2015 Twitter creation of YA fiction writer Adrian Boot, is an imagined paw-litical movement that strictly acts against the interests of its supporters (by eating their faces). It’s implied that the party’s flensed supporters are largely middle and working class and that the leopards eat at Le Coucou when they aren’t filling up on human guanciale.

It’s a fun meme and probably apt. (Witness Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley begging Trump not to tariff Canadian potash used to fertilize corn and soybean crops. But the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party bit also illustrates the limited degree to which politics can be understood through the lens of policy rather than through class and individual experience. 

A bias toward zero-sum thinking, the belief there is only “limited good” and therefore that the one group's gain is another's loss, is more prevalent among liberals than it is among conservatives and fairly evenly distributed along class lines^[2]. It’s a mental bias (and arguably a cognitive error) correlated with support for wealth redistribution, DEI programs, anti-immigration sentiment, and protectionist trade policies. It’s also the subtext of most Trump speeches, which may explain the president’s odd pull on former Bernie bros and RFK-loving, crystal-buying Los Angeles weirdos.

Research suggests that zero-sum thinking is particular common among people who haven’t experienced upward mobility – a large percentage of whom are already at or near the top – and people who work in combative white-collar professions: finance, corporate law, consulting, tech, and even media (attention is finite). This is why the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party joke makes Oxford-shirted know-it-alls giggle: We genuinely can’t understand someone would agree to play a high-stakes game of “I’ve got your nose.” But there is a fairly good reason. Many working class voters aren’t zero-sum thinkers. 

Positive-sum thinkers, particularly those on the right, have a higher tolerance for inequality than most of the people who actually benefit from inequality because they see the outrageous success of others as proof of that social and economic mobility remain possible in America. The thinking goes like this: If Zuck can do much better than me, I can do much better than my former self. 

That makes more sense than the Bluesky contingent might like to admit for people starting at or near the bottom. 

In 2023, Harvard researchers testing for zero-sum bias, showed subjects a version of diagram below on the left and asked them to hazard some guesses. The real answers, below on the right, indicate why many of the answers received by working class respondents were optimistic. Upwardly mobility is alive and well(ish) in America. Members of the working class know it.

But they may not know what the leopards know, which is that upward mobility is not the same as downward which is, if not dead, unwell in America. As Richard Reeves puts it: “The upper middle class’s glass floor is creating a glass ceiling for everyone else.” Consider a flipped version of the same diagram. Disproportionately few kids born wealthy get poor (which, FWIW, is why the conceit of this newsletter makes sense in the first place). 

Well-educated and well-off Millennials, who moved leftward as Trump came onto the political scene in the mid-2010s, are particularly likely to hold zero-sum views. Having watched effective wages stagnate and decline for earners below the 50th percentile for most of our adult lives, we understand that inequality is not, in fact, evidence of flat playing field and, what’s more, that it can, in extremis, turn one end of said field into a ski slope.

We aren’t stupid. We know who we went to school with. We know who sits a desk over. We know who sits a floor up. We may not be leopards, but most of us are ocelots. We won’t eat your face, but we will eat your lunch.

The zero-sum thinkers of the right, some of them Trumpian leopards, understand this. They find common cause with non-zero sum thinkers by promising to protect them from ocelots. They rail against Affirmative Action and DEI programs using non-zero sum language about meritocracy^[3]. What they strategically fail to mention is that the redistributive programs they malign are the only instruments of social mobility that have proven consistently effective post-Reagan. Without them, the glass floor gets stronger and the pitter patter of claws against it becomes deafening.

Regressive economic programs like tariffs certainly don’t help.

Well-informed cynicism may justify condescension, but zero-summers on the left should keep in mind that non-zero summers –  most of them the middle-class sons and daughters of immigrants – built the society in which we live, a society now irrefutably dominated by zero-sum thinking.

Are leopards going to eat their faces? Probably. But leopards aren’t the only homicidal psycho jungle cats around.

→ Coors Light kicked off its big Super Bowl campaign by intentionally misspelling “Refershment,” which got the brand all kinds of attention on social media and in B2B marketing publications fascinated by the ploys success. Here’s the Upper Middle Take (TM): It’s okay to hate this shit and everyone involved with it. (NO LINK)

→ John Derian is punk. Seriously.

→ The New Yorker has a fun Talk of the Town on Office of Applied Strategy, a culturally consulting firm founded by academics and magazine writers. The org puts out very fun content packets like “Hyper-Optimization: Creative Stagnation Amidst Cultural Abundance,” which was largely financed by Academic Magazine. Tony Wang, the firms founder seems to go out of his way to describe these reports as dossiers (or white papers), but a magazine is a magazine even if its sans-serif and a consulting firm is footing the bill. (CHECK IT OUT)

→ Sure, America has Patrick Mahomes, but Argentina bred gene-edited super polo ponies. So there’s that.

→ AI updates are annoying because they are relentlessly unfunny. A messenger that never giggles deserves to be shot.

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→ Political commentators on the left are arguing that Trump’s tariff announcements and subsequent negotiations with the leaders of Canada and Mexico accomplished nothing. On some level, that’s right. The programs announced after those conversation (putting aside some specifics) had already been pushed through by Biden. But Trump did one very big thing: He created market volatility in the form of an opportunity to short and an opportunity to buy. As Bloomberg noted on Monday, the majority of U.S. stocks are now traded in dark pools, private exchanges exclusively accessible to institutional investors, outside the country. This is probably not good news for anyone with a chunky amount of capital in the ol’ 401k. (READ MORE)

→ Remember the plot of the Star Wars prequels? The Trade Federation? The blockades? The clusterfuck in the senate? Everything old is new again.

→ Ethereum, the crypto “alt-coin” with the strongest governance and a claim to having the strongest functionality, is falling behind its competitors in terms of value. One remembers that scene in Silicon Valley when Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks talks about turning a profit and his investor says, “No revenue…. If you have no revenue you can say you're pre-revenue. You're a potential pure play." Being overvalued is valuable! (READ MORE)

[2] It’s important to point out the Black people in America exhibit stronger zero-sum bias than almost every other group. There’s a very, very good reason why. Slavery is the rare truly zero-sum (arguably negative-sum) situation. Second only to slavery is segregation and institutional oppression.

[3] Witness the whole MeritFirst.us nonsense. The problem is not that the motivation is bad, it’s that the outcome is likely to be bad and every reasonable person knows it.

[4] When I was a little kid, I was so obsessed with dinosaurs that I once convinced a curator at the Natural History Museum to take me downstairs into the collections to discuss whether some of the dinosaurs mounted together would have existed in the same environment at the same time. My parents wanted to encourage this enthusiasm for science so one summer they plotted a trip to Glacier National Park and Drumheller, which is in the Canadian badlands and happens to be one of the easiest places on Earth to find dinosaur bones. Long story very short, I found one. It was a hadrosaur femur. I gave it to the right people and all that, but I still think about it a lot. And I still like Canada. I always will.