Respectable Orgies → Wake and Flake → Pump and Dumpling

Hey Neighbor. A new study on the economics of video games and video game usage suggests players would get 90% of the pleasure at 40% of the cost if they knew in advance of playing a game how much they’d enjoy it.

So, yeah… that’s how life works.

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Nom Nom is made for the kind of dog parents who only serve their babies the best stuff, and I am absolutely, unapologetically one of those people.

I want to know there are top-quality ingredients in my dog’s food, and that it’s been developed by vets. I want to know she enjoys it. I want to know she can digest it easily so I don’t have to bring extra bags on our morning walks.

Is it a bit fancy? Sure. But so am I. And so is my dog. Nothing wrong with that.

→ LinksDao, the “crypto golf club” just bought a course in Kansas City, its first in the U.S. The club, which raised $12 million from NFTs back in 2021 when you could do shit like that, previously bought a links course in Scotland. It is now partnering with developers to redevelop Hillcrest, a private course turned public course turned private course again. What’s interesting about the project is that most of the LinksDao membership won’t play Hillcrest (at least on the regular); they will be invested in it. That’s cool too, but it calls into question what constitutes a club. Maybe that’s not the worst thing. (READ MORE)

→ Redditors who grew up wealthy are sharing the moments they “woke up” to their privilege. The vignettes make oddly compelling reading and suggest staggering levels of naivety among so-called elites. Parents, be more Jew-y. Talk to your kids about money! (Also, this is a somewhat bland exercise in virtue signaling. I want to know when these folks got comfortable with their privilege.) (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 suburban swinging and home prices.

Most of the colonials and mid-century moderns in New Canaan, CT, where median home listing price hovers north of $3M, sit on small, but immaculate parcels with views (obstructed by white oaks, picket fences, and people) of other small, but immaculate parcels. Real estate agents say it’s sort of town where neighbors know their neighbors. They left it unsaid that it’s also the sort of town where neighbors fuck their neighbors.

But it is. There are a lot of upside-down pineapple finials and red Adirondack chairs – classic swinger tells – on New Canaan lawns. Oddly enough, that might explain the home prices.

Key parties, pioneered by horny Air Force officers in the ‘50s, went mainstream by the ‘70s, when researchers like Gil Bartell^[1], whose seminal work was entitled Group Sex, found swingers were mostly white, mostly white-collar (lots of salesmen), and overwhelmingly anti-hippie. At that time, the residents of New Canaan – lily white and Lily Pulitzer – represented the vanguard of this polo and pearl necklace movement. This was famously depicted in The Ice Storm, Rick Moody 1994 novel –subsequently adapted into a meh film with Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline – which portrays New Canaan’s parties as prima facie evidence of cultural decay and malaise. And, sure, people who aren’t bored don’t do this kind stuff, but neither do people who don’t have friends. 

In 2000’s Bowling Alone – a book everyone knows and no one reads –  Robert Putnam made the case that America was losing “social capital,” which he defined in terms of trust.  He attributed 25 percent of that loss to TV and 10 percent to low-density suburban sprawl.

He was describing the loss of something valuable.

What Putnam didn’t harp on tooooo much on the fact that social capital wasn’t just produced by barbecues and community pools^[2], but by reinforced inequality. In the 1950s segregation was written into HOA agreements. Economic segregation remained the rule. That didn’t change quickly.

In the 1970s, a third of Americans hung with their neighbors at least twice every week and only a fourth never did. Thirty years later, those numbers had  flipped. In 2022, researchers asked a broad cross-section of Americans to rate their agreement that they could “count on their neighbors” on a scale of 1-5. The average score was 3.86. The most common predictors of a higher score: whiteness, college education, and homeownership. In 2018, Pew Researchers found 71% percent of “Upper Class” suburbanites believed they shared a “social class” with their neighbors – 20% above the national average. 

New Canaan is politically purplish blue, 83.3% white, 80% college-educated, and 81% owner-occupied (15% higher than the national mean). Only 25% of residents have household incomes lower than $100K. In short, neighbors share a social class – a rank in the preppy militia.  And that homogeneity produces expressions of cohesion^[3]. New Canaan’s Newcomers Club is an on-ramp for transplants joining the cocktail party circuit, where they gossip inevitably returns to key parties. 

Though it sounds scandalous and libertine, spouse-swapping is, in practice, the opposite of the sort of polyamory in vogue among urban pseudo-bohemians. It is sex as teamwork and it give partners a secret, a shared activity, and a pressure release.

But it’s not just a sex thing. It allows community to… come together. 

In Putnamian terms, it creates a hell of a lot of social capital. 

As you read this, there is a 3,300-square-foot, four bedroom modern colonial on the market in New Canaan for $2,195,000 and a home twice the size in Wilton for $1,548,000. Why the discrepancy? It’s not just proximity to NYC—social capital adds value. And in New Canaan, social capital’s most extreme form is an upside-down pineapple. 

It’s the kind of town where people know their neighbors – and sometimes bend them over the Restoration Hardware sectional. 

→ The term “Lore” has gone viral enough to spill over into the pages of the Wall Street Journal, which defines it as “slang for dramatic, and often traumatic, details that define a person’s existence” – always public, mostly online. In other words, “lore” is a measure of whether people talk about you after you’ve left the room. Is it a coincidence that the term is blowing up as podcaster Kelsey McKinney’s You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip climbs the bestseller list? No. The stigma around gossip is dissipating. Awesome. I’ll start: One of my buddies recently got a handy at a massage parlor. (READ MORE)

→ The Economist (why not?) has an interesting theory on why White Lotus has lost its luster: “The [show]… is ostensibly about the spite and delusions of rich American tourists. At heart, though, the show and its popularity are artifacts of the pandemic, with all its anxiety and itchy-footed frustration. What made it a sensation has become a drag.” Good take. You can relocate the desperate housewives to Thailand, but they’re still the desperate housewives. (READ MORE)

→ Trump is fighting a one-man war on pennies. He says they are worth less than they cost to make. This is objectively true in monetary terms, but not designed terms. Epoxy penny floors, which repurpose coins as makeshift tiles, can be cool as hell.^[4]

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Ask Mr. Market” is UPPER MIDDLE’s occasional financial advice column authored by Andrew Feinberg, a retired hedge fund manager who has beaten the S&P 500 for the last 30 years. He is the author/co-author of four books on personal finance.

Dear Mr. Market:

My wife just took a flier in a Chinese company called China Liberal Education Holdings Ltd. and on January 30 it plunged 98% on no news. WTF? I didn’t know such stuff could happen. Please advise. 

Stunned in Steubenville

Dear Stunned,

As the man said, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”  At the risk of sounding racist and having my cold noodle supply cut off by President Xi, you should avoid all Chinese small-caps now and forever. Chinese small caps represent a disproportionate share of the most flagrant frauds ever perpetrated on U.S. investors. The people behind these companies, which are usually headquartered in Hong Kong, Singapore, or on the mainland, often orchestrate spectacular gains that are followed by grotesque crashes. The stock your wife bought, for example, ran up an insane 4,743% in the five weeks before it collapsed. Only frauds trade this way.

Oriental Rise Holdings Ltd., a tea company, vaulted from $8.01 to $56.01 on December 5. (Guess the tea was caffeinated, not herbal.) The next day it closed at $3.62. It now fetches $1.05. 

On November 26, Primega Group Holdings Ltd., a Hong Kong company that moves soil and rock, saw its shares zoom from $10.54 to $107.36. (Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!) The next day the stock closed at $1.65. Today it goes for 78 cents. 

JBDI Holdings Ltd., a Singapore-based trader of containers, ran from $4.60 to $39.41 between August 27 and September 16, only to plunge to $1.89 later that day. Now it sells for 68.4 cents. 

MicroAlgo Inc., a Shenzhen company that allegedly does something with algorithms (or not), went from $77.20 to $509.60 one week last June. A month later it was at $26.80. Today it sits at $1.29. Its algos are getting more micro by the day.

We’re not dealing with subtle people here.

Why are Chinese scams so common? Obviously, they work and the consequences for getting caught must be minimal or non-existent. 

Also, China and the U.S. have different ideas about capitalism. Incredibly, there used to be one man in China who was responsible for deciding which companies got to go public. If you wanted to be listed, you came to his office with an attaché case full of cash. Mr. IPO, as he was known, became a very rich man. (I know, you didn’t see that coming.) If the bribe was too small, no IPO. A China booster might argue that this was healthy because Mr. IPO served an important gatekeeper function (inadequate bribe, weak company), but I wouldn’t want to push that analysis. We have enormous corruption in America, but we don’t have that level of pay to play. 

Just so you know, some of my closest friends call me Mr. IPO, so if you’re thinking of accessing the capital markets, perhaps we should talk.

Sincerely, 

Mr. Market

→ Bill Burr, who does not give a shit, is getting a lot of flack from right-wing commentators for saying billionaires should “put down like rabid fucking dogs” on a podcast earlier this week. No sane human thinks Burr, a loud and proud Masshole, was suggesting public policy, but the remark is being interpreted as anti-capitalist. It’s not. Extreme wealth concentration leads to “market capture” behaviors – lobbying, Elon Musking, venture capital generally – that kneecap free markets. Wealth concentration is a natural byproduct of free markets that can destroy free markets. This is why we have a government you goofs. (READ MORE)

→ Some of Biden’s Student Debt Relief program has been blocked by an appeals court. TBH… fine? The program was a subsidy to Biden’s educated base. A lovely gift to be sure, but regressive as hell – a fact many folks who learned that word in ECON 101 seem reluctant acknowledge. (READ MORE)

→ As egg prices spike, backyard chickens are becoming a thing. Fun project if you’ve got the space. But there’s always a dark-side to these kinds of agri-hobbies. Food prices spike for a variety of reasons – bird flu in this instance – but they invariably stay high because of labor costs. Everyone remembers the vegetable-packed “Victory Gardens” that sprung up in the suburbs during WWII as a patriotic thing and they were to some degree, but they were also a reaction to the food price shock that hit after the government rounded up thousands and thousands of Japanese farm workers and put them in camps. (READ MORE)

→ The insider sell-off continues apace. Yesterday, after the close, Palantir CEO Alex Karl announced plans to sell $1.2B in stock. In 2024, $PLTR insiders sold $3,104,510,822 in stock and bought none. The stock is up nearly 50% in 2025. (READ MORE)

[2] New Canaan has an amazing town pool. Amazing. You’d be hard pressed to convince me that this doesn’t have something to do with the towns proclivity for group sex. Everyone just wants to get their laps in.

[3] Obviously, part of the point I’m making here is that a certain amount of homogeneity – racial and economic segregation – seems to create a valuable form of community cohesion. It’s bares adding that there are also quite a few negative externalities, the first of which is the moral injury inflicted on all residents. It’s 2025 so I think we’re clear on this, but just in case: Observing behavior is not condoning it.

[4] Admittedly, this aesthetic got popular in the early 2010s “speakeasy” era when dudes wore Goorin Bros trilbies and looked like they just got kicked of the set of The Sting. Still… I think it’s cool.