Pitbull Market → Glaser Tag → High-Stakes Bullshit

Hey Neighbor. True story. The other night in a restaurant in Lower Manhattan, a well-to-do market exec made an admission to a friend. "I'm trying to secure an Art Basel invite from an old professor,” she said. “He once told me I looked like Anna Karina.”

She didn’t.

➺ Thanks to Hauser Vaughn (awesome name) for the anecdote above. If you’ve heard something fantastically Upper Middle recently please share. The submission of late have rocked.

➺ If you’re a new reader – hi! – and you think this newsletter is very good or very bad, please send it to a friend. I don’t want to get a real job.

➺ Still doing some analysis on the big wealth management survey. Apologies for the delay there. Lots of data. The correlations on correlated.

STATUS ❧ Upper Middle Research

Our Spoiled Dogs Survey, found Upper Middle dog culture is far from monolithic. Our caring behaviors and breed choices are less correlated to wealth than to sentiment and experience. We truly have personal relationships with our pooches.

Which is not to say that those relationships don’t have a very specific context….

The Upper Middle audience skews 65% millennial with an average age of 37. The median subscriber has a net worth just short of $1M, a household income in excess of $200K, and lives close to a major city. 

PUPPER MIDDLE

The clustering of caring behaviors suggests that dog owners are both responsive to the needs of specific breeds and driven by the desire to have specific kinds of relationships with their pets. Correlations in behavior suggested that there are six types of white-collar dog owners:

HAUTE DOGS

Poodle mixes, retrievers, and bulldogs are overrepresented in Upper Middle homes while pitbulls and pit mixes are conspicuously underrepresented. Mutts are common and most dog owners do not own breeds they associate with wealth, suggesting that breed choice is sentimental and socialized. Owners of rarer breeds were more likely to have grown up with dogs, have multiple dogs, and have larger dogs.

PAWTRIARCHY

Though net worth was not strongly correlated with pampering behaviors, it was correlated with childhood dog ownership, suggesting that wealthier dog owners are generally more experienced dog owners. This might explain wealthier dog owners’ preference for purebred dogs, which doesn’t skew toward more expensive breeds. Breed loyalty appears to be a social phenomena common to affluent metroplexes. This is typified by retrievers, which constitute 42%+ of dogs owned by respondents making $200,000-$499,999 annually and significantly over-represented in the homes of people with a net worth between $1M and $2.5M (specifically those living in New York, California, and Texas).

UPPER LEASH SIDE

Though caring behaviors were not most strongly correlated with geography, geographical trends did emerge. Dog owners on the coasts walked their dogs more frequently, spent more time in dog parks, bought more clothes, and were more likely to allow their dogs in bed. These variation was driven largely by owners of rarer breeds and spaniels – fancy dog people^[4].

➺ Dogs act just like their owners. ➺ If you’re not in the kitchen, you’re on the menu. ➺ High social class is associated with higher emotional intelligence. ➺ There are Chinese spies on campus (or at least reactionaries think there are).

TASTE ❧ Talking Pieces

Talking Pieces is a recurring feature highlighting Upper Middle members with great taste and nice stuff. Think that describes you? Let us know.

Name: Leonora Epstein
Job: Brand Strategist; Writer of Schmatta^[1]
Location: Pasadena, CA

Leonora Epstein, a New Yorker in exile, lives in Pasadena’s historic Bungalow Heaven district, a collection of (mostly) craftsman homes with large front porches built between 1900 and 1930. “It’s very quaint,” she says. “Very neighborly. Very idyllic.” The place evokes a specific nostalgia, Epstein leaned into with her design choices. “It's driven by finding vintage pieces I love and making the rest of it work around those,” she says. “And my husband is British. So there’s some British influence.”

A Glint of Glaser: “We were looking for something to hang above our long couch. I didn’t want to do a gallery wall so I was looking for three similar pieces or one oversized piece of art. I went down a Etsy rabbit hole and I stumbled on some vintage Milton Glaser posters. This is one is from the Mostly Mozart Festival, which was an annual Lincoln Center classical music festival. [Ed. note: In 2023, Mostly Mozart was absorbed into Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival.] I believe this poster is from the early ‘90s. It’s near and dear to me because my dad is a pianist and I grew up not far from Lincoln Center, so it reminds me of home.”

A Hint of Hackney: “I bought this House of Hackney pillow for one of our wedding anniversaries. Also Etsy. When I search, it will be something broad, like ‘1970s,’ and then I’ll filter into the home and decor category. Sometimes I like to search around a theme like tennis or sailboats, which sounds very Upper Middle, but I don’t do either sport. Often, I look up French pottery or Danish design. I have an odd collection of Etsy favorites.”

A Shadow of the Seven Sisters: “I am always searching for vintage women’s college paraphernalia. I have a dance card from Smith College, my alma mater, from 1912. You would go to a dance and people would write their name down for their turn to dance with you. Of course, it was an all-women’s dance because it was an all-female college. I also have book that was presented at one of the Smith College reunions in the 1940s. I’m drawn to a nostalgic, academic aesthetic.”

Epstein, Briefly
Pets? Yes.
Shoes inside? No.
Coasters? Depends on how fancy we’re feeling.
Thermostat set to? It’s off.
Bedtime? 9 to 9:30.

 ➺ Ryan Serhant can’t turn it off. Remodeling is the new moving (again). ➺ Holocaust Museum now has a Real Housewife on the board because of course it does. ➺ The Frick is frickin’ back. (More soon.) ➺  Snap Map can’t be stopped. ➺  The Pope has the same name as every boy in Pre-K.

MONEY ❧ The very important unimportant thing…

Party and Bullshit and Party…

A year ago, a video of Shark Tank chum guzzler Kevin O’Leary telling HBS students – most of whom go into consulting – that “there is nothing wrong with that pursuit if you want to be irrelevant”  went viral. Earlier this week, Rutger Bregman, the Dutch Historian best known for admonishing Davos attendees to pay their taxes, went on The Daily Show and said the same thing.

O’Leary is a Trump-y performative capitalist and Bregman is a basic income advocate preaching the gospel of elite civic responsibility, but the two have something in common: Neither believes salary is a measure of a worker’s importance. They’re David Graeber acolytes. 

In 2018’s Bullshit Jobs, Graeber (the only social anthropologist to author a must-read about Malagasy piracy^[2]) argued that over half of modern jobs are “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify [their] existence." The employees least able justify their work? Consulting and financial services managers. Where O’Leary mocks McKinsified meritocrats, Bregman suggests it’s their social obligation as members of the intellectual elite to find more compelling problems. Both approaches center shame, a social tool for enforcing (or altering) normative behavior.

That’s where things fall apart. Both O’Leary and Bregman want to change low-conviction elites’ normative behavior, but they don’t agree on what constitutes “importance” or “relevance.” Though it’s easy to mistake that disagreement for yet another front in the culture war, that’s not exactly fair. It’s simply an unresolved problem. Arguably, it’s America’s existential champagne problem: How can we better use all of this talent?

The answer is not obvious. But the conversation is starting. Good.

➺ Crypto abductions will continue until morale improves. ➺ This is how all philanthropies should actually operate – on a shot clock. ➺ Retail is surging because we’re all buying phones. Earnings beats in Q2 followed by…. ➺ “At times she seemed more focused on advancing her own interests and stature than the company’s.”