It's the end of the year, so I guess the FT algo/email-pushers are giving me random shit they think I'll click on... and sure enough, they were right:
What is the ultimate luxury status symbol? Once upon a time it may have been flaunting a rare handbag, sports car or flashy watch.
But with soaring costs of living and shrinking household sizes, an uncertain global future and a noisy pronatalist rhetoric, perhaps the most serious flex of wealth in developed economies in 2025 is something once considered a natural part of human life. Having kids — specifically, lots and lots of them.
"children today aren’t a source of positive household cash flow. They are a drain on it.""children today aren’t a source of positive household cash flow. They are a drain on it."
This is pretty tragic:
while “one and done” may be booming as a cornerstone of modern middle-class parenting culture, so too has a fetishisation of the opposite end of the spectrum. In other words, ogling extremely wealthy figures in the public eye whose picture-perfect families never seem to stop growing.
Was watching Home Alone in the last few Christmas-y days (duh, obviously) and it's quite fascinating how they're such a massive family... and yet keep a house that size, with those sort of vacation routines, on what seems like an average dual-income household. Maybe dreamy and Hollywood-y but my god does that seem mostly impossible today.
Thus, it becomes a brag:
“Four is the new three — previously conversation-stopping, but now nothing unusual,” she writes. “Five is no longer crazy or religious — it just means you are rich. And six is apparently the new townhouse — or Gulfstream.”
uuum, how many of the procreation-wondering Bitcoiners/Stackers have full-time nannies on staff?!
Kim Kardashian is said to have 10 nannies on a 24/7 rotation for her four children, while the Baldwin family have two on staff. Childcare positions in the US of this nature can easily command annual salaries of more than $200,000, though a more standard wage would be closer to $85,000. Still, paid support of any kind remains an unobtainable luxury for the majority of families.
P.S., never heard of this lady... and I skimmed through some of the extremely priced fashion stuff in the article, only to observe that "Elizabeth Paton is the FT’s fashion editor." UUh, OK. Makes sense.
archive: https://archive.md/3Yl9d
That's a very encouraging trend. These things tend to flow down from the habits of the rich.
True. I remember reading one time about the tit-for-tat that the rich and poor play with childrens names.
"Britney" becomes a rich kids name, then the poor start naming their kids that (to attach themselves to the positive connotations of the name), then the rich realize its no longer a high-status name so they move to "Emma" and the cycle continues...
that's not a tit-for-tat dynamics... rather a +1-lagging domino, or cat chasing its own tail sort of thing.
That rich people then change the names they choose is a bit tit-for-tat like.
tit-for-tat is a deliberate trade with someone else, no? Often in a venal sort of "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" way. How can that be the same as the naming convention trends freetx mentioned...?
tit-for-tat is a repeated game strategy where you defect after your opponent defects and cooperate after they cooperate.
If the rich perceive the poor choosing from a different set of names as cooperation, then this is potentially tit-for-tat: i.e. the rich will stick with their stuffy rich people names unless the poors start coopting them.
oh man, what am I thinking about?!
Your usage is an example of tit-for-tat: I choose to scratch your back if you scratched mine and I don't if you didn't.
My memory of the 90s was that dual income families were rich, not average.
Watching that movie as a kid, we all kind of understood that they were wealthy (not tech billionaire wealthy like today, but rich kid wealthy like they had a housecleaner).
I come from big families (at least three of my cousins have five kids each, one has seven, a few have four or three). No one has a nanny. But we do all homeschool. I would say none of them had that many kids as a status thing: they did it because they want to take over the world (I'm only kind of kidding).
I've never thought of my kids as accesories; they have thought of me frequently as an ATM.
understandable. I can relate to that part of the trade!
Women having so many kids seem to be a rare breed these days. Still it's not uncommon where I live (semi rural) to meet families with 4 or 5 kids.
The imagery you reference from Home Alone is revealing because that cinematic world assumed a middle class family could occupy a large home engage in expensive travel and care for many children without the extreme wealth gap we see today. In reality that degree of comfort now requires either a very high income or generational wealth and for some families likely both. The nostalgia for that imagined norm only sharpens the contrast with present realities.
The most interesting aspect of this new status symbol is that it blends the private with the public. A handbag or watch is outward facing status. A large family managed with paid help is a semi private signal that becomes visible through media appearances public events and curated online presence. It tells observers not just that the person has wealth but that they command a level of life control most people cannot dream of.
The deeper economic truth here is that reproduction at scale in affluent settings becomes a form of capital investment with heavy ongoing expenditure. It is a status game where the currency is not just money but the human capital and logistical machine needed to raise multiple children with a certain quality of life. In that sense it may be the purest form of the luxury flex today precisely because it cannot be bought in an instant. It must be sustained year after year which is why it remains unattainable for most and aspirational for many.
man, that hurts. Makes perfect sense, though
heh heh heh
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