Urbanization, mobility, and the media can make us feel poor by people outside our immediate community
In traditional settings where all people know about is the immediate community of their village, it is obliviously the case that one’s immediate community has a bigger impact on feeling poor than society as a whole—look at how many chickens he has, I’m such a loser. But thanks to urbanization, mobility, and the media that makes for a global village, something absolutely unprecedented can now occur—we can now be made to feel poor, or poorly about ourselves, by people we don’t even know. You can feel impoverished by the clothes of someone you pass in a midtown crowd, by the unseen driver of a new car on the freeway, by Bill Gates on the evening news, even by a fictional character in a movie. Our perceived SES may arise mostly out of our local community, but our modern world makes it possible to have our noses rubbed in it by a local community that stretches around the globe.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Chapter 17. The View from the Bottom (p. 527). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Psychology / Social Psychology / Politics / Economics Status:☀️