GURPS: Beverly Hillbillies (or: annoyed by GURPS' handling of the nouveau riche)

[Michael Thayne]

The handling of living above your Status in GURPS: Social Engineering strikes me as... not nuanced enough to be true to real life. If you don't try to conceal what you're doing, everybody reacts negatively, which doesn't strike me as particularly realistic. It makes the nouveau riche social incompetents to the last, when as far as I can tell, the reality is that it causes you to be looked down by higher-status people, but it will impress at least some people.

I guess you could model this with the rules for False Identities, but while this may work for modeling Jay Gatsby, it seems unlikely that men who have car speakers worth more than the car aren't trying to be mistaken for lawyers, they're trying to impress people who can only afford the car--and to some extent it works.

There are also some weird game-mechanical aspects to how this works in GURPS. If you luck into Multimillionaire 1, and you don't pretend you got the money some other way, you're required to live a lifestyle that's less than 1% as expensive as what you could afford (i.e. a Wealthy lifestyle, assuming you get imputed Status from Weath), lest you get an Odious Personal Habit. Which seems odd, plus, if you don't advertise your wealth through spending, how does anyone know you're Status 2 rather than a guy who merely has Wealthy (and the 1 level of imputed status that comes from it). It seems like in real life, part of the reason for the nouveau riche to live as lavishly as they can afford, rather than how old money thinks they should, is to avoid being mistaken for someone who doesn't have money at all.

Similarly, in a classless meritocracy, it's impossible to have higher than Status 5 unless you have Rank. But in fact, do multimillionaires with a job that could justify Rank live more lavishly than those without? I confess I don't know the world of multimillionaires that well, but it seems unlikely.

Thoughts?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

The handling of living above your Status in GURPS: Social Engineering strikes me as... not nuanced enough to be true to real life. If you don't try to conceal what you're doing, everybody reacts negatively, which doesn't strike me as particularly realistic. It makes the nouveau riche social incompetents to the last, when as far as I can tell, the reality is that it causes you to be looked down by higher-status people, but it will impress at least some people.

Note that this is not put forth as a rule for all societies. The paragraphs where this is discussed open with In many worlds, your Status falls to match what you actually spend. But in more traditional societies, you’re born to high or low Status and can’t do much to change it. The rules that follow apply in that case, up to Some societies follow a different rule and the rule for societies where achieved Status competes with ascribed Status. Neither case—purely ascribed, nor ascribed vs. achieved—applies to societies where there is only achieved Status, which would, I think, include most classless meritocracies.

You should use your own judgment as GM as to which case best fits your setting.

Bill Stoddard

[Michael Thayne]

So there's discussion of how Status can fall to match what you actually spend, but nothing about status rising to match what you actually spend. And the rules for classless meritocracies say you can't buy more than two levels of Status.

Maybe I would have been clearer if I'd talked in terms of a concrete example: a wealthy heiress with Filthy Rich [50] and Independent Income 10 [10] can at most have Status 3 [10] (1 level imputed from Wealth, 2 levels purchased) if she lives in a classless meritocracy and doesn't have a job that could justify Rank. This means that she must live well below the means provided to her by her Independent Income or else acquire an Odious Personal Habit.

Now it's plausible that she could acquire Reputation (Ditz who inherited all her money), but it's not obvious that that reputation should affect everyone, the way an Odious Personal Habit affects everyone.

Or maybe the rules about "classless meritocracies" that limit purchased Status to 2 levels do not accurately describe US society, and were actually intended for societies that are more meritocratic than the US?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

So there's discussion of how Status can fall to match what you actually spend, but nothing about status rising to match what you actually spend

.

That's because status only rises to match what you spend if you spend it in the right ways.

Maybe I would have been clearer if I'd talked in terms of a concrete example: a wealthy heiress with Filthy Rich [50] and Independent Income 10 [10] can at most have Status 3 [10] (1 level imputed from Wealth, 2 levels purchased) if she lives in a classless meritocracy and doesn't have a job that could justify Rank. This means that she must live well below the means provided to her by her Independent Income or else acquire an Odious Personal Habit.

No. Actually classless meritocracies are unlikely to react that way to conspicuous consumption. It's the very class-aware cultures that react negatively to people getting above themselves.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

So there's discussion of how Status can fall to match what you actually spend, but nothing about status rising to match what you actually spend. And the rules for classless meritocracies say you can't buy more than two levels of Status.

Maybe I would have been clearer if I'd talked in terms of a concrete example: a wealthy heiress with Filthy Rich [50] and Independent Income 10 [10] can at most have Status 3 [10] (1 level imputed from Wealth, 2 levels purchased) if she lives in a classless meritocracy and doesn't have a job that could justify Rank. This means that she must live well below the means provided to her by her Independent Income or else acquire an Odious Personal Habit.

In a society that still has a wide streak of aristocratic values, yes. Though there's nothing to say she can't live in solid bourgeois comfort, with all modern conveniences, a personal collection of fine art or natural curiosities or pornography, and so on, just as long as she doesn't make a big public display of it. Or she can engage in charities or fund parties of adventurers.

But in the modern United States, none of that applies, or not very much. There's very little sense of old money being better—not none, but not a substantial amount.

Being, say, Filthy Rich gets you +1 to Status for free, raising the heiress from Status 0 to Status 1. But she can afford a Status 4 lifestyle. She doesn't get penalized for that. Spending money on a higher standard of living, that associated with a higher social class, raises her Status; it doesn't just get her a discount on the Status she was born to. It pretty much has to work that way, because being Wealthy/Very Wealthy/Filthy Rich gets you only one level of Status free, but supports Status 2-4.

There's a middle ground between classless meritocracies and aristocracies of birth, and the rules you're referencing apply to aristocracies of birth—and especially to societies moving from aristocracy of birth to bourgeois free-for-all, with the upper classes resenting the incursion of people in trade who put on airs.

Bill Stoddard

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Or maybe the rules about "classless meritocracies" that limit purchased Status to 2 levels do not accurately describe US society, and were actually intended for societies that are more meritocratic than the US?

I would not call the US a 'classless meritocracy'. The modern US is somewhat less class-conscious than the USA of WWII, and certainly less so than the USA of the Gilded Age, but classless we certainly are not. We have an upper class that can be divided into 'upper upper (the 1% of the population that controls so much of the wealth), 'middle upper', and 'lower upper', the latter overlapping a bit with the vanishing upper middle class. Then we have a shrinking middle class, and a growing lower class, both of which can likewise be divided in three or more. Just because it's possible to get out of the class you were born in (though it's getting harder to do that), and people in the class above yours aren't generally allowed to screw you over without consequences nearly as badly as they used to be, doesn't men social classes don't exist.

I don't so much want to start an argument about this, but you hit a point that I felt really needed correction. I suppose you might be using a different definition of 'classless meritocracy' than I've ever seen before, though (that's not sarcasm, and I'm not trying to be rude).

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

I don't so much want to start an argument about this, but you hit a point that I felt really needed correction. I suppose you might be using a different definition of 'classless meritocracy' than I've ever seen before, though (that's not sarcasm, and I'm not trying to be rude).

It's the one from the Social Engineering.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But in the modern United States, none of that applies, or not very much. There's very little sense of old money being better—not none, but not a substantial amount.

I'd be willing to call old money a net zero or even net negative -- there's actually a fairly strong 'self-made man' meme that favors new money.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

I would not call the US a 'classless meritocracy'.

"Classless meritocracy" is a technical term in GURPS. It means a society where Status (also a technical term in GURPS) is primarily gained from free bonuses granted by Rank or by Wealth (likewise), and where you can only gain a level or two of Status by paying points for it.

So, for example, the president of the United States has Political Rank 8 [costing 40 points], which grants +3 Status; he also is almost always at least a Multimillionaire 1 [costing 75 points], which grants +2 Status; but his Status, as head of the world's most powerful nation, is almost surely 8, of which he has to pay for three levels [costing 15 points]. And that makes the United States not a classless meritocracy; it has at least residues of Status as inherent dignity or prestige. But such social positions are unusual in the United States; we're close to what GURPS calls a classless meritocracy.

What you seem to be talking about is more what Social Engineering calls an egalitarian society: One where differences in Wealth are restricted, to the point where no one ever gains a Status bonus from being rich.

You can, if you like, object that this terminology does not match the way the words are used outside of GURPS. But a lot of words have special definitions in GURPS or any game system.

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

"Classless meritocracy" is a technical term in GURPS. It means a society where Status (also a technical term in GURPS) is primarily gained from free bonuses granted by Rank or by Wealth (likewise), and where you can only gain a level or two of Status by paying points for it.

Wow. What an amazingly strange definition, as it seems to presume that Wealth is a measure of merit. This can be true, but wealth being controlled by the upper classes is very common in societies with strong class systems.