The New Elite"s Silly Virtue-Signaling Consumption

Today’s ascendant class, which emerged in the late 1970s and burgeoned in the 1990s, has been called the “educated elite,” the “cosmopolitan class,” the “new establishment,” the “creative class,” the “meritocratic elite,” the “exam-passing class,” the “metropolitan class,” the “new face of wealth,” the “labor market elite,” the “new upper class,” the “bourgeois bohemians,” the “anywheres.” This no-longer-so-new economic, cultural, and social formation has been lauded, denounced, and dispassionately scrutinized. And these conflicting endeavors have, surprisingly, yielded a definitional consensus.