One thing that I've noticed about the looting over the last couple of days is how stratified it shows consumption patterns in the UK are. I think I've once been into a Footlocker - to buy a pair of football boots - yet the theft and destruction seems to have always picked out sportswear shops. On the other hand, bookshops, where I spend considerably more of my time, seem to have been left untouched. I'd imagine that's not an unusual difference between someone of my class and someone of the class typical of the looters. It'd be strange if it was only consumption patterns and not, say, attitudes towards the legitimacy of other's property rights, which differed like that. Thomas Jones points out here that the borough of London which is all started in, Haringey, is the most unequal, and it's worth noting that Clapham Junction sits between a series of large highrise housing estates off Falcon Road and up St Johns Hill and the Victorian and extremely expensive terraces between Clapham and Wandsworth Commons. As Rousseau put it when pouring vituperation on the hierarchies of eighteenth century Europe and the conspicuous consumption that fuelled them, "subjects having no law but the will of their master, and their master no restraint but his passions, all notions of good and all principles of equity... vanish".
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James Meek is quite good here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/08/09/james-meek/in-broadway-market/
I think he maybe overeggs it a bit. I went to primary school and was then friends with kids from the estates round Clapham Junction, for example. Still, my social world and theirs now probably share very little.
Adam Smith made a similar point in The Wealth of Nations.
A point similar to what?
Your earlier comment reminded me of this, from WN, 1.2.4:
*** The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents. ***
Oh but of course that's right. Anyone who could tell me what my innate talents are is obviously lying. Suspicion of that kind of thing is why I hate psychometric testing.
It appears that one in eight children have never visited a bookshop:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14621621
Ben,
that seems surprisingly low to me.
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