this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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This stuck with me: Years ago, someone on Reddit described their middle school in the β70s having to have an assembly to stop a potlatch/arms race between kids stacking Izod/Lacoste shirts. There were well-off kids wearing three or more stacked Lacoste shirts every day, and poorer kids wearing cheap generic polo shirts under real alligator shirts to try to keep up.
A situation where the poor people are trying to keep up is not a βpotlatchβ. That would be the rich kids trying to outdo each other to see how many shirts they can give to the poor kids.
I may have an outdated sense of what a potlatch was. I was using the term in the sense of destroying value, per this kind of definition:
βA potlatch involves giving away or destroying wealth or valuable items in order to demonstrate a leader's wealth and power. β