Dancing in a World of Horseradish

[-]Richard_Kennaway6h126

I'm not describing an imaginary theoretical utopia. I'm describing an actual social institution that used to exist. It's called a dance hall and the pairings are called partner dancing. There are many varieties, including waltz, swing, and salsa. Dance halls used to be the place young people went to hang out [and find mates].

I thought young people still did that, although the outward forms have changed over the years. They call it "going out clubbing" and the "dancing" is unstructured writhing without formal organisation into pairs, but it serves the same purpose. But the music, whether recorded or live, is too loud for polite intellectual conversation, so it selects for people who have none.

Where do jefftk's posts about playing the music for dance events fit into the cultural milieu? Is that scene only a small niche in the larger scheme of things?

[-]Eli Tyre8h50

Singles meetups. Singles meetups are tailored to women-style filters. Men have a bad experience because they can't filter properly. Women have a bad experience because there aren't enough quality men.

I don't know what you mean by "can't filter properly". That isn't usually how the problems with dating, on the men's side, are described?

If this were true, it seems like it should be exploitable by smart men. If there are an abundance of women, can the men figure out a method for sorting effectively even if the context isn't conducive to it?

(I think this is symmetrical, and the women should be able to hack the dating app, if there's an abundance of quality men. But in-person meetups are much higher bandwidth and so have better affordances for bespoke filtering approaches.)

[-]Eli Tyre8h40

Why are dance halls niche these days? There are many factors, but the single biggest one is recorded music. It used to be that all music was live. Live music was a coordination point where everyone could form new social connections. And once you're there you might as well dance.

This explanation doesn't ring true to me?

The claim as I understand it:

Music, when it couldn't be recorded, was expensive to produce, and so usually produced and consumed as a club good? The cost of the music creation was amortized^[1] over everyone coming to a social event about it, which had the happy side effect of causing there to be social events of this type at all (which had positive externalities on dating).

But when the price of music falls, it becomes much easier for people to purchase music on their own instead of purchasing it collectively as a club good. As a consequence, there's a much weaker incentive to go to dance halls (since apparently a big chunk of the value was getting to listen to music). So people do that less, and the dance hall scene becomes niche.

Is that right?

This story seems possible, at least. But it seems a little fishy to me that, if dance halls were as awesome for dating as you suggest that a big chunk of the value was getting to listen to music. I'm not clear on why you can't keep doing the "teenagers go dancing" thing, just with recorded music instead of live music.

^{^}
Is that the right word? Can you amortize over many people enjoying a good at once instead of over time?

[-]xpym7h10

Yeah, it's not the gramophone that displaced in-person socializing. TV struck first, and then the internet dealt the killing blow.

[-]Mo Putera7h20

Bit tangential: re: your sequence name "civilization is FUBAR", I get the FU, but why BAR? Maybe I'm just in too much of a progress-vibed bubble?

[-]Eli Tyre8h20

I love this kind of economic analysis of cultural trends and I'd eagerly consume more of this kind.

I didn't realize that the reason why house servants largely disappeared in the first half of the 20th century was because household appliances were partial substitutes for them! But that makes perfect sense!

[-]Richard_Kennaway6h90

I thought, and a very brief google confirms, that the causality ran the other way. The appliances offered a solution to "the servant problem". The servant class was going away because of the First World War. In the UK a lot of servants were called up (and their employers nobly made do with a reduced staff for their country's sake), not just for soldiers, but to work in the factories and on the farms. They would do a day's work for a day's pay and the rest of their time was their own. Afterwards, they wouldn't go back to life in service. They might not be making much more in a job than they had in service, but they had freedom. If you've heard the saying, "you just can't get the staff", that's the era it comes from. So does the song "How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After they’ve seen Paree)". Then the Second World War and "Rosie the Riveter" did the same thing again.

Servants these days are a much higher class of luxury than in Victorian times, when even middle class families would often have a live-in general housekeeper.

[-]xpym6h1-7

For the former-maids now working in the modern service sector, this was a major step up.

Seems doubtful tbh. I think that being a maid/manservant to a one-percenter could in theory be a much better gig, but society apparently collectively decided that such jobs are inherently degrading and fundamentally conflict with the Egalitarian Spirit, and abolished them on moral grounds instead of economic ones.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

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Dancing in a World of Horseradish

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Luxury Products

Product Bifurcation

The Death of Live Music