I love social environments that aren't full of lemons even though admission is affordable and they have no formal filters. Social dancing (including both partner dancing and contra) are like this. Something about the profile of people who go dancing selects for general holistic fitness.

Thank you for the market research feedback!

I use the acronym "beyond all recognition" rather than "beyond all repair".

My original intended title for this post was "(Faux) Luxury", but I had so much to say about real luxury that I never got to the faux luxury part.

The rich peoples' private plane equivalent to dance halls is "good universities". Rich people often find spouses in college. (Less than ½ of US Americans graduated in college, and even less than that graduated from good colleges.) Rich people who fail to find a spouse in college end up in the same situation as poor people.

What happened to flying is complicated. One really important thing to know is that US airlines were deregulated in 1978. Before that, price competition was basically illegal. You must factor in the effects of state intervention when comparing US airlines before and after that date.

Yeah, the appliances are just particularly salient milestone in a general trend. Economists call this trend cost disease.

I'm currently reading a book about mid-20th-century Japan where labor was so cheap that high-end service workers had their own maids. It's like the servants had servants.

Yes, both sides are absolutely exploitable. But (like Morpheus notes) you have to be weird and most people are a priori not weird.

Thank you. I have corrected my error.

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.

Yep. This is my thesis.

I'm not clear on why you can't keep doing the "teenagers go dancing" thing, just with recorded music instead of live music.

It can be done, and most partner dance scenes these days do use recorded music most (if not all) of the time. However, the strongest communities and greatest draw are, by far, the live music venues.

In my experience, going out clubbing is a very different, asymmetrical experience compared to partner dancing. You can quantify this objectively by measuring the equilibrium gender ratios. Popular clubs are constantly trying to get more women into the club and restrict entry by men. Unpopular clubs tend to end up with a gender ratio where men outnumber women. In this way, the unbalanced gender dynamics are similar to dating apps.

As for jefftk's posts, I believe he writes more about contra dancing than partner dancing. Contra dancing is awesome too. I love contra! However, while contra dancing is still really good for meeting opposite gender people compared to most of modern atomized society, contra isn't quite as ruthlessly optimized for that target as partner dancing is. Instead, contra dancing loses a little bit on the romance side of things to buy a really strong community.

Personally, I found the first week or two of Halfhaven to be useful. After that, Goodhart's Law took over. I wanted to put more time into each post, so I chose not to continuing publishing at the proscribed schedule. After that, I continued to find value in hanging out on the Halfhaven Discord.