Bud Parr

September 24, 2008

Regarding my last post on Gossip Girl, I’ve just discovered (via Razib at Gene Expression) that Matthew Yglesias noted last year the weird sociological inaccuracies of Gossip Girl.

So, though I?m not the first to make the point, at least I?m not alone in making it.

While I?m at it, some reject my ?market failure? explanation for the persistence of privileged, old money villains and argue instead that the public simply finds those villains more entertaining.  There may be something to this, and I don?t pretend to understand popular tastes. Nonetheless, I do suspect that the near-total absence in pop culture of any other moneyed type ? villain or not ? is a sign that pop culture purveyors are artificially restricting what they might otherwise be willing to depict.