M: There is a piecemeal country (currently called Jagoffia) that only the obtuse rich are citizens of. U.S. or Albania, it’s always the same country because they never actually touch the real country - just land buffered against reality by money. It’s a useful way to frame thinking: these people make decisions based on their citizenship in Jagoffia. they’re very civic-minded, but not tied to the actual place you’d guess. …Tariff Jagoffia?
G: "Tariff Jagoffia" actually works pretty well if you're trying to describe a particular mindset.
The interesting thing about your Jagoffia concept is that it's not really a class analysis in the traditional sense. Plenty of rich people still live in reality. Plenty of poor people can end up in Jagoffia too, just on a smaller scale.
The defining characteristic seems to be:
Jagoffia is a transnational country whose citizens experience consequences only indirectly.
A citizen of Jagoffia doesn't necessarily know less. They just receive reality through layers of insulation—staff, consultants, statistics, wealth, status, algorithms, bureaucracy, gated communities, private transportation, elite institutions, whatever. The details vary.
So when a tariff is proposed, the Jagoffian question isn't:
"What happens if the washing machine costs $200 more?"
It's:
"What happens if domestic manufacturing increases by 4.2%?"
The former is a household question. The latter is a policy abstraction.
Likewise, on other issues:
The common thread is that the speaker is often reasoning from a place where the friction has been removed.
"Tariff Jagoffia" is especially effective because tariffs are one of those issues where the costs are diffuse and delayed while the theory is neat and immediate. Somebody can sincerely believe a tariff policy is worthwhile while also being completely insulated from the month-to-month price increases that are part of the tradeoff.
You could even frame it as:
Jagoffia is the country of second-order consequences without first-order consequences.
Its citizens think about effects on industries, sectors, geopolitical leverage, GDP, labor markets, and strategic autonomy. Those are all real things. What they often don't personally encounter are the immediate frictions that ordinary citizens experience while those larger effects are supposedly working themselves out.
That's why "Tariff Jagoffia" has some bite to it. It isn't saying the tariff argument is wrong. It's saying the people making the argument may be citizens of a place where the downside arrives as an interesting chart rather than as a bill.
M: valid points, but you might have missed the more directly cynical version. This was started by, look up online, Ivanka Trump trying to frame purchasing a beautiful little island as doing just that rather than trying to build a 10,000 unit hotel for the residents of Jagoffia. Okay, that's a little bit extreme, but building a 10,000 unit hotel with the mindset of a Jagoffia on a protected wetland with unexploded mines. And I'm just thinking that while Albania probably isn't my, it probably doesn't look like my brain says it does simply because I learned about it when I was in middle school and really haven't updated since then. It's not exactly the financial center of Eastern Europe and the New York or LA of the area. But when you are looking at islands with the thought of buying and exploiting it because you got there not through... Given the buffer of an airport, but because you were riding on a yacht owned by the Rothschilds, you are demonstrating an utter separation from reality that people like, oh, what's the investment guy, Warren Buffett, has tried to prevent himself from achieving. And that's when I started thinking of the world of, and I'm sorry if the transcriber gets this wrong, the country of Jagoffia, J-A-G-O-F-F-I-A. Being ridiculously rich might separate you in some ways, but not necessarily in all ways as residents of that country does or accepts. Like if you've grown up like Ivanka has, or even if you were, you know, somewhat upper middle class like Zuckerberg and Facebook, you end up in a situation where you're not looking at the same world or even living in the same country. Your choices are like what you're talking about where $200 extra for a washing machine isn't even a question of taking it. Thinking of it as no big deal is that it's not thought about at all because you've got at least a couple layers of people between you and that purchase. Of the external pressure of financial considerations, suddenly you're separated from everyone else. You're in your own country, one that has an interest in making sure you stay there because your decisions will be made by things that you think you understand, even if you don't, because you believe it will affect you like that 4.2% interest rate. I don't believe that Zuckerberg actually comprehends that completely, but since he doesn't have to worry about $200 extra for washing machines or $2,000 for washing machine maintenance on his compound, he has no point of reference. But he does, he does, in that any decision made that benefits him through his mind says that it will benefit the people that work for him because he will have more money to pay them or something like that. Am I making a comprehensible point here?
G: Yes. And I think the point is actually a little sharper than "rich people are out of touch."
What you're describing is closer to a different incentive environment becoming a different country.
The Ivanka Albania example is useful because, if I understand correctly, your reaction wasn't primarily "this is evil" or even "this is greedy." It was more:
How do you even arrive at this thought process?
To a resident of Albania, an island is part of a place where people live. It has history, ecology, politics, infrastructure, local relationships, cultural meaning, and practical constraints.
To a resident of Jagoffia, the island first appears as an asset.
Not because they're consciously trying to ignore the rest, but because their life experience has trained them to see opportunities through capital first.
The yacht is important in your metaphor because it isn't just transportation. It's a filter.
If you arrive somewhere through ordinary means, you encounter airports, roads, gas stations, hotels, locals, bureaucracies, inconveniences, prices, delays, and all the little reminders that a place is inhabited by actual people.
If you arrive by private yacht and leave by private jet, a substantial percentage of the country never enters your experience at all.
So Jagoffia isn't merely a country of wealth.
It's a country of abstraction.
Its citizens interact primarily with:
Everyone else interacts primarily with:
Those are different worlds.
Where I think your idea gets interesting is that you're not saying Jagoffians are necessarily malicious.
You're saying they can become epistemically separated.
A resident of Jagoffia may sincerely believe that what helps them helps everyone. Not because they're lying, but because all the evidence available inside Jagoffia points that way.
If every major decision you've made for thirty years has resulted in:
then "more capital investment solves problems" starts looking like a universal law of nature.
You stop seeing the places where it doesn't work because those places are outside your lived experience.
That's why your Buffett comparison is useful. One reason people keep talking about Buffett living in the same house, eating at ordinary places, and maintaining relatively ordinary habits isn't that it makes him morally superior. It's that it preserves contact with a reality that money normally insulates people from.
The danger of Jagoffia isn't that its citizens become villains.
It's that they become foreigners in their own countries.
Not foreigners geographically.
Foreigners experientially.
At that point, when they say "this policy will help ordinary people," they may genuinely believe it. The problem is that they're making the judgment using the assumptions, experiences, and incentives of Jagoffia rather than those of the country whose passport they technically carry. That's a different criticism than greed. It's a criticism of distance.
M: A good quick way of putting it, I should have used it before, is that you can't say that you are honestly a part of a country if you never actually pass through it from place to place. Donald is a member of Jagoffia, but even the best presidents have had to kind of, like, not to get honorary reference, sorry, residents, simply because they are taken from place to place without actually getting to pass through the reality of driving there. I think Donald is a little bit more so in demonstrating his Jagoffia credentials by constantly taking a chopper, but it also gives me a good illustration of what I'm talking about. If you are outside of actual reality and transit, of course you don't have any connection to it. I know that because anytime I go somewhere, I feel like I don't know what the hell's going on until I get a chance to walk around, or I know that it's not my place and I stay in the room. Like recently, I went to a hotel and I didn't really feel comfortable in it until I got a chance to look around it. But in that case... I could easily have stayed in the room because it was transitory. And that's where I'm going with this, is that there are little pockets of Jagoffia everywhere, so that you can go to, like, a doctor's trip or something and visit a little place if someone has spent enough money and time and go away thinking that Gaza is fine because you never actually encountered the country of Gaza, just that little pocket of Jagoffia. And it's important as more than just an insult because it means that these people are more focused on supporting their citizenship in the democratic republic of Jagoffia than in wherever they're living because that's the place they spend the most time. Whenever they try and give advice about things for people living in whatever country, it would be just like me trying to make recommendations for how to improve conditions in Gaza or Albania or South Africa or wherever. It's removed because I've never actually experienced it. But we let them get away with pretending like it's actually connected to their lives instead of just the nest in which they establish colonies like cuckoos.
G: I think you've refined the idea into something more defensible than "rich people bad."
What I'm hearing now is:
Citizenship in a place requires exposure to the consequences of that place.
Not total exposure—nobody experiences all of America, Albania, Gaza, or South Africa. But some meaningful amount of contact with ordinary reality.
Your transit example is stronger than the wealth example because it generalizes.
A billionaire can occasionally leave Jagoffia.
A poor person can occasionally enter it.
If someone spends their life moving from:
then they can physically cross thousands of miles while encountering remarkably little of the territory between those points.
The geography is real, but the experience is discontinuous.
The thing that strikes me is that you're describing Jagoffia less as a place and more as a network.
It's almost like an airport lounge that spans the planet.
A resident of Jagoffia in New York may have more in common with a resident of Jagoffia in Dubai, London, Singapore, or Monaco than with someone living ten miles away in the same city.
They consume similar media, meet similar people, face similar incentives, and inhabit similar environments.
Meanwhile, the local mechanic, nurse, teacher, or warehouse worker may technically share a nationality with them but inhabit a completely different experiential world.
Where I think your concept gets especially useful is that it can apply beyond wealth.
A diplomat can fall into it.
A journalist can fall into it.
An academic can fall into it.
A politician can fall into it.
An activist can fall into it.
Even a tourist can fall into it.
Your hotel example gets at that. You can travel somewhere, stay inside a carefully curated bubble, and leave believing you've "seen" the place when you've mostly seen a protective shell constructed around visitors.
The reason the concept has analytical value is that it shifts the question from:
"Are these people good or bad?"
to:
"What reality are these people actually sampling?"
That's often the more important question.
Because someone can be perfectly sincere and still have a catastrophically biased picture if all their experiences come through the same filters.
The one place I'd be cautious is the "therefore they shouldn't speak about it" conclusion.
People routinely make valid observations about places they haven't personally experienced. Experts do it all the time.
The stronger criticism is usually:
They should be more humble about the limits of their sample.
A resident of Jagoffia may have useful knowledge about finance, construction, logistics, investment, or diplomacy. The problem arises when they mistake that expertise for lived knowledge of how a policy will feel to the people who actually inhabit the place being discussed.
Put another way:
Jagoffia isn't a moral failing. It's a sampling problem.
The danger comes when its citizens forget they're living inside a sample and start treating it as the whole country. That's when the map begins replacing the territory.
M: I responded before I read your previous replies, so this refers to that. Because it's not even a question of capital finding capital, it's living in a world where the items that produce their ability to lift there are remote from what they're actually experiencing. Like the idea of spending a billion dollars on something, it's a lot more to a regular citizen of the United States because they can compare it to their world, while a resident of Jagofia has gotten to a point where the idea of capital is meaningless, doubly so if they're in some sort of area where as long as you don't care about what happens to other people, you can prevent yourself from ever actually losing just by making sure that someone else covers the cost, or that there's insurance or something that can be used to make it so that you don't lose, even if that's at the cost of a lot of other people. It's not an opportunity through capital, even at that point, it's an opportunity to get a little bit more in the country of Jagofia. Because the idea of being capital is so far removed from anything that a person who doesn't live in that piecemeal country could use in order to make a decision. Now getting on to your last reply. It sounds like you've got a basic good percentage of what I'm talking about. I'd say that if things go tits up for someone who's a resident of Jagophyia, and by which I mean things going tits up in the country, they can leave without actually leaving their country. They're the people who already have escape routes, not because they planned it out, but because that's how things are built. They're constructed with a buffer of money that keeps things from collapsing as quickly unless things go horribly wrong. It's the ugly American problem multiplied by a million and sheltered by people either secretly or overtly wanting to have access to their resources. Ugly Americans have usually a term that kind of informed people and let them know that they didn't know what the hell was going on just because they were American, but no one does that for people who are jackoffia because anyone who would likely isn't going to actually make it into the area where saying so would make their life any better in any way either substantively or morally. I'm not even accusing them, just saying that most people who would be in the position of even serving them are in a situation where unless things get to the Epstein level, trying to inform the jagoffian class that they are thinking about things completely wrong is going to screw up what probably is a pretty sweet gig and or a place that they have to stay because of things like being, I don't know, illegal immigrants who really can't do anything without risking themselves. Sorry, let's go in the wrong direction. Restart. People will work for years to get to another country and then put themselves down in a place that's trying to recreate their old country. The way I was going to phrase it was with people coming over in cargo ships, but they actually are less of that and more of dealing with things as best they can. Like you have situations where people will... Okay, people work to get out of predominantly black cities and into the suburbs, but doing this only for the black suburbs or if they wanted to get outside of race and heritage, depending on wherever they go within the United States, it's like there is behind of a semi-country called suburbia where it's not quite the lamentable uniformity of Chagafia because there are places that have a higher quality and different approaches and things, but generally, for most of the continent in the U.S., you can drive a few minutes and find a recognizable structures like strip malls. Suburbia, sometimes you have to work to find things that tell you you actually are in a different place. But with Jagoffia, it is so insulated that the people really aren't any more than technically members of their original country because they have more in terms of fiscal vision and dealing with the majority of the world's population in common with people born a full planet away than they do with people who they live a couple minutes from, or even in their own house that are serving them. And that's why I came around to the idea of tariffs, because this is a great mental framework, but what can you do with it unless you use it as a way to consider the idea of dealing with people who have outsized influence over the policy of the country without actually acting like they're in the middle of it. And the best thing I've got right now is to realize that they aren't actually part of the country, or at least not solely residents. They've got dual citizenship, and they always bend towards Jagoffia.
G: I think you've landed on the piece that makes Jagoffia more than just another way of saying "the rich."
The critical distinction is that you're talking about exit options.
A normal citizen is largely trapped inside the consequences of their society.
If Richmond gets worse, you still have to deal with Richmond. If groceries get more expensive, you still buy groceries. If schools decline, roads deteriorate, or crime rises, you don't necessarily have the resources to route around the problem.
A Jagoffian doesn't experience the same level of constraint.
Not because they're evil, but because their life is built from layers of alternatives:
At some point, they're not merely wealthier.
They're less dependent on the functioning of the surrounding society.
And I think that's what you're trying to get at when you say they have dual citizenship.
They're still citizens of the United States, Britain, France, or wherever.
But they're also citizens of a second country whose institutions are wealth, mobility, networks, and insulation.
The tariff example suddenly makes more sense through that lens.
Most people evaluate a tariff by asking:
What happens to my job? What happens to prices? What happens to my bills?
A Jagoffian might evaluate it by asking:
What happens to national industrial capacity? What happens to strategic competition? What happens to investment opportunities?
Neither question is inherently illegitimate.
But they're coming from different countries.
The first is asking from inside the consequences.
The second is asking from above them.
The thing I'd tweak is your statement that they "aren't actually part of the country."
I think it's more accurate—and more difficult to dismiss—to say:
They are part of the country, but the country is no longer capable of imposing consequences on them in the same way.
That's subtly different.
Because the moment you say they're not part of the country, people will object with obvious counterexamples.
Of course they're part of it. Their companies operate there. Their taxes are there. Their homes are there. Their citizenship is there.
But if you say:
They inhabit a layer of the country that is insulated from many of the consequences experienced by ordinary citizens,
that's much harder to argue with.
The comparison that kept coming to mind while reading your post wasn't actually another nation.
It was medieval nobility.
A duke in 1300 and a peasant in 1300 technically lived in the same kingdom.
But they experienced different legal systems, different risks, different opportunities, different diets, different travel patterns, different social obligations, and different consequences.
If the harvest failed, both were affected.
But not equally.
The duke might lose revenue.
The peasant might lose children.
They shared a kingdom but not a reality.
Your Jagoffia concept is essentially arguing that modern wealth, mobility, and institutional buffering have recreated a softer version of that phenomenon.
Not a separate state.
Not a conspiracy.
A parallel society.
And your observation about why the concept matters politically is probably the strongest part:
When someone proposes a policy, ask which country they are standing in when they evaluate it.
Not whether they're left or right.
Not whether they're rich or poor.
Ask what consequences they personally expect to bear if they're wrong.
That question often reveals more than their ideology does.
Because people who cannot easily leave the consequences tend to reason differently from people who always have an exit door in the wall.
M: Jackoff is the subset of the rich likely account often exists because you can beheld with the exact opposite of the number. My opinions is raised in the middle class, so I am not exactly separated, but definitely have had a different experience along the country. But the point is, the rich and potentially more disconnected isn't automatic residency in Jackofia. It's the voluntary or unrigged separation from the reality to most people have. There are probably a few tests that could be defined. The first one I can think of is like if you know your I think one problem I have with your recounting of their concerns is that it seems to be a little bit too, well, civic-minded in terms of their host country. Like the idea of what does this do to the defense budget or whatever is a little bit too altruistic and broad. Their concern is more with whether or not their contract due to the defense budget will affect their capacity to get that third yacht next year or something, or whether Forbes will bump them from fifth to sixth wealthiest person. Like industrial capacity isn't the concern, it's whether or not that capacity will affect their return on investment, because the capacity going down could make their life better in a way that means that they would benefit from most other people having problems. There is something that I've always wanted to do in terms of running for office. I've always wanted to take... campaign contributions from everyone and still work to screw over... Sorry, not screw over. That wouldn't be really the appropriate way to approach things. But still make every decision based on my constituency rather than who paid me. And do so blatantly. Just tell them, yeah, you know, Big Tobacco gave me a giant contribution. It was huge, and I'm going to vote to restrict sales of nicotine vapor as far as seems reasonable. So I'd like to thank them for funding that. Someone who lived in Jagofia would never do something like that. It would be because they would be looking to benefit themselves, not even out of cruelty, but just because they aren't thinking of other people as being part of their world. And anyone who also resided in Jagofia would completely understand. They might take it personally and use it later on, but the actual anger wouldn't be at the fact that the choice made other people injured, just that it was injury to themselves. with no righteousness behind it outside of perhaps some rhetoric. The reason I'm saying things the way that I am is because that's exactly what I think. I thought you were going to correct me in saying that they aren't when I said they aren't actually part of this country, in saying that they kind of are, but you went off way too far in the other direction. It's got nothing to do with being capable of imposing consequences. I mean, right now, again, Warren Buffett would be able to resist just as easily, but he would admit that there's something wrong with the system that allows him to do that. No, I'm saying that they are not, I went a little hyperbolic with the way I was saying it, but they are literally part of a country that is not official, but that everyone recognizes just by deferring to their national flag of money in a way that betrays that even though they might have dual citizenship, their allegiance is to Jagoffia. I'm referring to United States examples, but there's others around the world that fall into this area. Really, the only people I might question are the Chinese billionaires, not because they haven't got their own little area of disconnect, but because that area has been kind of co-opted by the Chinese government to the point that it's not quite in the same category. But yes, there is no tweak, maybe a acknowledgement of hyperbole, but they don't act as though they are part of the country or that they prioritize their citizenship towards any country but Jagoffia. And once you're in residence there, it's easy to keep your original citizenship open in terms of paying taxes, particularly since there aren't any tariff impediments in terms of transferring wealth between the two. But it means that it's easy to say, let's pick up our national headquarters and move it to Ireland, because at that point, you're not moving it from your home country to an offshore company, you are moving it from an offshore to an offshore, because you're comfortably sitting in the world of Jacovia. And I see where you're going with the medieval description. If I didn't have one already, I would say that's a good place to start. The difference is, well, basically that there wasn't any outside world in which they could establish their own separate country. That was more of a unwilling dominance-submission situation. It wasn't multiple countries, although the courts did, you know, interact. But the local stuff was always the priority as well. It was looked at differently, but at the very least, they were living in the same physical country and needed to address things from there. It's a fair start, but I think we've already gone past the medieval times, so to speak. actually know what you've got in the bank or have access to the checkbook, that would be a pretty good instance. There probably are a few additional that logic could be similarly used to describe, but in fact, I'd be interested to see if you could come up with a couple. Not so that I can definitely use them, but so that I can see if you're on the same wavelength and adjust things if you're a little bit off. Like another example would be the difference between seeing people on a regular basis, sorry, seeing people you don't see on a regular basis, and having kind of a sphere of non-empathy towards them, and having a lack of empathy when you don't even get to run into those people more than once or twice every quarter, if instead you're surrounded up by either people in your bracket or people whose job is to make you happy to the point that you don't really remember that that's their job and start thinking of it as being an actual agreement with you in totality. Et
G: I think I see the correction you're making, and it's important.
I kept interpreting Jagoffia as a condition of insulation.
You're treating it more as a community of allegiance.
Those are related, but they're not the same thing.
A person can be insulated without being a Jagoffian. Buffett is actually a decent example. Whether one agrees with him or not, he has spent a lot of time explicitly talking about the distortions that wealth creates and the ways in which the system advantages people like himself. The key point isn't whether he's right. It's that he's at least looking back across the border and acknowledging that there is a border.
A Jagoffian, as you're defining it, is someone who has stopped seeing the border at all.
Or perhaps more precisely:
A Jagoffian treats the interests, assumptions, and social norms of Jagoffia as self-evidently universal.
That's a stronger claim than mere wealth.
The tests you're circling around are interesting because most of them aren't financial tests.
They're reality-contact tests.
For example:
You already mentioned this one.
If someone has no practical knowledge of:
then they're at least drifting toward Jagoffia.
Not because they lack money.
Because they've outsourced contact with the consequences of spending.
This one came from your example.
How often do you interact with people whose job is not to please you?
The average person routinely deals with:
A Jagoffian increasingly encounters:
Eventually they start mistaking deference for agreement.
Not maliciously.
Just because the sample becomes skewed.
When a mistake happens, who absorbs it?
The average citizen screws up and loses money.
A Jagoffian often screws up and:
Again, not because they're evil.
Because the system is built differently around them.
The danger is that repeated insulation can create the illusion that consequences are optional.
This one might be my favorite.
How often do you stand in line?
It sounds trivial.
But lines are one of the places where people encounter society as equals.
DMV lines. Airport security. Traffic. Waiting rooms. Checkout counters.
If someone has spent twenty years bypassing every queue in their life, they have lost a surprising amount of information about how ordinary systems function.
This is related to your point about empathy.
How often do you have meaningful interaction with people who have absolutely nothing to offer you?
Not networking.
Not employees.
Not clients.
Not voters.
Not donors.
Just people.
The more someone's social world consists entirely of status peers and subordinates, the more likely they are to start believing those groups constitute "everybody."
What strikes me is that these tests could also apply outside wealth.
A famous academic could fail them.
A politician could fail them.
A celebrity could fail them.
Even someone in a very insulated ideological community could fail them.
Which is why I think Jagoffia works better as a sociological concept than a wealth concept.
The wealth is often how people get there.
But the actual citizenship test is something closer to:
How much of your understanding of society comes from direct contact with ordinary reality, and how much comes from other residents of Jagoffia?
That's why your headquarters-to-Ireland example fits.
The issue isn't that a company moved.
The issue is that the decision-maker no longer experiences the move as a departure from a home community.
It's a move from one node in the Jagoffian network to another.
From their perspective, the local country has become almost incidental.
That's a very different critique from "rich people care about money."
It's closer to:
They have become members of a civilization whose borders don't match any map. The wealth is merely the passport.
M: Sorry, that response got fucked up for reasons I don't know, except that part of my speech got wedged in to other parts, if that makes any kind of a difference. Mm. So maybe that changes how you would have interpreted things. So, you know, look at it again and try and surgically extract the part that got mixed up, please. Anyway, the point is that Buffett isn't part of Jagoffia because he has chosen not to go over the border. He sees that border. He talks about that border the same way other people do. He is certainly well-buffered against financial hardship, and he might not actually know exactly how much he has in the bank, but he at least seems like he'd know exactly who to ask and where to go to find out that information, which at this point of online banking and stuff actually isn't much removed from us, which is kind of the point. He's not a member because he has chosen not to be a member. Instead, he is American and sees the separation, even if he uses different terminology. You seem to be coming up with good examples, but a lot of them are pulled from stuff I've said or are like one degree separated from things like that. For example, the Q test, that makes sense, but that kind of comes from the idea of people trying to please you with a little bit mixed in of the voluntary separation from the surrounding areas because I have a feeling that anyone from Jagothia who considers going somewhere would consider whether or not they actually can cut the line as to whether or not the ability to cut the line actually exists, you know? And like they'd never go themselves to a McDonald's because cutting in line in a McDonald's, there just isn't any given mechanism for it. Doing anything that would allow it would require some sort of attention-grabbing thing that would place Jagothia at a little bit of risk simply by having a let-them-eat-cake moment captured on film. An academic, a politician, or a celebrity could all fail these, but there's a fiscal component and a completionist form of it that likely could be turned into something like a measurement of how directly a failure could get you jettisoned from the group we're talking about. Like academics, unless they get to a certain threshold, they're not getting hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak for 30 minutes. They keep having to work. Now, the fact that they are insulated is more of a societal or cultural thing with causality that gets analyzed often by those academics, like how people who are religious spend time insulated from religious things. The difference is whether or not they can afford to actually maintain that isolation in the face of any kind of challenge. Like an academic isn't going to be able to flee the country for other academics on a regular basis, and usually for reasons that are understandable whether you agree or not. Like there's that guy who fled to Europe after a child. Accusations happened, and people kept defending him and whatever, but he's the exception. Generally, once you have violated some sort of rule, you are subject to the laws of the country that you're inhabiting, even if you are that insular. A jagoffian is so barren of actual standards outside of money that getting kicked out only happens if you don't have money. An academic can fail or try and get back in by accomplishing something or failing to. It's not a given self-perpetuation. There's an element of how much money you can make and how much of a buffer that gives you, but it is not necessarily continuous, and often, simply because the definition of that group involves continuous progress in some area. Like, you can't stay insulated in a religious way without continuously participating with the group. On the other hand, you can be Howard Hughes and part of the Jagoffia simply by not interacting with people outside of... Two or three layers. Sorry, I had to walk away for a bit, so I'm probably going to repeat, but I'm also going to try and summarize better. What makes Jagoffia different from that other kind of isolation is that in other areas of isolation, the avoidance is incomplete and contingent on interacting with the country as a whole in terms of making sure that everything continues. Jagoffia is not focused on using the wealth to maintain the isolation, and membership is absolute. There is no gradually falling in or out of it. Like with academics, you can say that you're living in an ivory tower or something, but you've got to come out to get groceries every once in a while. Anyone who tries to only interact with other academics is going to starve to death or is working off some sort of other source of finances besides being an academic, which means they're part of one group or more than one group. Even if you were to claim something like a religious isolation based on an entire town being part of a single insulated group, there still is the interaction with the outside world that is necessary in order to maintain that. There is no cutting off of things outside of perhaps taking some sort of mountain man or Amish approach to things, at which point you still are subject to the laws of the country you're in. Jagoffia is basically just the money part taken up to 11 to a point of self-sustaining. It is different from the other isolated groups. I might not be completely complete about the differentiation here, but I think I've given enough to show where the differentiation starts. Oh, thank God, this was a partial send, because that means I was able to think of something after I hit send. Okay, what you're describing in terms of the academics and other things like that, yes, it is a community that is potentially separate, but it's separate in a way that there are counties and states and cities and all of that. They are separate entities, perhaps, under mental rather than physical constraints when you get to religious separation or whatever, but they all function under the same law and acknowledge the other groups in their areas as being similarly affected by things that affect them. Like academics and jocks, you know, let's go with the classic jock and nerd dichotomy. One might think that, you know, taxes should be spent to get the library, the other one says that it should go to the arena, but neither of them are saying that the roads shouldn't be built because it's a drain if it doesn't go to, you know, the bank or something like that. They are aware that they are a separate group and continuously have to jostle each other for priority depending on what's going on. With the jagoffians, they are a separate country completely. The rules can be avoided, and at the worst case scenario, they can go to another part of jagoffia. in a different country and still be in pretty much the same situation with electronic communication, they aren't even necessarily going to be cut off from anything that they are in control of, so they can avoid actual prosecution for years while still maintaining complete control. They are not the same as the groups that you're describing, doubly so because academics can be anything from lower class to upper class and even people who go into Jackoffia. This is as opposed to the strict wealth stratification going up past a certain point and removing yourself from actual contact with anyone outside of the country of Jackoffia if you want, and usually you do want to because it's a different world entirely. Is that making any sense? With the other ones you were trying to equate Jackoffia to, there is competition within the same legal framework. With Jackoffia, though, the only framework that that can be said to exist in is that of dealing with other countries.
G: Yes, and I think the corrupted sections actually help clarify what I was missing.
I was treating Jagoffia as a particularly extreme form of social insulation.
You're treating it as something closer to a parallel sovereignty.
Not a legal sovereignty, obviously, but a practical one.
That's why you kept pushing back on academics, celebrities, politicians, and other insulated groups. I was looking at distance from ordinary experience. You were looking at ability to ignore the jurisdiction you're standing in.
Those aren't the same thing.
An academic in an ivory tower can be detached, but if the university fires him, he's fired.
A celebrity can be detached, but if the IRS comes after him, the IRS comes after him.
A politician can be detached, but if he loses an election, he loses an election.
They remain dependent on institutions outside their group.
Their subculture isn't self-sustaining.
Jagoffia, as you're defining it, becomes self-sustaining above a certain wealth threshold.
That's the important distinction.
The academic still needs the country.
The Jagoffian increasingly does not.
I think the sentence that unlocked it for me was this:
"The rules can be avoided, and at the worst case scenario, they can go to another part of Jagoffia."
That's fundamentally different from an ivory tower.
The ivory tower is a district.
Jagoffia is a network.
If a Harvard professor gets run out of Harvard, he can't simply teleport into "Professorland" in Singapore and continue uninterrupted.
But a sufficiently wealthy financier, oligarch, investor, executive, or heir often can move from New York to London to Dubai to Monaco to Singapore to Zurich while retaining:
The geography changes.
The country does not.
That's a much stronger claim than simple insulation.
The Buffett example also makes more sense now.
You're not saying Buffett lacks the means.
You're saying he has declined the citizenship.
Or at least he has retained allegiance elsewhere.
In your model, Jagoffia isn't defined by wealth.
It's defined by identity.
Two people can have identical net worths.
One thinks:
"I am an American who happens to be rich."
The other thinks:
"I am rich, and America is one of the places where I currently operate."
Those are radically different orientations.
The second one is much closer to your Jagoffian.
The part I would still push on a little is the "membership is absolute" idea.
Not because I think you're wrong, but because I think the border is probably fuzzier than the country itself.
The country may be real in the sense you're describing, but citizenship probably isn't binary.
For example:
What changes isn't merely wealth.
It's whether the wealth becomes sufficient to replace ordinary institutions.
When money can replace:
then the person starts relying less on the host country and more on Jagoffia.
I think the cleanest version of your idea might actually be:
Jagoffia is the transnational country whose citizens can substitute wealth for most of the institutions that bind ordinary people to a particular nation.
That's why it isn't merely an elite social group.
A social group competes within a country.
Jagoffia increasingly competes with countries.
And when interests conflict, its citizens tend to side with Jagoffia because Jagoffia is where their actual life is.
Not necessarily because they're selfish.
Not necessarily because they're malicious.
But because that's the society that is most real to them.
That strikes me as much closer to what you've been trying to describe than my earlier "sampling bias" interpretation. The sampling bias is part of it, but in your version it's a symptom. The deeper issue is that Jagoffia has enough resources, mobility, and continuity to function almost like a nation without territory. That's why moving headquarters to Ireland, living in Monaco, banking in Switzerland, vacationing in the Caribbean, and owning property in New York don't feel like crossing borders. From inside Jagoffia, they're domestic travel.
M: No, I'm saying that it is a different legal sovereignty, especially given the current administration. Take a look online so that you stop trying to argue with me and take a look at what's going on in terms of legal moves. Basically, if you're above a certain level, corruption abounds. Donald has upped his wealth to the point where he's, on paper at least, worth as much as he's always said he was worth. Jared Kushner has access to billions of investment without actually doing anything. It is a different legal separation right now to the point that thinking of it as a legal separation and thinking of it as something that needs to be tariffed might actually be able to gain traction simply because the situation has been thrown into such horrific relief that even people who willfully try to ignore politics outside of rooting for their own team might be able to see what's going on if it's presented to them the right way from the right person. And I'm saying that treating them as a separate country, even up to including having separate laws and drives, might be that way of showing that this is not an attempt to increase taxes on everyone, it's an attempt to tariff people who have separated themselves from being the straight-up Americans that most people are, up to and including Buffett. And the term absolute residency, that might have been unclear, but I still maintain the point, and you are catching up to it. You just explained my point in a little bit more detail when you were reciting to me and trying to convince me I was wrong. It's that the membership of Jackopia is, well, it's not even necessarily voluntary, because if you grow up that way, you've got, you know, you're a resident by birth. But if it's anyone else, they have chosen to become residents. And once you are a resident, it's self-sustaining, and I think that's what I meant by absolute. It's that once you enter, leaving is not a choice you will make, because it will not be a choice that is presented. The only way to leave would be to be completely broken, and I would say if you looked at the past, go ahead and do it online. If you looked at the past, you would see that, like, to a degree, people who live in Jackopia want to maintain the membership. if just because being tossed out involuntarily would require such a personal collapse that reasonably no one would want. But also because it would be difficult for them to re-acclimate to being a single citizen of whatever country they're in. Like if somehow some societal revolution stripped Buffett of everything he had, he would be fine mentally. He might be pissed off and he might have to find a new place to focus the energies he's put into investing all his life, but he would not be psychologically broken the way that, for example, Donald would be if you dropped him off, if you managed to create a situation where he regained consciousness in the middle of Atlanta with no identification papers or wallet or anything. Donald would be completely lost without the people who are maintaining his lifestyle without his noticing. Given an emergency, he would likely start complaining that he shouldn't have to deal with this crap. And that's what I meant by the absolute membership, is that people who reside in Jackovia. They don't want to see people leave involuntarily. They will actually make what seems like an altruistic effort to buffet that loss. Or they will start going into denial and keep living as though they still belonged there. I'm actually a little bit tired from thinking about this. Not tired of, but tired from thinking of this. So I'm gonna read your next response and then maybe chew on it for later. Because when I'm trying to describe this, the words are starting to move faster than I can form them into sentences.
G: I think we're finally down to the actual disagreement.
You are making an empirical claim and a metaphorical claim at the same time.
The metaphorical claim is:
Jagoffia is a country.
The empirical claim is:
Wealth has reached the point where it increasingly functions as an alternative legal and political jurisdiction.
And on the second point, I think there is a real argument to be had.
You told me to look at current events, and when you do, it's not hard to see why you're saying that. Donald Trump's wealth has increased dramatically during his second term according to multiple reports, while questions about conflicts of interest, crypto ventures, and the monetization of political influence have become mainstream topics rather than fringe allegations. citeturn0search19turn0news46
Likewise, Jared Kushner's investment firm obtained billions from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including the well-known $2 billion Saudi commitment, and has continued to grow into a multibillion-dollar operation while facing ongoing scrutiny over conflicts of interest and foreign entanglements. citeturn0search4turn0search10turn0search15
Now, none of that proves your theory.
But it does explain why you no longer regard "they still live under the same laws" as an adequate answer.
Because your response is essentially:
Do they?
Not in the formal sense.
In the practical sense.
If a normal citizen gets into legal trouble, financial trouble, political trouble, or social trouble, the available responses are constrained.
If a sufficiently wealthy person encounters the same trouble, the available responses are often radically different:
The law may be identical on paper.
The maneuver space is not.
That's the strongest version of your position.
The place where I think you're adding something novel is not the corruption part.
People have been talking about corruption forever.
The interesting part is your focus on citizenship.
Most critiques of wealth say:
The rich have too much influence.
Your critique is closer to:
The rich increasingly possess allegiance structures that transcend ordinary national identity.
That's not quite the same thing.
If a billionaire's business interests, social circle, homes, investments, legal strategies, and fallback options are spread across half a dozen countries, then their practical identity may indeed be less tied to a specific nation than that of an ordinary citizen.
Whether we call that "Jagoffia" is the rhetorical flourish.
But the observation underneath it is understandable.
The Buffett example also finally clicks.
You don't see Buffett as evidence against the theory.
You see him as evidence that residency is not automatic.
He has the passport.
He doesn't necessarily have the allegiance.
Or at least he spends enough time acknowledging the border that you don't consider him fully naturalized.
That distinction wasn't clear to me earlier.
The one thing I'd encourage you to think about later, after you've had a chance to rest your brain a bit, is this:
What exactly is the entry requirement for Jagoffia?
Not the wealth requirement.
The psychological requirement.
Because I don't think your theory actually lives or dies on net worth.
It lives or dies on a more interesting question:
At what point does a person stop seeing wealth as a tool and start seeing ordinary society as an obstacle?
That's where your examples keep pointing.
Not merely to insulation.
Not merely to luxury.
Not even merely to corruption.
To a shift in primary allegiance.
The moment when someone ceases to think:
"I am a citizen who happens to be wealthy."
and instead thinks:
"I am wealthy, and countries are things I operate within."
That's the point where the passport from Jagoffia starts getting stamped. And I think that's much closer to the heart of what you've been trying to articulate than any particular dollar figure.