Sublime

But along with the consumer revolution there now emerged an intellectual revolution that sharply altered the understanding of the role of ‘vanities’ in an economy. In 1705, a London physician called Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract (unusually but charmingly written in verse) entitled The Fable of the Bees, which proposed that – contra

Most remarkable of all, however, was that each book was priced according to Amazon’s website algorithm, which adjusts prices in real time based on supply and demand.

Der Neid protestiert gegen eine Ungleichheit von Vermögen und Status. Die Fantasie der Gleichheit könnte sogar die Quelle der zweiten Konsumrevolution im 19. Jahrhundert gewesen sein, aus der der Massenkonsummarkt hervorging. Eine Vielzahl an massengefertigten Gütern wurde verfügbar und erschwinglich, der Lebensstil der Reichen wurde sichtbarer und

On a per-person basis, materials use has been nearly constant over these twenty-five years, as more efficient use of materials has been counterbalanced by expanded production. In 2005, the global average was about 8.8 metric tons, or just under fifty pounds of materials used per day.

From 1980 to 2005, the weight of the materials used to produce a dollar of GDP fell about 30 percent on a worldwide basis, or 1.2 percent a year. Because output grew more, there was a 45 percent increase in materials use overall.

Specifically, in 1928, the top 1 percent accounted for 24 percent of all income. In 1970 the one-percenters’ share of the wealth was down to about 9 percent, the result of multiple economic dynamics and government policies, including the New Deal reforms and the post-war growth in the 1950s and 1960s of the country’s manufacturing base and, with it