Sublime

The materialist superstition is this: that wealth consists of things rather than thoughts, of accumulated capital rather than accumulated knowledge—that people are chiefly consumers rather than creators, mouths rather than minds.

Our alternative ‘iron law of inequality’ can be annotated as r < g, with r signifying the rate of interest and g the economy’s trend growth. This formula, which is the inverse of Piketty’s, can explain both changes in the distribution of income and wealth during the 1920s and the rise in inequality since the 1980s and, in particular, the Great

The key to the critique of capitalism is therefore the revaluation of value. The foundation of capitalism is the measure of wealth in terms of socially necessary labor time. In contrast, the overcoming of capitalism requires that we measure our wealth in terms of what I call socially available free time. As long as our measure of wealth is socially

The bottle service club today pitches Goffman’s “action” to the world’s new elite; it encourages the rich to flaunt their riches, to display wealth for display’s sake. Bottle service clubs are predicated on conspicuous consumption, a term coined, in 1899, by Thorstein Veblen, the quirky Norwegian American economist.

After a certain point, the only people still playing the conspicuous consumption game will be those for whom it is still a useful signal—lower socioeconomic groups, people in developing countries—and those who don't have other dimensions on which they're able to compete. In other words, it will quite literally be a poor man's game.

He broke with neoclassical thinking by observing that what might be rational for an individual acting in isolation might be bad for everyone as a whole. An example of this is “the paradox of thrift”: In a recession, a reasonable thing for me to do is to start saving more than I did before, but if everyone does it, the aggregate level of demand in

A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure.

Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to accumulate riches. The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add another element: war and plunder. After all, just about anyone