Veblen good

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pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

These types of investments offer meaningfully different outcomes for those able to spend compared to everyone else. CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION AND “VEBLEN GOODS” The late Princeton economist Harvey Leibenstein coined the term “Veblen goods” or “Veblen effects” to describe the goods that are used for conspicuous consumption. Examining consumption patterns by income also shows differences across society in how we conspicuously consume those classic Veblen goods. Let’s look at the first emerging trend I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: The rich are spending less on goods that demonstrate wealth.

As the economist Robert Frank observes, with the outcry over inequality in full swing, public hedonism and overt luxury spending have become flashpoints in the debate (which is not to say they aren’t spending money), and thus those in top income groups find new channels for their money that are known only to those in their circles (whether it’s a live-in housekeeper or, for the very rich, NetJets to Art Basel Miami).26 Conversely, the middle class, those in the 40th to 60th percentile income bracket making on average $47,000 a year, are returning to their pre-Recession conspicuous consumption behavior while reducing their spending on inconspicuous consumption in the post-Recession period. Historically, they have always spent significantly more on conspicuous expenditures than inconspicuous consumption, and at the height of the financial crisis barely reduced their spending on clothes, watches, cars, and other Veblen goods (see fig. 3.1). In fact, in absolute dollars, only the top three income brackets are spending more today on inconspicuous consumption than they did in 1996—the middle class and lower income groups are spending less during the same time period. Overall, the upper income brackets are spending 5–10% more on these goods than they did in 1996.

Gender and Society 22(4): 524–526. doi:10.1177/0891243208315383. Currid, E. (2006). New York as a global creative hub: A competitive analysis of four theories on world cities. Economic Development Quarterly 20(4): 330–350. doi:10.1177/0891242406292708. Currid-Halkett, E., Lee, H., & Painter, G. (2016). Veblen goods and metropolitan distinction: An economic geography of conspicuous consumption. Working paper, University of Southern California. Dale, S., Krueger, A. B., & National Bureau of Economic Research. (2011). Estimating the return to college selectivity over the career using administrative earnings data.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

With most products, demand goes down when prices go up, all other things being equal. But with “Veblen goods,” something very different happens: higher prices cause demand to go up. Such products are named for Thorstein Veblen, the American economist and sociologist who coined the phrase conspicuous consumption. Veblen goods such as luxury cars, designer clothes, and fine art are valued in large part because they’re expensive. They signal the affluence and high status of their owners. Some animal products are Veblen goods, which is bad news for the animals. As we saw in chapter 3, sea otters became so scarce in the late nineteenth century that prices for their pelts rose tenfold.

As we saw in chapter 3, sea otters became so scarce in the late nineteenth century that prices for their pelts rose tenfold. But this didn’t cause a search for replacements because people didn’t want a replacement; they wanted the otter pelt more than ever. The inverted economics of Veblen goods would probably have doomed the species if not for the international moratorium on sea otter hunting signed in 1911. Bison faced the same problem as their numbers cratered. In the 1890s buffalo heads sold for as much as $1,500, which is equivalent to more than $40,000 today. I’m confident that some time around the turn of the twentieth century some knave would have sold to some fool the right to kill the last few North American bison on Earth for a huge sum of money, had that been allowed.

Seebohm, 24 Royal Crown Cola, 101 Russia, 185 Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), 66 Salemi, Jason, 216 Salesforce, 256–57 Samasource, 255–56 sanitation, 22–23, 194 Saudi Arabia, 104 Save the Elephants, 154 Schmidt, Christian, 148 Schnakenberg, Keith, 175 Schumpeter, Joseph, 122 Scientific American, 59–60 Scotland, 38 Scramble for Africa, 39 sea otters, 43, 96, 152 Second Enlightenment, 123, 141, 238–39, 265 Second Machine Age, 112–13, 114–15, 122–23, 141, 162, 168, 177, 200, 206, 213, 231 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson), 112 self-employment, 138–39 self-healing cities, 21–23 self-interest, 127 Sen, Amartya, 68–69, 94 service industry, 88, 200–201 Shapiro, David, 190 Shell Oil, 103, 104–05 Shellenberger, Michael, 251 Sherman, Brad, 107 Sheskin, Mark, 210 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (las Casas), 39–40 Sidgwick, Henry, 142n silver, 120 Simon, Julian, 69–70, 71–72, 75, 151, 179, 244–45 Singapore, 148 Singh, Manmohan, 171–72 Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg), 179, 181 slash-and-burn agriculture, 148 slavery, 35, 36, 37–38, 181 Sloman, Steven, 226 smartphones, 102, 111, 113, 168–69, 205, 235, 236 Smil, Vaclav, 31, 101 Smith, Adam, 125–39, 128–29 Smith, Noah, 191 smog, 42, 55, 186 Snow, John, 22–23 social capital, 212–13, 216–17, 228–29, 247, 254, 255, 270 social democracy, 133–34 social development, 24–25, 26 social development index, 60n social safety nets, 131–32 socialism, 132–38, 192 sodium nitrate, 17 solar power, 111, 240, 250, 269 Song, Jian, 93 Sørlle, Petter, 47 Soros, George, 132 South Korea, 117–18, 174 Soviet Union, 133, 163–64, 170–71 “Spaceship Earth”, 64–65 Staggers Act (1980), 109 Starmans, Christina, 210 steam engine, 16, 17, 27, 30, 36, 44, 48–49, 205, 206, 237 steamships, 17–18, 26 steel, 80 Steller, Georg Wilhelm, 273 Steller’s sea cow, 273 Stenner, Karen, 217 Sterba, Jim, 43–44 Stigler, George, 126 Strangers in Their Own Land (Hochschild), 221 Suicide (Durkheim), 215–16, 219 sulfur dioxide, 54–55, 95, 186, 249 Sullivan, Andrew, 219 Summers, Larry, 254 sustainability, 64 taxation, 5, 130, 250 tech progress, 2–3, 4, 36, 67, 99–123, 113, 141, 151, 158–59, 167–68, 169–70 defining of, 114–15 Tesla, Nikola, 27 Texas, Hill Country of, 29, 205 Thatcher, Margaret, 132, 138 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 129 Thomas, Chris, 182–83 3-D printing, 239 tin, 72 tin cans, 101 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 89–90, 212–13 Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), 66 tragedy of the commons, 183 transportation, 241–42 Trump, Donald, 158, 201 trust, 212, 213, 217 Truth About Soviet Whaling, The (Berzin), 164 Ulam, Stanislaw, 19n Ultimate Resource, The (Simon), 69, 179 unfairness, 210, 220–24 Union Oil, 54 United Airlines, 257 United Kingdom, 76, 85 United Nations, 40, 58, 199 United States, 117–18 agriculture in, 81–82, 100 coal consumption in, 102–03 cropland acreage in, 201–02 dematerialization in, 76–85 industrial production in, 88–89 mortality rates in, 213–14 slavery in, 37–38 suicide rate in, 214–16 water pollution in, 189–90 urbanization, 91–92, 199–200 Utopia or Oblivion (Fuller), 70 vaccination, 227 Van Reenen, John, 203, 204, 207 Varian, Hal, 236 Veblen goods, 152–53 Veblen, Thorstein, 152 Venezuela, 118, 134–38, 172 voluntary exchange, 117 wages, 20–21 Waggoner, Paul, 76 Wagner, Stephan, 148 Wald, George, 61 water, drinking, 194 water pollution, 189–90 Watt, James, 15–16, 20, 121, 206, 237 Watt, Kenneth, 58 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 127, 131 Weeks-McLean Law Act (1913), 96 Welzel, Christian, 176, 177 Wernick, Iddo, 76 whales, 44, 46–47, 163–65 wheat, 31–32 Wheelwright, William, 17–18 Whole Earth Catalog, 68 Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson), 159 Wilson, James, 19n wind power, 111, 240, 250 Winship, Scott, 215 Wolff, Edward, 206 Woodbury, N.J., 65 wooly mammoth, 180 World Bank, 118, 168, 169, 192 World Values Survey, 176 Yao Ming, 154, 161 Yellowstone National Park, 46, 153 YouTube, 236 Zoorob, Michael, 216 First published in the United States by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2019 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK, Ltd, 2019 A CBS COMPANY Copyright © 2019 by Andrew McAfee The right of Andrew McAfee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.


pages: 184 words: 46,395

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

Contentsx Praise for The Choice Factory Preface Introduction Bias 1: The Fundamental Attribution Error Bias 2: Social Proof Bias 3: Negative Social Proof Bias 4: Distinctiveness Bias 5: Habit Bias 6: The Pain of Payment Bias 7: The Danger of Claimed Data Bias 8: Mood Bias 9: Price Relativity Bias 10: Primacy Effect Bias 11: Expectancy Theory Bias 12: Confirmation Bias Bias 13: Overconfidence Bias 14: Wishful Seeing Bias 15: Media Context Bias 16: The Curse of Knowledge Bias 17: Goodhart’s Law Bias 18: The Pratfall Effect Bias 19: Winner’s Curse Bias 20: The Power of the Group Bias 21: Veblen Goods Bias 22: The Replicability Crisis Bias 23: Variability Bias 24: Cocktail Party Effect Bias 25: Scarcity Ethics Conclusion References Further reading Acknowledgements Index Praise for The Choice Factory “This book is a Haynes Manual for understanding consumer behaviour.

Furthermore, the cinema ad outperformed the same copy by 21% to 15% on the other metric monitored, “it’s the sort of ad that sticks in your mind”. Applying these approaches won’t transform a mediocre ad into a great one but it might just give it an edge over copy bought in a more generic manner. If transformation is what you’re after then the next chapter might be of interest. It’s all about the power of price… Bias 21: Veblen Goods How a high price can boost demand As it’s a colleague’s birthday one of your team has organised a surprise: a caterpillar cake and a few glasses of bubbly. The champagne hits the spot perfectly – cold, refreshing with a subtly sweet aftertaste. You drain your glass and head to the kitchen for a little more.

, by Evan Davis, John Kay, and Jonathan Star [London Business School Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 1–23, 1991] Marketers Are from Mars, Consumers Are from New Jersey by Bob Hoffman [2015] Bias 16: The curse of knowledge Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath [2008] The Wiki Man by Rory Sutherland [2011] Bias 17: Goodhart’s law Long and Short of It: Balancing Short- and Long-Term Marketing Strategies by Les Binet and Peter Field [2012] Management in 10 Words by Terry Leahy [2012] Leading by Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz [2015] Bias 18: The pratfall effect: Social Animal by Elliot Aronson [1972] The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks [1984] Bias 19: Winner’s curse The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life by Richard Thaler [1991] Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant [2016] ‘Harnessing naturally occurring data to measure the response of spending to income’, by Michael Gelman, Shachar Kariv, Matthew Shapiro, Dan Silverman, Steven Tadelis [Science, Vol. 345, No. 6193, pp. 212–215, 2014] ‘The Psychology of Windfall Gains’, by Hal Arkes, Cynthia Joyner, Mark Pezzo, Jane Gradwohl Nash, Karen Siegel-Jacobs, Eric Stone Eric [Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 331–347, 1994] On the Fungibility of Spending and Earnings – Evidence from Rural China and Tanzania by Luc Christiaensen and Lei Pan [2012] Bias 20: The power of the group ‘Humour in Television Advertising: The Effects of Repetition and Social Setting’, by Yong Zhang and George Zinkhan [Advances In Consumer Research, Vol. 18, pp. 813–818, 1991] ‘Feeling More Together: Group Attention Intensifies Emotion’, by Garriy Shteynberg, Jacob Hirsh, Evan Apfelbaum, Jeff Larsen, Adam Galinsky, and Neal Roese [Emotion, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 1102–1114, 2014] Bias 21: Veblen goods ‘Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy’, by Rebecca Waber, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon; Dan Ariely [Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 299, No.9, pp. 1016–1017, 2008] Bias 22: The replicability crisis ‘Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions’, by Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg, and John Jones [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 82, No. 4, pp. 469–487, 2002] ‘Rich the banker?


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

In identifying the man who misses what matters in life by questing after ‘trinkets of frivolous utility’, Smith shows his awareness that markets can be driven by human passions as well as by human calculation. Today we might describe some such items as ‘Veblen goods’. Named after the great Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen, Veblen goods are those of ‘conspicuous consumption’, for which demand does not lessen when the price rises, as the standard theory would predict. Instead, demand for the good increases, as consumers see the price rise as a signal of relative scarcity or status, making the good still more desirable.

The result is that, notwithstanding a handful of mavericks, few wish to be seen as unusual or apart from the others. The behaviour of these markets is often dominated by ‘momentum’ investors, who trade based not on any estimate of fundamental or intrinsic value, but on the rate of rise or fall in the asset’s price. As with Veblen goods, high share prices come to be seen as a mark of underlying value, and rapid or extended price rises as signals of lack of supply, stimulating demand and causing investors to crowd in. Conversely, price falls are read as signals of over-supply, causing investors to sell heavily in turn. But these rises and falls can also occur in apparently autonomous ways, as investors simply cue their behaviour off each other, rather than for any more fundamental reasons.

I am very grateful to Tim Besley for this point; see especially his ‘The New Political Economy’, Economic Journal, 117.524, 2007. See also Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics, Princeton University Press 2007 Wisdom of crowds: cf. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday Books 2004 Veblen goods: see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, Macmillan 1899. In his essay on the imitative arts (in EPS) Smith memorably analyses the phenomenon of topiary in Veblenian terms: ‘It was some years ago the fashion to ornament a garden with yew and holly trees, clipped into the artificial shapes of pyramids, and columns, and vases, and obelisks.


pages: 112 words: 30,160

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Today, the condition of being around a lot of other people adds to metropolitan expense via congestion, and the cost of competition for scarce public and private resources (the parks are crowded, and the best shows sell out quickly). What could possibly make city life worth the expense? Maybe it’s all for show. It could be that cities are what economists call Veblen goods, after economist Thorstein Veblen. A Veblen good has an unusual property -- as its price rises, demand for it also rises. Why? Because it functions as a status symbol. Wealthy Americans could choose to pay high prices for city life because city life is like a Rolex watch or a $10,000 bottle of wine: it shows that you've got money.


pages: 256 words: 76,433

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

Women’s Wear Daily also reported that cheap-fashion prices are not pulling down designer price tags but driving them up: Consumers are shopping at the high-end specifically to “max out their Visas.”21 They are using clothes as a type of competitive consumption. In economics, there is a principal known as “Veblen goods.” These are the products we desire more the higher their prices go because we hope this will show other people that we have wealth and status. Clothing is very sensitive to this effect since it deals directly with personal expression and ego. We see it as an extension of ourselves, and it is the most visible way we can strut our stuff.

., 129–30, 133 Trebay, Guy, 110 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 44, 142–43 Trovata, 109 Tucker, 114 Ullman, Myron, 95–96 Umbro, 40, 148, 181 Uniform Project, 191 unions, 38, 44, 48, 51, 140–44, 154, 155, 163 UNIQLO, 2, 33, 70 UNIS, 60 UNITE HERE, 48 Universal Studios, 40 Urban Outfitters, 13, 43, 60–61, 73, 204, 205 USA Today, 202 Usigan, Ysolt, 71 Valentino, 62, 63 Van Meter, Jonathan, 17, 19 Variety, 31 Varsity, 148 Veblen goods, 77 Versace, 6 Very Sweet Life, 187–88 Very Sweet Life, 190 VF, 181 Victoria’s Secret, 189 videos, YouTube, 12, 13–15, 122 Vietnam, 165, 180 vintage clothing, 133–34, 135, 201–2, 204 designs copied from, 112–13, 120 refashioning of, 134, 200–202, 206 Vogue, 17, 22, 30, 31, 34, 64, 65, 114, 171 Vogue.com, 113 von Furstenberg, Diane, 62, 110, 171 Wagner, Robert, 143 Wagner, Stacy, 158 Wall Street Journal, 43, 92, 93, 95 Walmart, 2, 12, 13, 15, 18, 23, 24, 26–27, 30, 31, 70, 95, 96, 100, 131, 144, 181 factories and, 144–48, 151, 159 Walton, Sam, 95 Wanamaker’s, 1 Ward, Andy, 36–38, 41, 43, 45, 52, 53, 142, 214 Warner Brothers, 148 Washington Monthly, 53, 148 Washington Post, 132, 185 well-spent.com, 60 What’s in a Dress?


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Snob and bandwagon goods are not of course mutually exclusive: many snob goods mutate into bandwagon goods, leading to their abandonment by true snobs. This perpetual circle is familiar from the worlds of art and fashion. Overlapping with both snob and bandwagon goods are “Veblen goods,” so called in honor of the great American theorist of conspicuous consumption, Thorstein Veblen. Veblen goods are desired insofar as they are expensive and known to be expensive; they function, in effect, as advertisements of wealth. In the still hierarchical world of business, whether one travels first, business or economy class signals one’s rank in the company.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

In a caustic but perceptive jibe, the Norwegian-born economist Thorstein Veblen, best known for his critique of conspicuous consumption, remarked that ‘beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty’. Hence, the coinage in economics of the term ‘Veblen goods’, which refers to commodities of which people will buy more when the price goes up because this confers increased status, whereas higher prices more normally choke off demand. Or, in the language of the thought-provoking British economist Fred Hirsch, many works of art such as Old Masters are ‘positional’ goods.

P. 1 Times/Sotheby Art Indices 1 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare) 1 Titian 1 toads (see Madame Nui’s toad) Tocqueville, Alexis de 1 ‘too big/interconnected to fail’ syndrome 1 Toyoda, Sakichi 1 transmutation of base metal into gold 1 Trichet, Jean-Claude 1 trickledown theory 1, 2 Trollope, Anthony 1, 2, 3 tulip mania 1, 2, 3 Turner, Adair 1 two-tier capital structures 1 UBS 1 UK debt 1 entrepreneurs 1, 2 financial services 1 gold standard 1, 2 inequality 1, 2, 3 manufacturing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 regulation 1, 2 speculation 1 taxation 1 Unto This Last (John Ruskin) 1 US 1 banks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bretton Woods Conference 1 debt 1, 2, 3, 4 dependence on China 1, 2 financial services 1 gold standard 1 inequality 1, 2, 3 literature 1 manufacturing 1, 2, 3 regulation 1 robber barons 1 speculation 1, 2, 3 taxation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 trade 1 usury laws 1, 2 Utopia (Thomas More) 1, 2 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 1 Vasari 1 Vayanos, Dimitri 1 Veblen goods 1 Venttsel, Elena 1 Vermeer, Jan 1 Vickers Commission (UK) 1 Vico, Gianbattista 1 Victoria, UK Queen 1 Vinik, Jeffrey 1 Volcker, Paul 1, 2, 3 Volcker rule 1 Voltaire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Wagner, Richard 1, 2, 3 Wall Street (film) 1 Wall Street Crash (see crash of 1929) war 1 Warhol, Andy 1, 2, 3, 4 Watt, James 1 Way We Live Now, The (Anthony Trollope) 1, 2 Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) 1, 2, 3 Webb, Beatrice 1 Weber, Max 1 Wedgwood, Josiah 1 Weinstock, Arnold 1 Westinghouse, George 1 Wheatcroft, Geoffrey 1 Wheen, Francis 1 White, Harry Dexter 1 Whitney, Richard 1, 2, 3 Wilde, Oscar 1 Wilson, A.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

I am ashamed now to think that I had no idea of how I was going to earn that money or how I wanted to live, other than driving around in an absurd car, but I was no different from some of the young people I come across today – money as the presumed answer to life. The trouble is that money remains the one thing of which, it seems, you can never have enough, as the escalating (and surely unnecessary) rewards of senior executives seem to prove. Even when you have met all your needs and wants there are always the Veblen goods, so called after Thorstein Veblen’s theory of comparative goods, those aspects of conspicuous expenditure that are effectively rationed, like the membership of elite clubs, the ownership of property in an exclusive zone, or being in the top ten of some league table of corporate pay. Money is also, for some, a scorecard, unrelated to anything it can buy except a place on the Forbes List of billionaires.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

This idea can be expanded to behaviour: think of things that we don’t need to do – things that, in a narrow rational framework, aren’t the most efficient actions to take – but that reveal something about our character to others. The more public the behaviour, the more powerful the signal.18 Trains and planes enable costly signalling by selling premium tickets – these are Veblen goods. Now we can entertain the idea that public transport can be comfortable and indulgent: bigger seats and tables show social status during and after the journey (a fact enhanced by social media). A cunning innervation is already in place to harness signalling as a way to increase the status of the electric car as a signal that the driver cares for the environment.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

I am not giving general introductions to these figures but focusing specifically on what they had to say about (and how they used) notions of waste and general economy, and more narrowly, what they said about the nature of money in relation to these notions. By addressing money from the perspective of waste, I am inverting its more customary textbook treatment as a function of utility. This is a familiar theme in the study of consumption: luxury objects express the capacity of their owners to waste what they have, and the “Veblen good” is more coveted the higher its price goes. As Veblen describes it in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the capacity to indulge in wasteful expenditure—and to make others use up their productive time catering to one’s luxurious tastes—is a key marker of distinction (Veblen 2009). Waste is a cultural symbol, in Veblen’s theory; indeed, one might refer to wasteful rather than conspicuous consumption (Varul 2006: 104–105).

See also conceptual utopia; realistic utopia; technical utopia; techno-utopia valorization, 73, 231n25, 242 valuation, 28–29, 40, 160, 215, 272, 295, 305, 302, 325, 326; and morality, 292; in Nietzsche, 137 value, 36; in Baudrillard, 189; in linguistics, 38–39; of money, 37, 41, 48; in Nietzsche, 137; versus price, 29; in Simmel, 27–29, 318, 325–26. See also nonpecuniary values valuns, 360 Vatican, 166 Veblen, Thorsten, 151; The Theory of the Leisure Class, 164 Veblen good, 164 Vedove Bianche (White Widows), 92 Velthius, Olav, 16–17, 293 Ven, 316 Vercellone, Carlo, 243 Vietnam War, 99, 298 violence, 47, 68; and debt, 91n, 100, 101; in de Sade, 169; and economics, 64; in the Eurozone, 261; and the financial crisis, 77n; generalized forms of, 225n16; and honor, 97; and mimesis, 43–45; and money, 43–46, 96, 250; and the sacred, 173; and the state, 96.


pages: 287 words: 80,050

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

In some cases, it just seems fantastically self-indulgent, as when Marie Antoinette had an entire village built purely in order for her to play at being a milkmaid, or when Michael Jackson had a private amusement park constructed on his estate. In others the extravagance seems to be motivated by a desire to flaunt one’s wealth: that, presumably, is the point of wearing a Rolex watch with diamond inlays and other such items known as “Veblen goods” (named after Thorstein Veblen, the economist who introduced the term “conspicuous consumption”), the main purpose of which is to demonstrate superior status. Sometimes the spending itself can be part of the display, as when some billionaires outbid all comers to secure an artwork they know little about or a star player for the soccer team they own.


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

However, the theory of sexual selection was a truly extraordinary, outside-the-box idea, and it still is; once you understand it, a whole host of behaviours that were previously baffling or seemingly irrational suddenly make perfect sense. The ideas that emerge from sexual selection theory explain not only natural anomalies such as the peacock’s tail, but also the popularity of many seemingly insane human behaviours and tastes, from the existence of Veblen goods* such as caviar, to more mundane absurdities such as the typewriter. For almost a century in which few men knew how to type, the typewriter must surely have damaged business productivity to an astounding degree, because it meant that every single communication in business or government had to be written twice: once in longhand by the originator and then again by the typist or typing pool.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

“The substantial diamond gift can be made a more widely sought symbol of personal and family success—an expression of socio-economic achievement,” said an N. W. Ayer report from the 1950s. Today 84 percent of American brides get a diamond engagement ring, at an average cost of $3,100. In 2008 Armin Heinrich, a software developer in Germany, created the ultimate Veblen good: he designed an application for the iPhone called I Am Rich. It did nothing but flash a glowing red gem on the screen. Its point was its expense: $999. Maybe stung by criticism over its banality, Apple removed it the day after its release. But before it could pull it, six people had bought it to prove that, indeed, they were.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

In 1899 Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he coined the term “conspicuous consumption”.110 Consumers bought goods to demonstrate their wealth and status, rather as a bower bird decorates its nest to attract a mate. The result is that some products are only worth having because of their exclusiveness. So-called Veblen goods are those where an increase in price will push up demand. There was always something snooty about the attitude of some commentators towards mass consumption. How dare the common people take pleasure from buying stuff? Indeed, it brings to mind the medieval sumptuary laws against buying clothes, which tried to prevent poorer people from wearing fabrics and colours that were favoured by the aristocracy.