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posted by FatPhil on Tuesday August 08 2017, @05:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the put-your-hand-over-your-mouth dept.

Conspicuous consumption persists today. But just as the patricians of classical times changed their habits once the masses gained the ability to copy them, so too have modern American elites recoiled from accumulating mere goods now that globalisation has made them affordable to the middle class. Instead, argues Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor at the University of Southern California, in "The Sum of Small Things", they have begun consuming the fruits of "conspicuous production": socially worthy things like fair-trade coffee. They also emphasise "inconspicuous consumption", of services like education. Far from making the world more egalitarian, this shift, in particular, threatens to entrench modern elites' privileged position more effectively than the habits of their predecessors ever did.

[...] Rather than filling garages with flashy cars, the data show, today's rich devote their budgets to less visible but more valuable ends. Chief among them is education for their children: the top 10% now allocate almost four times as much of their spending to school and university as they did in 1996, whereas for other groups the figure has hardly budged. They also invest heavily in domestic services such as housekeepers, freeing up time that the less fortunate must spend on chores.

Rather than frittering away that precious leisure time on frivolities, as Veblen's leisure class did, they devote it to enriching experiences, like attending the opera, holidaying in far-off lands and working out at fancy gyms. Their children, by tagging along and thus absorbing this "cultural capital", develop the sophistication needed to win admission to selective universities, vastly increasing the odds that they will form the next generation's elite.

The rich also throw lavish birthday parties for their dogs.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 08 2017, @03:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 08 2017, @03:29PM (#550622)

    This is nothing new.
    Look at what the Robber Barons and Monopolists ended up doing in the 19th Century.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:49AM (#550857)

    I'm pretty sure this is happening because on some level they know that what they have wasn't earned and are concerned about the angry villagers with pitchforks and torches coming to burn their houses down.

    This isn't the result of actual critical thinking or sense of conscience, this is purely a matter of the fact that if they keep front and center, they may well find out what a second American revolution is going to be like. And it's probably going to look a lot more like the French Revolution than 1776.