It might even be thought that, from the purely political point of view, extravagant ostentatious consumption is even desirable because it highlights the social divide and undermines the system that creates it. Leszek Kolakowski in Main Currents of Marxism summarizes it very nicely: ‘Bourgeois consumption in the face of workers’ poverty is a moral issue, not an economic one the distribution, once and for all, of rich men’s wealth among the poor world not solve anything or bring about any real change.” This is very different from Keynes’s view where apparent social equality is achieved through an act of concealment: becoming rich is acceptable, but not the use of riches for luxury.įor Marx (as for Mandeville-even if for different reasons), the way wealth is used is irrelevant. One can live a very modest life, use all of his money to invest or make charitable contributions but the vice of acquisition remains.Ī Marxist would also be indifferent to excessive wealth and its use by arguing that the problem does not lie in a person who has become so rich, but in the system that has allowed for such wealth through exploitation. Mandeville’s is therefore a much more fundamental critique: the vice remains regardless of the use to which one’s wealth is put. It has nothing to do with how the money is spent. The latter is the vice of greed it is “in-built” in the acquisition of wealth, in activities that people engage in order to become rich.
The vice that concerns John Adams is very different from the vice “diagnosed” by Mandeville. Consider the moral effect on the wealthy individuals first. They are critiques of consumption, but they do not go deeper, into the origin of wealth, that is into the production process. The second critique is concerned with the effects of wealth on people themselves who enjoy it, and perhaps secondarily on a society where the upper class becomes increasingly decadent, and separate from the rest.īoth are, in some ways, superficial critiques. It critiques a symptom of an economic system that allows for such behaviour, but does not deal with the appropriateness or justice of the system itself. The two critiques are different: the first is an instrumental critique: it is not a critique of the activity as such but of its social implications. that it provokes resentment and envy among those who cannot afford it, and a moral one, that it leads to personal decadence. In last week’s Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim, reviewing a new book on John Adams notes Adams’s concern with American elite’s accumulation of wealth and luxury consumption that might lead to the vices of indolence and decadence.ĭisplay of wealth is, by all these authors, and probably thousands more, criticized for two separate reasons: a social one, viz. (This is clearly impossible to implement today, but the idea that one needs to do something with excessive wealth underlines Rosenvallon’s concern). Recently I listened to Pierre Rosenvallon proposing the reintroduction of sumptuary laws that would not allow certain types of consumption. The same idea is present in Max Weber’s description of Protestantism: accumulation of wealth and austere living: “Wealth is …bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care” ( The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism). Keynes in his famous opening of The Economic Consequences of the Peace speaks of a social compact (although he does not use the term) that, according to him, existed between the rich and the rest before the World War I where the rich were “allowed” to amass huge wealth but on the assumption that they would use it for investments (and thus further growth), not for ostentatious consumption. Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images His newest book is “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World”Ĭross-posted from Branko’s blog Global Inequality Branko Milanović is an economist specialised in development and inequality. Is luxury consumption bad? Should it be limited? At the time of high inequality, and especially inequality driven by the very top of income distribution (1 percent and higher) these are legitimate questions.
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