Prologue: The Question
I did expect to spend a Tuesday afternoon asking myself whether the most basic biological drive in the human animal—the one responsible for every single person reading this sentence being alive—qualifies as a luxury. A luxury is supposed to be a private jet. A handbag made from the skin of an animal that went extinct last Tuesday. A bottle of water that...
For much of the 20th century, the grammar of status was written in leather, steel, and silk. The luxury watch on a wrist, the handbag dangling from an arm, the supercar idling outside a private club—these were the unmistakable semaphores of wealth and social standing. Thorstein Veblen, the great sociologist of the Gilded Age, termed this "conspicuous consumption": the public destruction...
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