Thorstein Veblen
Always Just Out of Reach
The line for enough moves with your income
The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), chapters 2 and 5
You earn more than you used to and the gap is exactly the same. Where does the line for enough come from?
What actually happened?
Veblen names no family in his book; what he draws is a ladder. The people on each rung admire and imitate those on the rung just above, and seldom compare themselves with anyone below. What the rung above lives like becomes what decency means one rung down. When the lower rung catches up, the line has already moved. The line always sits a little above where you have just stood. Nobody announced it, yet everyone feels it is there.
The standard is not the average
He wrote that the standard we spend towards is not what has already been achieved but "an ideal of consumption that lies just beyond our reach." Whatever we reach stops being the ideal.
On fifty thousand a year you eye the life of someone on eighty, not the national average.
The neighbour stings, the billionaire does not
He observed that each class envies and imitates the class next above it, and rarely measures itself against those far ahead. The very rich do not make you feel poor; the colleague with the new flat does.
A colleague buys a flat and you notice you have not; a billionaire buys an island and nobody minds.
A richer country does not fill it
His conclusion is harsher: however wealth is shared out, a general rise in a community's wealth cannot satisfy this need, because it is a contest for rank, not a quantity. A raise for everyone lifts everyone one rung.
Everyone in the firm gets a grade's raise and nobody feels better off than last year.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: your pay went up and the month-end is as tight as ever, and you suspect you are bad with money.
Ask first: whose life is it that I mean by enough? If you can name the person, the line is borrowed, not yours.
Where it goes wrong: hearing it as be content and stop striving. He describes how comparison is structured; he does not tell you not to earn more.
Lines to keep
The gap you feel is often someone else's lifestyle.
Everyone rises together and the ranking stays put.
Watching the neighbour costs more than watching the account.
Same situation, other people are asking
When people near me do well, something in me goes cold.Is he better than me, or just three years earlier?He's a step ahead of me on everything.Am I doing the work, or proving something?Someone is ahead of me · all 16 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.