What do you think of conspicuous consumption? If one day you struck it rich or won the lottery or something, would you go around buying all the crazy expensive stuff of your wildest dreams, or would you try to live modestly? Why do a lot of people think that conspicuous consumption is a bad thing? And what, if anything, is wrong with it?

I started thinking about this because on New Year's Day, Ngau and I visited some of his relatives - his really rich relatives who own a luxury condo complex and hotel. After dinner, they took us on a tour of their private wine cellar, and holy cow. I felt like I was watching a parody of Stuff Rich People Like, like something Stephen Colbert might make up to make fun of Mitt Romney. They renovated the cellar to look like a French winery with stucco arches, and heavy wooden farmhouse furniture, and artwork on the walls. (This was in the basement of a concrete and steel high rise hotel, by the way.) They had bottles of wine that were 200 years old, bottles of wine rescued from a shipwreck, bottles of wine that cost $100,000 each, which is nearly double my life savings. They had a whole climate controlled room just for Cuban cigars, some of which were 100 years old, and just as expensive as the wine. If they so chose, they could literally smoke tens of thousands of dollars in one go. I left feeling halfway between awestruck and appalled. I mean, I can't think of anything that's actually wrong with it, ethically speaking, but all the same, I found it insane.

How would you play it if you had that kind of cash, Kea? I'm curious, since you asked. I assume you wouldn't be spending it on rare wine and cigars.

I think the problem is the type of conspicuous consumption to fulfill personal desires. Rare wine and cigars indeed annoys me, because I consider it so wasteful. It's like spending money on the most expensive sundae - once you reach a certain level of taste, the food, wine and cigars aren't going to taste any better if they were $100 or $100,000. The only thing changing the flavor is the money. You might as well roll up a few thousand dollar bills and smoke them. The whole point of spending that much money on consumables is to prove you can, which seems like a bunch of wankery.

However, when I hear about a guy dropping 20 million to see the space station or read about Jackie Chan's giant house filled with secret passageways of his own design, I think "cool!" This stuff not only gives the wealthy spenders pleasure, but it seems less about showing off wealth and more about fulfilling a fun dream. They're still spending more money than most people will see in a lifetime, but for some reason it feels less selfish.

If I hit it big, yes, I'd buy a bunch of stuff to fulfill my wildest dreams. Most of my dreams that aren't achievement-based involve tons and tons of travel, so that's where a lot of the fun money would go. But I'd do all that after making sure my family was set - no more mortgages, trust funds for the nieces' and nephews' educations, IRAs for the parents, that sort of thing. And I'd love to set up a scholarship trust and a grant trust for charitable foundations. I've actually written down what I'd spend all the money on in my journal, so that if lightening strikes and I did become stupid wealthy, I wouldn't blow it all on something I at this moment consider stupid.

I also think it makes a big difference, if the spending comes of as showing your wealth, or buying something that is expensive, but even if every yokel could afford it, you'd still buy it because you want it for itself, not for status.

I can understand the architectural part of the wine cellar, even if it is not my taste, though propably the way they present it might shift my perception towards showoffs. I can understand wanting to try out some special expensive wines, like really old wine. I can understand to develop a fondness for a specific type of expensive wine and that you start buying it, because hey you can afford it. But it seems from your description, that this is not a collection, that happens to include some expensive things, but a collection of expensive things and that implies showoffs.

What would i do with a lot of money. There is propoably a couple of things i would by, but it would be my current lifestyle with some luxury items attached to it, not a different lifestyle. And quite likely i would by less then i assume. It would be kinda typical for me to decide i buy a car, then start researching various cars that i find out what car i really want, then get frustrated by how much time and effort that research is, decide to rather spend the money for the car for going by taxi often, and then in most cases use public transport anyway out of habit. I am on a small scale in such a situation now, because both of my upbringing and during the time i was studying and could not afford my own apartment and was saving for one, i developed some frugality habits. Now i have a job since roughly 10 years and i got my apartment shortly afterwards, and my spending habits have not really cought up. And i have the problem, that i really don't like to make a purchase without being informed about the product and it's alternatives, even for small things, and that i don't have enough time, to do all that research.

A long time ago, we had a thread asking how posters would spend $1 billion. Until I reread it just now, I had forgotten how I had said I would allocate the money. What I remembered was that I had thought it would be easy to decide how to fritter away $1 billion, since you don't have to exercise restraint like if you had to decide how to spend a small amount. It turns out that I found it extremely difficult to decide how to spend that ridiculous sum. I did all the boring, responsible things first, then got increasingly brazen as I kept finding that I still had enormous amounts of fake money left. At the end I felt I was spending the imaginary cash like an aircraft carrier full of drunken sailors, but I was still having trouble getting rid of it.

What this taught me is that when it comes to spending money, Congress and I aren't even on the same planet. Conspicuous consumption just isn't really in my nature. Even inconspicuous consumption didn't come easy. Heck, I have a hard time putting together a decent Amazon.com wishlist. If I had $1 billion, sure, I would probably get a nicer house and a nicer car, but not that much nicer. I don't make six figures, but I still have everything I need and most things I want.

If I won the lottery and had a gigantic sum of money to spend, odds are I'd buy myself a nice house, maybe a manor, and then reinforce it til it's a stronghold capable of withstanding the zombie apocalypse. Not because I know it will happen (it will eventually), but because I've always been a moderately paranoid sort. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't feel safe carrying twenty dollars in a Wal-Mart. If I had that much money and people knew about it I'd certainly spend some of it take certain safety steps.

Looking past that, I'd probably make efforts to invest the money. Slice off a sizable chunk of the money (ten percent of it) and use it to play the stock market. Take another chunk of the money (forty percent) and use it to invest in some of the business ideas I've always had knocking around inside my empty noggin. Once that's said and done, I'd take the remainder of the money (about fifty percent), stick it into a savings account and sit on it like the worlds most expensive chair. I might use it to buy some expensive things now and then, but for the most part I'd keep it on standby in case my stock crashes and my businesses fail and I'm not making anymore money that way anymore.

Maybe this speaks to a poverty of imagination, but I think that even if I became absurdly rich, I would not spend extravagantly on anything. I'd buy a condo, set aside enough for my parents' retirement (although I think they have themselves covered), set aside enough for my own retirement (because I won't have any children to take care of me), give a chunk to my brother, build my parrots an awesome aviary, and then continue living pretty much the way I always have done. I might wear slightly nicer clothes and eat slightly better food and go on vacation slightly more often. But after that, I dunno. I think I'd start looking for ways to give my money away. Because I don't actually want stuff. I had a pretty cushy childhood with all the stuff I ever wanted. It's not a big deal.

I'd give a chunk to the Kakapo recovery programme in New Zealand. I'd find a charity that does rainforest conservation and donate a chunk to them. I'd buy up a whole bunch of old factory buildings (like the ones Jackie Chan built his secret mansion in) and convert them into a mixed-use neighbourhood with a sizeable low-income housing component and a lot of artists' studios. And I'd only make it just profitable enough to break even, thereby revitalizing the area without building a bunch of monstrous 50 story tower blocks on top of a giant shopping mall.

Pay off all my debts, take what's left, pay off any of my family's debts, then give the rest to my father to play the stock market. A) I trust him with that much money, and B) in his hands, I guarantee he'll turn a profit with it. In return, give myself a stipend of it to live comfortably off of it as long as I can while I continue education - either go for a doctorate or pursue a degree in something else. I find that I really do enjoy learning, and ideally I'd far prefer to stay in college and continue with another degree if I could.

A couple of years ago I'd probably have bought a big house and a bunch of stuff to fill it with. Now I'd look at investing my money for interest, travelling and investing some money in the local arts.

As soon as I start looking at charities any amount if money bleeds away. They need so much.

I completely agree with you. There can't be any wine on earth that tastes so good that it justifies a cost of $100,000. It costs that much so that people can brag about the fact they own it, which is total wankery. However, I can't actually put my finger on any reason why wankery is ethically wrong. Crass, yeah. Stupid, yeah. But wrong? Not that I can think of. Can you?

In a sports competition, if the winner goes "I am so much better then you" towards the looser, that is a breach of etikette. You have to show a certain amount of restraint in and after competitions.

Not doing so is mainly childish, but if that behaviour would be tolerated, it would flare up tempers and competions would become more vicious. So keeping your decorum and keeping the rituals is important for long time effects.

If you brag about your money, it implies that you see making money as a competition. And i also don't know any ritual way, to show respect to the competitors, you have won against, while showing off your wealth. And everybody has some financial needs, so everybody is somehow in the competition, even if they aren't really competitive about money themselfs.

So i would regard it as bad manners. Ethical implications of bad manners would depend on, if your manners are bad because you are socially clumsy, if you don't regard some people as important enough to be polite to them, if you do it as provication to make some point, or whatever other reasons you have for it.

My conspicuous consumption would probably lean toward my horse riding. I miss it and I want to get back into it once I have the money, but I'm too practical to jump to personal spending. Debts and house repairs come first and then setting aside money to keep us comfortable for the rest of our lives. Once we have that, nicer cars and luxury hobbies can come into play.

On the one hand, I strongly believe that a person has the right to do whatever he or she wants with whatever money he or she staggers home with after the government is through with them. On the other hand, I also believe that a person is morally obligated to be a good steward with what he or she is given, and to do what they reasonably can to benefit their fellow humans. Spending ridiculous amounts of money on stuff just to brag that they can is extremely wasteful when you think of all the good that money (which they can clearly afford to throw away) could do.

So when it comes down to it, I'd look at it like adultery. There's no law against it, so you are within your rights to do it if you want, but that doesn't make it any less morally reprehensible.

I agree with arcosh that part of it may be an etiquette issue. It's not nice to brag.

I also agree with AT that it feels like a moral issue in the sense that you're throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars away on wine you'll likely never drink just to say you have the wine when there are millions of people who can't scrape together enough cash to eat even once every day. It's a waste of money just to waste money.

However, it's hard to point at that $100,000 bottle of wine and not point at the smartphone I just bought - my very first - to replace the brick pay-as-you-go phone I've had for four years for no other reason than I wanted better internet capabilities in my hand. The brick was perfectly functional, but I wanted the smartphone more because it was shinier. The money I spent could probably have gone to a program to get internet or computers for people who have none.

Money is a strange, strange thing and the morality of it is hazy. Since civilization began, there have always been people eating lark tongues while other people starve in the streets. I guess that's what we get from switching from a hunter/gatherer bartering culture to an agrarian monetary culture.

I would buy a castle or a private island, or a castle on a private island. This would not be to show off (ok maybe to some friends), but it is because I always have wanted both. After that? I would try to invest as much into sustainable business assets to keep me in a comfortable living situation. Mostly after that I would want the sustainable income to be able to do things that I want instead of doing things that I felt that I had to do.

Well, it's not as if rich people are parading down the street shouting "I own crazy expensive stuff!" to everybody in sight. Most people wouldn't even know that said rich person has several million dollars worth of alcohol in his basement. Rich people mostly care about showing off to other rich people, which I guess makes it a mutual wankfest, but that's not the same as rubbing their money in regular people's faces.


Money spent on useless brag items doesn't get thrown down a hole, never to be seen again. It circulates into the economy, it becomes other people's income.