Thorstein Veblen tells us how elites display their superiority by showing off their cultivated taste and skill, which in turn displays their economic power, and ultimately their capacity for violence. Veblen was very upset by this. But you don’t have to be.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: Hello, welcome to The Students. I’m Wolf Tivy. This is another episode of “Doing the Reading.” Joined again by my colleague, Ben Landau-Taylor, here. We’re going to talk about Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class,” which is a very important text laying the foundations of ideas like, that you may have heard, such as conspicuous consumption, and other connected ideas.
Basically, why and how do wealthy people, and even non-wealthy people, engage in various forms of consumption, essentially as a signaling mechanism. It’s a very important text in social science, and so we wanted to discuss that one. So Ben has done the reading here. He’s read the book more recently than I have. I read it some years ago.
I found it very fascinating. It’s actually a really interesting book. So Ben, welcome back on. Thank you for coming and let’s begin the discussion of Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class.”
Ben: Yeah. Thank you. Good to be back. So this book was written in 1899, so right at the turn of the century. And yeah, it’s been a very influential, one of the most important works of the sociology of our elite class in our society.
And obviously, the culture has changed since 1899.
Wolf: A lot of things have changed.
Ben: And what’s interesting when I was reading this book is noticing how a lot of the specific ways that the leisure class expresses itself and the specific forms of leisure have changed a lot. The ideas around the ideology justifying it has changed a lot, but the same dynamics of what they’re actually doing and how it works in the larger society seem to be basically the same. So, what I want to do here, basically, I think there’s three big concepts that I take to be the most important things that he’s describing as these theoretical mechanisms. You mentioned conspicuous consumption. That’s definitely one of them, although it’s not really the heart of the book.
It’s not the theory of the consumption class, right?
Wolf: Right. No, I bring it up as obviously the term that I think most people have heard—that’s originated by Veblen.
Ben: Yes. It’s the one that absolutely became the really famous one, the one that was most used sort of in terraforming the culture in kind of the way that Veblen wanted when he was writing this book. One of the interesting things about social science is that by describing something, you end up changing it.
Wolf: Yeah, and you know you’re doing that, and he knew he had certain things in mind.
Ben: Yes. He definitely has his axes to grind in this book. He makes no attempt to hide it. He’s very open.
Wolf: Yeah, actually this is one of the interesting things I found about the book. So Thorstein Veblen, I think, what is he Swedish or Norwegian?
Ben: I think he was—
Wolf: Norwegian. I think so
Ben: a Norwegian. Yeah, so he was living in America. I think his ancestry was Norwegian.
Wolf: Yes, he was a Norwegian. I think he might’ve even been first generation, but immigrant into America and he’s very much the downtrodden, poor, kind of resentful guy. This is the impression I’m getting from him. He’s got an air of resentment towards the WASP ruling class, and he really dislikes them.
Ben: Yeah, throughout the book, he keeps dropping all of these Latin phrases and in one of the later chapters, he goes on this rant about how they force you to learn Latin even though it has no value, just to show that you’re—of the right class. After having demonstrated, “I can do the thing” also like, “Screw you guys for making me do that.”
Wolf: Yeah. Oh, yeah. So he’s definitely really mad. This is one of the impressions I came away with. On the other hand, the interesting thing is his analysis is good enough that you, the reader, don’t have to be mad about it.
You can also just read it and be like, “Wow, this is a great guide for what it means to be classy.”
Ben: Yes. And you don’t want to absorb his resentment because that’s just—
Wolf: Pointless
Ben: not good for anybody. But he has a lot of very, very good insights which are well worth taking into your own understanding of the world.
Wolf: Yeah. So why don’t you start us off? Where does the argument start? Where does he go with it?
The structural purpose of leisure (04:40)
Ben: Yeah. So first, let’s talk about what does he mean by leisure? When he talks about leisure, he does not mean watching TikTok, playing video games, listening to true crime podcasts. That’s not what he’s talking about here.
Wolf: Right. He’s not even necessarily talking about polo, which is maybe a more time—
Ben: He is talking about polo. We’ll get into that.
Wolf: But I guess more fundamentally, what is the social process he’s getting at? It’s not about the particular things—that were in his time, even.
Ben: Right. But the general thing is that there is this distinction that people make. He calls it invidious distinctions, which is things that tend towards producing envy. But what he’s really getting at, if we want to—get rid of the fancy words, is there’s a distinction between what is honorable and what is lowly. And there are people who are higher, more elevated, who are in a social position that people are like, “Yeah, that’s the good thing.”
And there are people who are the masses. And this is a way of expressing that one is part of the more elevated, the more honorable—
Wolf: Yeah. The elevated class. Yeah.
Ben: And so leisure is, to a large degree, a performance—of proving that you are the sort of person who doesn’t have to have anything to do with manual labor. The core thing about being part of the masses, about being base, is manual labor. And the closer you are to that, the worse it is for your social position. And nearly everybody has this intuition. Even the people like, Rudyard Kipling is someone who, in many ways, really idolizes the raw production, but even he has this sense that it’s the sort of this base on which all this other stuff is built.
And he’s like—we should honor these people who make all of this stuff possible. You’ve probably read “The Sons of Martha,” is a poem of his which—is all about how we make all of this highfalutin philosophy stuff possible by forging the iron and stuff. But even the people who really philosophically admire it share this sort of fundamental sense that this is base and that there is this other honorable thing.
Wolf: Yeah. The thing that actually is valuable is the thing somehow built on top of that.
Ben: Right. And that is the perspective from the most engineering production maximalists—which is something I share myself, but most people are just like, “No, that’s icky. I don’t want it on me.” And so you want to—
Wolf: Well, one of the interesting things that Veblen does is I think he gives a great grounding of that intuition, like where does that come from? And in the first few chapters, what I remember is that his argument starts out in very primitive, barbarous conditions and primitive societies where first of all, everyone has to do production, but then there’s this distinction introduced by violence, which is that some people can force other people to do their production for them. And this is the nucleus of the leisure class, of social hierarchy, of leisure is sort of people demonstrating not just wanting the luxuries for their own sake, but actually demonstrating that they have the capacity for violence. That leisure at its base is a demonstration of capacity for violence. So that’s just something that I found interesting and unique in his work, is that the leisure, the sort of social semantics of it trace back to you are demonstrating your dominance over others—in ultimately a violent way.
You are able to extract labor and wealth from other people without having to do anything productive yourself, which demonstrates that you have violent power in society. And that’s where he grounds it all. I found that very interesting as the beginning of his argument.
Ben: Yes. And I’m not sold on every step of the history of primitive man that he tells. But the basic idea that this comes from the violent extractive power is, I think, basically correct.
Wolf: Yeah. I also found the particular derivation questionable at points, but I found the core insight very interesting.
Ben: But it’s 1899. Everyone starts with what they ima—all of the social scientists at the time, you would start with what you imagine the state of nature and then tell a story of like—it was just kind of the style at the time.
Wolf: We still do this now. It’s just different sort of hoops that we jump through.
Ben: Yes. Yes. So that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about leisure. The idea is, he uses the analogy, for production, you have at the end of it some object. For leisure, the point is to not produce an object, but to produce a change in yourself—that is visible to others, that people can look at you, and it’s like they’re not auditing every minute of your day to make sure you’re not doing labor.
But if you do particular types of leisure, which is like despite being called leisure, it’s often very effortful—and takes a ton of your time and energy. Precisely because people who have to do the manual labor can’t put in that type of time and energy in order to—become a sort of person who you can look at them and just interact with them for three minutes and being like, “Oh, I see what-”
Wolf: “I see. This guy is high class.” “He has power in society. I have to defer to this guy.”
Ben: Right. And I’m sure we’ve all been on both ends of—having felt that out and being like, “Who is this guy? He’s too many clicks below me. He’s so far above me.” It’s very perceptible.
Wolf: Yes, it is very perceptible. Yeah.
Ben: And so with this concept of leisure, there’s three, what I take to be the most important, most useful for me, concepts that he builds out of this. So conspicuous consumption, of course, that’s the really famous one, which everyone has heard of. Most of our viewers are probably familiar with it, but—
Wolf: Yeah. And the basic argument there is you’re demonstrating your power and your leisure capacity by basically consuming things and experiences that other people are not able to. It’s like—okay, I’ve got my Ferrari, I’ve got my polo field, I’ve got my big house. This demonstrates that I have means, and that you don’t.
Ben: Right. And is the Ferrari important because it’s a much, much, much better car than the Honda Civic? Not really. It can go faster, but—the main point is that it’s very expensive.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, so the interesting thing is because he’s mad, he sort of doesn’t give as much credit, I think, to the internal experience of leisure. I think there is a lot of senses in which you’d rather have a Ferrari than a Civic, if you had room for that in your life, and not just because what it says to other people. It’s a more interesting experience. It’s fun.
It’s like from a technical perspective, it’s more interesting, right? There’s a bunch of things, and a lot of this, what he traces this back to socially is like, okay, these cultivated tastes in these things derive their value ultimately from their signaling of your superior social power or whatever. But internally, there’s also this sense, I think the way people actually experience it is that you internally get this sense of matters of higher taste. Where there actually are these things that you value, essentially, and that you value above the base utility of things. And this is maybe actually a crucial aspect of society.
The core spiritual life of society, the social life of society, the basis of the social hierarchy is often in these, let’s say, intangible values that are maintained by this leisure class. And so that’s the interior perspective of, I think the people engaging in that kind of consumption is, well, someone has to hold up this taste, or this is actually interesting and I want to sponsor this kind of work in the world, and there’s a certain social utility to that. Now, he doesn’t dwell on that. I’m just adding this as something that I think is an important thing to keep in mind.
Ben: Yes. And he is very much at war with the sort of canons of taste of his day. Which, well, we’ll get into that later, but to stick with the core concepts of it. So yeah, conspicuous consumption is a pretty familiar idea. Interestingly, in large part because it’s sort of the least revolutionary of them, and his phrasing of it was often used as a way of attacking those older values in pretty much the way—he was hoping for.
The macroeconomics of respectability: Conspicuous leisure and vicarious leisure (14:05)
Ben: But he sees conspicuous consumption as a sort of not the big load-bearing thing, where the big load-bearing thing, as you might expect from the theory of the leisure class, is conspicuous leisure. Which is, in the similar way that conspicuous consumption is about consumption, which has a large purpose of demonstrating that you are consuming the thing. Conspicuous leisure is leisure where a big purpose of it is demonstrating that you are doing the leisure.
Wolf: Yeah. Or demonstrating that you’ve lived a life such that you’ve actually made an enormous investment in cultivating a certain type of taste, or that you are capable of having certain kinds of insistences in how you do things.
Ben: Right. So, when you have the person who has... sort of level one conspicuous leisure is look at all of my TikTok photographs of me going scuba diving. And then level two is when you’re like, “Oh, I know which European cities are cool and which ones are just overrun with tourists.” And as you get the sort of more refined taste through more engagement—with the object of the conspicuous leisure.
Wolf: Yeah. And a lot of it is the portability of that taste, I guess, is an important aspect. You can go to a party in San Francisco and having detailed opinions about which cities are cool in Europe is this demonstrable symbol of having engaged in a life of conspicuous leisure, right? It’s like, oh, you have had slack in your life to go and visit all these cities, engage in the scene there, and come to opinions on that. So within three minutes, in a context totally divorced from that, you could demonstrate having done this leisurely process.
Similarly, like a wine snob or a food snob, at dinner, you can kind of demonstrate through your manners, through your appreciation of the food and so on, you could demonstrate, oh, I have engaged in a large amount of expensive consumption or leisure of various types.
Ben: Yes. And there’s all of these sort of particular domains: travel, wine, literature, whatever. But the main vehicle for this, as Veblen sees it—is codes of manners.
Wolf: Manners, yeah.
Ben: Like speech codes, etiquette—carriage, how you hold yourself. That is sort of the main way that leisure is conspicuously displayed because in order to acquire and perform these sorts of elite manners, it just takes a lot of time and effort and energy, as well as interfacing with the actual elite class in order to pick it up and become good at it. And so that’s sort of the center of it around which all of these particular tastes revolve, basically.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s a costly signal. It’s a verifiable, costly signal of having spent a lot of time among elite people living an elite lifestyle.
Ben: Right. And I think this is still just as true as it was in his day. The particular speech codes, the particular manners, the particular forms of etiquette are no longer the ones that existed in 1899. We have our own new ones, but—the purpose of a huge amount of the conspicuous leisure that people do today is to conform to those and display their mastery of it. Yeah.
And then there is also, in addition to this, there is vicarious leisure. What is vicarious leisure? It is leisure that goes to your honor even though you yourself are not doing it—yourself.
Wolf: You’re patronizing someone else to do it.
Ben: Right. Because once you get wealthy enough, you literally can’t spend all of it on conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption for yourself. Bill Gates just has too much money. There’s no way. He couldn’t do it if he wanted to.
Wolf: Right. So he has to hire people to do leisure on his behalf.
Ben: Right. Where by leisure here, we mean things which are conspicuously not material production. And so if you have—
Wolf: Accrue honor and so on
Ben: and so if you have your giant NGO, which funds a bunch of other NGOs that do the lobbying and the governing, then that redounds to the honor of the person who’s funding it in the same way that in Beowulf, Hrothgar has his mead hall where he’s throwing big feasts and giving gold rings to all of his warriors. That is also vicarious leisure. It is leisure that he is funding but not doing, and it ends up serving his honor and elevating him even further above the base.
Wolf: Yeah, and I loved all of Veblen’s examples with that. He talks about kind of in the more medieval era, retainers and guys wearing your livery and all the artists and dancers—and the musicians and so on, that you have to kind of have around your estate, that you’re cultivating and patronizing, and how this sort of makes you more grand by having these people around who are conspicuously engaged in a lifestyle of non-production. They’re able to do music, they’re able to do art, useless art.
Ben: Yes. And another one that he brings up many times, which I think he somewhat has a point on this one, but also it is important to remember that, as you say, he is quite mad about all of this. So in 1899, he’s like, the big thing that a lot of the bourgeoisie leisure class does is it has servants—which keep the house at a level that no one really needs. There is a level of cleanliness beyond what is required by good hygiene and good health, and even good aesthetics, which is insisted upon, and you bring in lots of servants to do this. And they are doing this thing which is not material production in order to make your household be a household of good repute.
And if you read other people from the late 19th century, the thing he’s describing just is really bound up in their sense of what is respectable.
Wolf: Well, we see this actually even in our own time as well. You go over to certain people’s houses and it’s like, “Yep, this person...” I wouldn’t quite say have servants, but we arrange the economics a little bit differently these days. This person has contractors—might maybe what you would say.
Ben: Yeah. I think the phenomenon of the person who is always remodeling their house.
Wolf: Right. Exactly. Yeah. Or the house is kept conspicuously clean—by contractors who come in every day.
Ben: Yes. So yeah, vicarious leisure ends up being, I think, one of the really important concepts for just how huge amounts of our society are organized.
What are the naturally honorable leisure activities? (21:38)
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Another concept that I want to introduce here is he has this idea, I forget exactly what he calls it, but the criteria for what makes a good leisure activity or what makes a good consumption activity is precisely that it is useless. That it does not have direct material utilitarian requirement, but is sort of difficult but not directly useful. And so you get things like the fine arts. And that this is what constitutes fineness in art, is that it is difficult but not useful, right?
So you get this painting, you get this composing of music. You get the clean house. You get the certain types of clothing.
And he even takes this to the point of some of these activities, some of these things are actively harmful. Certain types of conspicuous leisure is the having of soft hands or fashions like white clothes that are very tight or something that you couldn’t possibly work or do anything physical. You’re disabling yourself. You’re taking on high handicaps to demonstrate that you don’t need that utilitarian stuff.
Ben: Yes. One of my favorite examples he gives is hunting and how it changes over time. Where if you look at savage tribes with throwing spears or bows—then hunting is this honorable activity. Which the men engage in as sort of their big yes, this is how we demonstrate our mastery. But it’s also just an important part of just feeding the tribe.
Wolf: It’s an important part of the economy, yeah.
Ben: And then as things develop, it sort of bifurcates, and by the medieval period, you’ll have the sort of low-class hunters who are going off and just trying to haul in meat so that they have stuff to eat, and that’s this very base, very low-class thing. But on the other hand, you have the sort of noble version of hunting, where you’re going after the white stag, and you’re doing this—as a sport, or you’re fox hunting. You’re not going to eat the fox. It’s not that you need this—economically.
Wolf: You’re going out on a hunt with your guys. You’ve got your horses, you’ve got your hounds—you’ve got your guns, and it’s all this big fanfare. And you’re only going after the white fox.
Ben: And it bifurcates into the utilitarian one and the fine one.
And so there’s four activities which he’s like, “These are the naturally honorable activities.” This is the things that the leisure class inherently does, is these four things, which are war—government—sports—and devout observances. And those four things are inherently honorable. And especially within the ideology of 1899, our own one doesn’t consider war and sports to be particularly honorable. But speaking as a generalization about human societies, I think this is generally the stuff that you see be the main sources of honor.
And so any of these activities, there’s a sense in which you can argue, oh, war is actually a productive thing. You have to defend yourself. Oh, government is actually a productive thing. But in terms of the sort of psychological perception of it, the thing is you have to be removed from the baseness of labor, and those things are removed from the baseness of labor.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. And then they’re further elaborated in these directions of fineness—especially in their participation in this dynamic. So war as a sort of conspicuous leisure class activity is about the pomp of the uniforms and the pageantry and all of that aspect.
Ben: In extreme cases, it can even turn into jousting or dueling or something like that.
Wolf: Right. Dueling, exactly. And yeah, or in religion, I think he’s really mad about the Episcopalians in particular in this book. So he’s describing all this Anglican pomp and circumstance of the type you’d see up at Grace Cathedral and, of course, done at a much finer level of investment in his day. And yeah, he’s just dripping with contempt for the whole thing.
But he describes what they’re doing, I think, in interesting ways. I loved where he describes the religious stuff about how it’s conspicuously being a servant to God. God becomes elevated as this ultimate leisure class avatar who has this whole stable of vicarious leisure on his behalf. And you’re elevated by your closeness to God by participating in the sort of God’s conspicuous leisure of the—pageantry of the church
Ben: In the same way that a retainer of a lord is elevated by their lord’s honor.
Wolf: Precisely.
Ben: Yeah.
How today’s leisure class was created (27:16)
Ben: A lot of the book is working through many of these examples in a lot of detail, and I agree with most of them, and the ones where I don’t are also interesting, as is often the case with this sort of book. Yeah. So I’d also like to talk about more specifically what is the leisure class doing in his day—and what is it doing in our day—and how did that change? Because there are many ways in which it’s changed and many ways in which the fundamentals, I think, have stayed the same. And looking back on this a century and a quarter later, I think is—we get some really interesting perspective by doing that comparison.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, and so I know you’ve written actually interesting sort of modernizations or reviews of this in the modern context with the conspicuous engagement in ideological activities or social activities and how these things have evolved. I’d love to hear more about that. What does Veblen consumption look like today as compared to his time?
Ben: Yeah. So in his time, the sort of dominant ideology, the sort of legitimating conception behind a lot of this conspicuous leisure was this very aristocratic ideology—of they’re learning Latin. He’s big mad about that. It’s got all of these fine arts knowledge of the classics, the great composers. These ideas of nobility and magnanimity and that being this big thing that as you were saying, these are the tastes that people are trying to put through the society.
And this was starting to fray by 1899, and then in 1914 with the First World War, it just—
Wolf: It blew up
Ben: totally collapsed, which is—its own big topic. We could have a whole video about that.
Wolf: Many.
Ben: Yes.
So yeah, that whole thing, the specific world that he is mad about just ended up totally—
Wolf: It blew up 15 years later
Ben: Yeah. Right. There was this period of sort of a spiritual chaos in the middle of the 20th century as a new one was being worked out. And the one that ended up kind of winning that at the time was called the counterculture. And there’s some interesting ways that they were sort of dealing with all of this.
So these were the ones who popularized the idea of conspicuous consumption and turned it into a term that not just sociologists and economists, but just about everybody has heard.
Wolf: Yeah, and specifically through that lens of critique, right? Because it’s like what they’re trying to avoid.
Ben: Right. Partly because so much of it was associated with that aristocratic ideology.
Wolf: Yeah, and the people, right? There’s different people. I remember one of the things he makes great hay about at one point is the fact that these leisure class people are what he calls the dolichocephalic blonds. In other words, Nordics, right? And so he’s mad about that, too, even though he’s himself Norwegian.
Ben: He’s far from alone.
Wolf: And then so of course, the counterculture is very much against that, not just it’s a different cultural representation, it’s different people, right? And so that’s one of the big things that’s changed as well.
Ben: Yeah. And so—so interestingly, there had been a big emphasis on conspicuous consumption, more so in 1899 than, say... If the Middle Ages was much more about conspicuous leisure, relatively, the pendulum sort of swung towards conspicuous consumption—in the 19th century. Then it kind of became like we just got too good at production. It used to be that you would wear your fancy suit and your top hat because clothes were really expensive.
It just took a lot of labor to make good clothes. If you had a big ball gown, that would just take hundreds of hours, maybe thousands of hours in extreme cases—to physically make that object.
Wolf: Yeah, and it still does, but it’s interesting the way that increased material production has changed the signaling value of material stuff. And it seems to have been at least associated historically with the collapse of, let’s say, fine materialism, elite fine materialism. And now we get much more of this utilitarian aesthetic, even a conspicuously utilitarian aesthetic, in some modern architecture and so on.
Ben: Right. And where you find conspicuous consumption today, it is very often things where it is a brand which is artificially expensive—rather than it being like a Birkin handbag does not take thousands of hours to produce. The reasons it’s expensive is that there’s a brand name attached to it.
Wolf: Yeah, there’s some kind of cultural connotation to it—that has been built up by this brand.
Ben: And so, basically we got too good at mass production for conspicuous consumption of material goods to continue being as important—to demonstrating one’s membership in the leisure class. And so conspicuous leisure took a bunch of that prominence, sort of shifted over. And there were a bunch of ways, if you look at the actual core counterculture, especially the ‘70s—a lot of it we think of it as the ‘60s in pop culture, but I think the ‘70s is when much more of it actually happened.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, yeah, sort of the revolution obviously got started in the ‘60s, but it continued into the ‘70s.
Ben: Yeah. And people are doing all sorts of other, going on the hippie trail and walking all the way across Eurasia. They’re cultivating Buddhist or Hindu mystical awareness. They’re retreating to these communes where they have nothing to do with all the industrial production. There’s all of this political activism.
And the things that won out after this period of people trying all of these modes of conspicuous leisure were the activism and the college degree—as sort of like the two modes of conspicuous leisure that ended up getting recuperated back into society and forming the sort of legitimizing narrative of the present elite.
Wolf: And all the ideological constructs that come along with that, the speech codes, the—the—
Ben: In the same way that—
Wolf: Ways of seeing things. The language, the little choices of language that people have.
Ben: Yes, just as with the previous aristocratic ideology—having determined that in those days. And a thing to be clear about here is that this doesn’t mean that the people are insincere. In fact, it only works because they are sincere.
Wolf: Yeah. And again, this is the point I made earlier with the kind of matters of taste. People are sincere about the importance of taste. They think it is actually very important that society have—
Ben: They’re correct. It is.
Wolf: Someone needs to do the art. Someone needs to sponsor the art. Someone needs to keep the fine mechanical engineering of the Ferrari people alive. It’s this important activity of sponsoring the finer things that make civilization worthwhile. This is how they see it.
Ben: Right. Right. And in the sort of middle latter chunk of the 20th century, this new chain that managed to hit every point on the whole chain of the leisure class—sort of worked itself out, figured out, okay, these people are going to be funding all of the vicarious leisure in these ways. They’re going to be honored for it.
Wolf: Yeah, this is the philanthropists.
Ben: Right. And we’re going to create these narratives and sort of widely share them around about how, if you were to go back to 1899 and talk about an activist, they wouldn’t know what you meant. The closest thing that they would have would be these high society ladies trying to ban alcohol or something.
Wolf: Yeah, the suffragettes and so on.
Ben: Right. But it was a very different archetype described in very different ways. So this stuff had to be worked out and popularized, and all of the different parts of it sort of had to work together. And after a while, yeah, they basically cohered, and it’s not perfectly static, but it basically got worked out, and it’s been pretty stable for—many decades.
Wolf: And so, right. So we’ve now had this kind of new form of leisure class that we have now ruling us. I think I’m somewhat of a partisan of the previous form. I thought their tastes were more appropriate then, and the new ones have been mostly destructive in my opinion. But I recognize that they also do good things in some of the particular ways that they engage in the arts and in conservation or things like that.
The new counterculture’s opportunity (36:30)
Wolf: I think also recently we have the rise of a new counterculture, and the rise of new critique of this thing as it’s starting to fail itself.
Ben: Yes, because the established thing is visibly fraying. And—
Wolf: It is fraying. The contradictions are becoming very clear that you have this elite class based on resentment of eliteness, or being against the kind of thing that Thorstein Veblen was against. But they are themselves sort of doing that. We wrote about this actually in Palladium in a few different ways. There was one article in particular about this culture at Yale—that I remember that was, that got—
Ben: That was a very good one
Wolf: a lot into this stuff. And, yeah. And so those contradictions are starting to become obvious. The ways in which they’re not actually holding up the duty to maintain society and so on. It’s all falling apart.
It’s becoming a much more adversarial, much more nakedly cynical kind of thing. Also, as people game it, it becomes sort of widely known that this is not important matters of taste that we all believe in, but rather just a social dominance game that you can game it. As that knowledge goes around, people game it harder, and it’s sort of reached the limits of credulity.
Ben: We’ll see. It’s certainly fraying, but it doesn’t look to me like we’re in 1914.
Wolf: No, we’re not in 1914.
Ben: We might be in 1899.
Wolf: We might be in 1899. There are now, like Veblen, there are now intellectuals criticizing this stuff. And I think, and not from a reactionary perspective, but like Veblen was, from criticizing its functionality, criticizing it from a forward-looking perspective.
Ben: Yes.
And so there’s this wonderful... So Michael Bloomberg, he wrote an autobiography when he was a big software finance magnate. And then later on, he republished the autobiography when he was running for political office, but he took a lot of stuff out. So one of the things he took out was he was just describing the philanthropy that he does. He’s given away billions of dollars to the various NGOs and causes and—we should be using the state to make sure people don’t drink soda, and we should be—having the schools be this way instead of that way and—all this sort of thing.
And he was describing what it feels like emotionally and socially to be doing this—in just a really candid way, which—so if I can read a chunk of that. “The real financial legacy I’m leaving my kids is much more powerful. They will be the key trustees of our family’s foundation and, as such, will possess great influence. For the rest of their lives, along with their mother and a handful of my closest friends, they’ll distribute large grants to worthy institutions and creative individuals needing support. In their hands will be the ability to channel cultural development, further scientific and medical research, shape the political process, mold our youth, and support their religious organizations. What greater satisfaction could we possibly get than watching ourselves do great things for humanity? Not only great things, but things we, not someone else, think should be done.”
And so that is how a lot of these, what Veblen would call devout observances and works of government—end up being channeled through this sort of canon of respectability—and into the shaping of society towards the ends of government.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. It’s a very interesting model.
Downward social mobility and the spurious leisure class (40:48)
Ben: And there’s one additional sort of sub-piece within it, which Veblen talks about, which I think is very interesting because we see a lot of people today talking about it as though it’s a new thing. And to hear Veblen describe it in 1899, I found very striking.
Wolf: What was that?
Ben: So, it’s what he calls the spurious leisure class, where the idea is that there are people who are culturally within the mode of the leisure class—but they are not actually rich enough to do it. And so he talks about the decayed gentleman, the lady who has seen better days—as these people who are bound up in the performance of the leisure class, but in fact, they don’t have the money to do it. And so there ends up being this mismatch and this sort of reek of desperation off of them as they are trying to make things. They are making large economic sacrifices, large financial sacrifices. They would figuratively, and in some cases, literally, rather die than do manual labor.
Wolf: Right. Or work oil and gas jobs—might be the modern equivalent.
Ben: And so, today we talk about overproduced elites. We talk about the—downwardly mobile, and that’s correct, but this is a thing that is not new, that has been going on for—you get these people who are socialized to be like, “Oh, that’s the thing I should be doing.”
Wolf: Yeah. I always dislike the term overproduced elites because it implies, oh, you can have too many people who are elite in their abilities and—and so I—
Ben: I think spurious, Veblen’s term, is actually much closer to what’s going on.
Wolf: Yeah. Spurious leisure class. That does get a lot closer to it, because what’s actually going on is you’re overproducing or you’re producing a class of people who have—tastes that are not appropriate to their actual social station. And that are, in fact, destructive of their ability to engage in something useful for society. And this is maybe part of why Veblen’s intent in all of this is to tear this system down and instill something a lot more utilitarian.
The inevitability of hierarchy and the failure of egalitarian experiments (42:50)
Wolf: I think at the end of the book, he gets into more of his vision.
Ben: Right. And it’s much more of the sort of technocracy—
Wolf: Yeah, exactly. It’s technocracy
Ben: yeah, the sort of we’re going to rationalize everything, the thing that was sort of shared in common by the free market GDP maxers and the communists of his day.
Wolf: Yeah, and the sort of early managerialism. Because in his other works, which we should also read, he’s one of the big champions of kind of that managerial revolution before—as it happened
Ben: We’ll just figure out rationally what—ought to be done, and then we’ll do it.
Wolf: Yeah. And he also argues that the whole capitalist class is obsolete. He’s not a communist as far as I know, but—
Ben: No
Wolf: he—
Ben: He’s a different type of hyper progressive of a form that no longer exists.
Wolf: Yeah. But which is very interesting to draw on. But yeah, he argues in other books that the capitalist class is obsolete because actually you only need this kind of managerial, industrial culture to run everything, the technocracy, basically. And so that’s interesting. But yeah, that’s the vision that he’s sort of laying out.
And it’s interesting to see which parts of that have kind of succeeded and which have failed. Obviously, we’ve been talking here about how a lot of the dynamics that he’s describing have come back under new guises, even appropriating a lot of his direct language as sort of like a new way to do what he was describing. It’s like, “Oh, we don’t do conspicuous leisure,” or sorry, “conspicuous consumption. That’s low class. That’s-” “... tasteless.”
Ben: Now we know—
Wolf: Now we—
Ben: that it’s experiences, not things, which is to say it’s conspicuous leisure, not—conspicuous consumption.
Wolf: Right. We don’t talk about conspicuous leisure because that’s maybe a little too close to home still. And so it’s interesting to see, but the way that it’s all become activism and government, it’s like often it takes on the mantle of this kind of technocratic or utilitarian or anti-aristocratic sort of character that I think Veblen was pushing for, but it’s also very different from what he wanted. Or even we have managerialism, but it’s not like the technocratic, engineers in charge kind of thing that—he envisioned.
Ben: And I think the big way that I disagree with Veblen—is in 1899, there was this sort of progressive, technocratic, managerial worldview that was like, oh, now that we are so rational and we understand so much about the world, in the same way that we have conquered the physical world, we can also conquer human nature. And so like—
Wolf: We no longer need these signaling mechanisms and whatnot
Ben: Right. And so there has been conspicuous leisure in every society up to that point, and now we are rational enough to understand it and do away with it. And I don’t think—
Wolf: That’s not real.
Ben: Yeah. That experiment was tried and failed.
Wolf: Yeah. And actually, I think this—
Ben: And I think that we’ve seen it in every human society that we know.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s a human universal.
Ben: Therefore, it’s going to continue to exist.
Wolf: Yeah. And it’s interesting to ask why it continues to exist. And here is where I think Veblen becomes really interesting because he actually gives a pretty good account of why it exists. And all you have to do is not be mad about it, and you read his thing and it’s like, oh, it’s similar to the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s like proof of work type stuff, right?
It’s like, okay, well, there’s actually this problem of social hierarchy in society. You kind of need hierarchy. You need to establish hierarchy, and it needs to be something that’s kind of difficult to contest. And one of the things that’s difficult to contest is proof of work, right? And what a lot of this conspicuous consumption stuff is, is ultimately a proof of work thing where you’re saying, look, I have power in society, and I deserve power in society.
I deserve to be deferred to because I’m the one... There’s a certain sort of stability to it. You’re making the class hierarchy, which must exist, legible by engaging in these kinds of activities. And so if you read Veblen, invert the valence of a lot of what he’s doing. It’s like, oh, what if you read this as a sort of person engaged in class signaling and you say, “Oh, that’s why I’m doing this. This is how we should do this effectively. We should cultivate taste and look for the things that allow us to establish our class position effectively,” or whatever.
And also to analyze the whole social system as actually even a functional thing. These taste hierarchies are functional, that the—
Ben: Or—
Wolf: proof of work aspect is functional.
Ben: They can be functional. Some are more functional than others.
Wolf: Some are more functional than others. And you can optimize them for functionality even. To a certain extent. And so if you look at it that way, Veblen becomes very interesting. It’s both individually like a practical guide to class dominance.
It’s like, here’s how you should become more tasteful and engage in more efficient, conspicuous leisure so that people take you more seriously. But also socially as a guide, okay, these are real forces in society that we have to contend with as we engage in our conspicuous leisure of government. We have to take into account that this is what’s going on, and this is how it works. And design society so that these things are not wasteful and destructive, but beneficial. They’re elevating taste, creating beautiful things.
They’re driving forward science. They’re actually engaging in some kind of useful philanthropy, conservation—helping people out who can be helped.
Ben: Yeah. Gigantic libraries in the center of the city that anyone can use or—
Wolf: It’s actually useful.
Ben: Yeah. Or educational programs for the people who are going to benefit from them rather than making—
Wolf: Rather than wasting it
Ben: towering obelisks that crush the human spirit or whatever.
Wolf: Right. Or waste it. This has been a lot of the problem of our current leisure class, actually, has been a lot of the investments they’ve made into supposedly helping humanity have been, in fact—entirely wasted.
Ben: Yeah. We’ve doubled or tripled the amount of money going into schools per capita, and as a result, they got worse.
Wolf: Yeah. And a lot of that is because of the ideology they’ve done it with because they, like Veblen, they don’t like the concept of eliteness, right? And it’s like a lot of what they’re trying to do is sort of—hypocritically do away with eliteness to demonstrate their eliteness.
How do we channel conspicuous leisure to prosocial purposes again? (50:06)
Ben: So as the current thing has been kind of wearing thin and starting to sway a bit in the wind—the question that to my mind is really interesting is, okay, so much of the genius of America when it’s working well is that it’s really good at making systems that take into account human nature, even the parts of it that someone like Veblen might wish could be done away with and being like, “How do we build a system that acknowledges that and—
Wolf: That harnesses this in a useful way.
Ben: Yeah. Harness, yeah. Exactly. And build something useful out of these pieces rather than trying to suppress them or wish them away.
Wolf: Right. And this was the intent of the Constitution. It’s the intent of capitalism.
Ben: Right. And so what is the version of this? What is the functional version of conspicuous leisure of the leisure class that is...
You’re not going to go back to the aristocratic ideology. World War I did happen. It’s not unhappening. So what is the thing that should come next? And it’s not going to last eternally, but that should last for the next, I don’t know, century or two.
What is the thing that is appropriate to the challenges of our times—that should be built in a functional way to take these impulses, which humans have, and cause them to do something that makes a good society?
Wolf: Yeah. And I think a lot of it is just sort of as we’ve been discussing, almost just take the resentment out of it and say, okay, human nature exists, and it’s good. And what can we do with it, right? And what do we want to do? Like, okay, there’s going to be class hierarchy.
What does it mean to have people on top who are good? And how can we become that? What are the essential problems that humanity needs to face? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with philanthropy in particular, right? It’s—
Ben: Yeah. It’s because it’s good and important that you have to do it well.
Wolf: Yeah. And so it’s okay. You have to do it well. You have to not be trying to erase differences that can’t be erased. You have to not be trying to tear down systems that shouldn’t be torn down.
You should be engaged in some useful... This is where we get into this challenge is like, well, can it be both useful and conspicuous leisure, right? And I think there’s a certain level of like, well, it’s useful to society. It’s useful as a public good, but it’s not useful to me in particular. It’s not a way that I’m going to get richer by doing this.
Maybe you are. Bill Gates probably got richer as a result of his philanthropy, right? At least he gets more money under his control than he would’ve otherwise had.
Ben: And he became a big philanthropist in the wake of the antitrust stuff against Microsoft. So there’s a question of, would they have taken—away even more of his money if he didn’t?
Wolf: Yeah. People say he made a big mistake selling his Microsoft stock. It was like, would he be allowed to not sell his Microsoft stock? Is kind of the actual question.
Ben: Yeah. It’s hard to do counterfactuals. Who knows? But I’m sure that’s the sort of question he was asking himself.
Wolf: Yes, exactly. But okay, there’s good versions of this, and I think a lot of it comes down to accepting human nature, accepting hierarchy, accepting there’s a class system, and having a clear-eyed view of what we’re doing here with this conspicuous leisure stuff. And—
Ben: Yeah. And having a class system that—
Wolf: It isn’t
Ben: works for all of the levels, for all of the classes. And like—
Wolf: Well, and isn’t mad about itself. Right? That’s the key thing is that I think the thing that worked in the old aristocratic system was that it might not have described itself as, or it certainly didn’t justify itself in terms of conspicuous leisure. I don’t think that’s a good justification. But it certainly, I think the high arts, we look back on those times as being very tasteful, because in fact, they were.
And we look back on them as the source of much great art and high culture, and we appreciate them in that regard because in fact, they did a great job at that. And, that’s maybe something that we’ve lost. I think the high culture of the 20th century has been largely disappointing. And I think they also self-endorsed in a way that I think was very healthy. Though I think that broke down during and after World War I, obviously.
But if you ask a leisure class gentleman of the 19th century, “Is what you guys are doing here...” You describe it in these terms of leisure. It’s always, “What you guys are doing here, good?” Right? And it’s like—
Ben: And so much of World War I was them being like, “Maybe this isn’t good.” And they just never really recovered from that.
Wolf: Yeah. And I guess the modern leisure class, I think they would describe what they’re directly doing as good, but I think they would describe the arrangement of society overall right now as not good.
Ben: Right. And the reason that they see what they’re doing as good is because they are dismantling the current arrangement, which is bad.
Wolf: Yeah, which is a really bad basis for social order. You should not have dismantling the social order as the basis of your social order.
Ben: Well, I mean, whether you want to or not, you’re not going to have it for a long time.
Wolf: It’s not going to last very long. Yeah. So that’s the situation we find ourselves in now, I guess.
Ben: Yeah. And I see a lot of our work over the next 5 or 10 years being as building a functional version of this that can—be the next thing as the current thing fades as all of these eventually do.
Wolf: Yeah. Do the work of building an actually functional counterculture that can step into the vacuum.
Ben: Cool. Well, thanks for having me on. And I look forward to continuing to work on this problem together.
Wolf: Yeah. This was great. I very much recommend people read Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class.” It’s a good book. It’s interesting.
Read it as a guide to how to become more classy, read it as social science to understand the world, and read it as a refreshing sort of critique of even the current social order.
Ben: Yeah. It’s an amazing book. Highly recommended, and especially chapter three and chapter four are sort of like the core central theoretical payload. So the whole thing is worth reading. But if you’re going to read part of it, I think those two chapters are how to 80/20 the book.
Wolf: Excellent. Okay. Thank you, Ben. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for everyone for watching.