Consumption - Economics, Competition - Economics, United States - International Business, Social Sciences - General & Miscellaneous, Rich People
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Overview
Robert Frank caused a national debate in 1995 when he and co-author Philip Cook described the poisonous spread of "winner-take-all" markets. Now he takes a thought-provoking look at the flip side of spreading inequality: as the super-rich set the pace, everyone else spends furiously in a competitive echo of wastefulness. Frank offers the first comprehensive and accessible summary of scientific evidence that our spending choices are not making us as happy and healthy as they could. Furthermore, he argues that human frailty is not at fault. The good news is that we can do something about it. We can make it harder for the super-rich to overspend, and capture our own competitive energy for the public good. Luxury Fever boldly offers a way to curb the excess and restore the true value of money.Editorials
Cass R. Sunstein
Frank's distinctive contribution is to argue that an understanding of the consumption treadmill shows that a progressive consumption tax would make many people better off while making few, if any, worse off. — The New RepublicCass R. Sunstein
Frank's distinctive contribution is to argue that an understanding of the consumption treadmill shows that a progressive consumption tax would make many people better off while making few, if any, worse off.— The New Republic
David Brooks
...Frank has come up with a plan....[He] uses neuroscience to prove that we would all be happier if we were liberals...— National Review
Richard Houston
...Frank amasses prodigious evidence of America's wasteful ways....[T]he author borrows the rhetoric of Darwinian analysis from conservatives to explain the acquisitive compulsion...— WQ: The Wilson Quarterly
Kirkus Reviews
A scientific attack on luxury that, though a little preachy, is not just an ascetic diatribe. Despite the truism that you can't buy happiness, most people believe more money will make them happy. The reason for this self-deception, Frank (co-author with Philip J. Cook of The Winner-Take-All Society, 1995) argues, is that unlike the hypothetical independent agents of economic theory, real people compare themselves to others when formulating desires. Indeed, externally derived indicators of what we "need" are so powerful in shaping choices that "on the best available scientific evidence, we seem not to be spending our money in the ways that would most promote our own interests." Consideration of what truly makes people happy would lead to, for example, buying smaller homes and less expensive cars and diverting the resources saved into "less conspicuous forms of consumption," like more time for family and friends. Questioning the wisdom of working longer hours to facilitate buying more expensive toys and thereby sacrificing the time to play with them is nothing new, of course, but what sets Frank's effort apart is his refusal to be a moral nag. Rather than beating us over the head with the puritannical strains of American culture, he presents systematic evidence that conspicuous consumption fails to achieve its intended goals. Having made his case that opulence at the top of the economic pyramid is skewing individual decisions throughout society in objectively unfortunate ways, he then proposes a progressive consumption tax as a way to rein in spending on luxuries by the rich. He closes the volume with a vigorous argument against trickle-down economics and for the proposition thatprogressivity embedded in a consumption tax will invigorate the economy. The chances that his ideas will be widely embraced are, of course, approximately equivalent to the chances that manufacturers will stop using human envy to sell their products, but they are nevertheless worth considering.Book Details
Published
May 4, 1999
Publisher
New York, NY : Free Press, c1999.
Pages
336
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780684842349