However, the marketing team may have won the battle but lost the war. When huge sums are spent on experiences, this embodies wealth in a new and useful way. Political discourse has great difficulty expressing what’s wrong, exactly, with inequality. Who cares if there are more billionaires than ever? Who cares how much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in how many hands? If it makes us all richer, does it matter how rich the richest are? The counter argument is that, sadly, it makes us all poorer, via a number of mechanisms – my favourite memorably put by the economist Stewart Lansley: “A tsunami of hot money raced around the world at speed, in search of faster and faster returns, creating bubbles – in property, commodities and business – that eventually brought the British and global economies to their knees.” These arguments don’t stick; the causality is endlessly debated, as the culprit slips away. However, when rich people start dropping sums that could rid whole villages of cholera – on a trip that extends humanity in no direction, that is probably pretty boring for a lot of the time and not dissimilar to flying overnight – the picture changes. This is what inequality actually looks like: rich people burning money on fun. That’s what the world works to service. That’s why things have to be the way they are. The high-net-worth spacemen may discover what gangsters have known since The Lavender Hill Mob: getting the money is the easy bit, it’s when you try to spend it that the world wakes up.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 11:34:51 +0000
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