s of conspicuous waste, or at least of the
habit of ostentation, usually become evident on a close scrutiny. It
would be hazardous to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent from
the utility of any article or of any service, however obviously its
prime purpose and chief element is conspicuous waste; and it would be
only less hazardous to assert of any primarily useful product that the
element of waste is in no way concerned in its value, immediately or
remotely.

Chapter Five ~~ The Pecuniary Standard of Living

For the great body of the people in any modern community, the proximate
ground of expenditure in excess of what is required for physical comfort
is not a conscious effort to excel in the expensiveness of their visible
consumption, so much as it is a desire to live up to the conventional
standard of decency in the amount and grade of goods consumed. This
desire is not guided by a rigidly invariable standard, which must be
lived up to, and beyond which there is no incentive to go. The standard
is flexible; and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only time
is allowed for habituation to any increase in pecuniary ability and
for acquiring facility in the new and larger scale of expenditure that
follows such an increase. It is much more difficult to recede from a
scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed
scale in response to an accession of wealth. Many items of customary
expenditure prove on analysis to be almost purely wasteful, and they
are therefore honorific only, but after they have once been incorporated
into the scale of decent consumption, and so have become an integral
part of one's scheme of life, it is quite as hard to give up these as
it is to give up many items that conduce directly to one's physical
comfort, or even that may be necessary to life and health. That is
to say, the conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditure that confers
spiritual well-being may become more indispensable than much of that
expenditure which ministers to the "lower" wants of physical well-being
or sustenance only. It is notoriously just as difficult to recede from a
"high" standard of living as it is to lower a standard which is already
relatively low; although in the former case the difficulty is a moral
one, while in the latter it may involve a material deduction from the
physical comforts of life.

But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in conspicuous
expendi