And more wealth meant even more regard. People respected the banker more than the garbage man, even though the latter might work harder. But since status is relative, one person's gain is another's loss. A spiraling contest develops, Veblen said. Being bank-rich quickly becomes a poor way to broadcast one's superiority.
Money is only worth anything if it's flaunted - that is, spent on things beyond basic needs.
In order to be reputable it must be wasteful. To Veblen, this runaway conspicuous consumption that ensued was the irrational driver of his time. What's worse, he thought, the disease didn't just confine itself to the rich. In Karl Marx's theory of communism, workers would eventually rebel against the rich owners of capital. But that rarely happened, Veblen pointed out.