One of the things which struck me when I recently read The Communist Manifesto (plus two earlier drafts of it in FAQ form) was that Karl Marx seemed to believe that the industrial revolution meant the end of scarcity. When he described a never-before-seen problem of over-production, he made it sound like the problem was too many products now existing with nothing to do with them, not a bad use of scarce resources. And much of the insanity of the Communist Manifesto follows at least somewhat logically from that incorrect premise. Having said that, as I was recently cleaning up the family room, it did strike me how much junk it’s easy to accumulate in the modern world—and I mean stuff literally no one wants and you can’t give away, so all you can do is throw it out. In certain ways, if you’re reasonably well off, it can feel a little like a post-scarcity world. And this reminded me of something Rob K. Henderson talks about with regard to luxury beliefs—that the wealthy no longer show off their wealth with luxury goods, but by flaunting luxury beliefs.

If you’re not familiar, luxury beliefs are basically beliefs so stupid that you can only survive them if you’re rich enough to avoid the consequences of them. (Technically, Rob defines a luxury belief as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while inflicting costs on the lower classes.”) The basic idea, as Rob describes it, is that it used to be the case that the rich flaunted their wealth with fancy clothes, fancy cars, jewelry, and the like. But these are now too accessible, so instead the wealthy flaunt their wealth in ways which are not so accessible. In a sense, this is not entirely new. Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse’s satire of the idle rich, and his friends flaunted their wealth through being conspicuously stupid in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Even earlier, in his 1910 book What’s Wrong With the World, G.K. Chesterton remarked:

Sir William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. “We” (that is, the aristocracy) “are all Socialists now.”

That said, I think that Rob is right that there is something peculiar to our time in the abandonment of luxury items as signifiers of status. And I think that no small part of it is the general level of material wealth. It’s true that there are still very expensive versions of common things, but they’re usually not all that much better. They’re mostly just more exclusive. An exclusive watch doesn’t keep the time better, or sparkle brighter, than a cheap watch. To know which are the very expensive handbags you need to be able to recognize logos. Gold, as in the metal composed primarily of the seventy ninth element on the periodic table, is still quite rare, but gold the shiny color is everywhere. To quote Chesterton again, this time in response to the common phrase that “not all that glitters is gold”:

All is gold that glitters, for the glitter is the gold.

That is to say, people valued gold because it’s pretty. Now that there are things equally pretty, some people cling to the exclusivity of the rarity of one particular gold-colored metal, but most people don’t really care. You can buy children’s jewelry for a few dollars that’s as pretty as anything you buy for tens of thousands of dollars in a real jewelry store—at least if you don’t pull out a microscope, and most of us don’t even rent microscopes, let alone own them. (Admittedly, the children’s jewelry isn’t as durable, since the pretty part is usually on the outside, as a paint, but the children’s jewelry is so cheap one might as well throw it out and buy new once the glitter has been worn off.)

This is true of many other things, too. Chemically synthesized pigments and plastics have made things that used to be extremely rare now universal and extremely cheap. Digital distribution of media from books to music to movies have had a similar effect. And here we come to the point about the end of scarcity: scarcity is quite far from over, but I can see how people raised in affluence and with certain kinds of tastes could mistakenly think that we’ve basically come to the end of scarcity.

To spell that out a little: affluent people tend to be raised in such a way that they think of having a job as a normal and desirable way to spend their time; they often (mostly erroneously) think that if they didn’t need to work, they’d still work anyway. So it would not be hard to ignore that they do work for which they happen to be paid well. On the other half of it, if their tastes happen to run to things that have become extremely cheap, they will tend to have the ability to get more than what they want. These are the people for whom it is very difficult to buy birthday presents because they already have everything they want. That’s not a matter of being fabulously wealthy, it’s just a matter of what they want costs $100 per month in subscriptions and maybe another $100 per month from Amazon (and their cell plan and internet bill are, to them, just basic living expenses they can easily take care of) and they spend most of their time on social media or consuming stuff they get from their subscriptions. If such a person has no curiosity about how things like the phone they use or the cell service they pay for work, I think it’s possible to see how they would, without thinking about it, assume that scarcity is over.

If a person does make such a mistake, I suspect it might easily lead them in the direction of some of the very destructive places the belief in the end of scarcity led Marx. For example: if scarcity is over, there are no question about how resources should be allocated which need to be answered. They can thus be ignored, or else whatever the answer which sounds most pleasing on the hearing of it can be accepted. Since scarcity is over, there’s no real need to motivate people to work, since you have unlimited everything anyway. Since scarcity is over, there’s no need to take care of anything since you can always replace whatever is destroyed through neglect with a new one out of the infinite supply of new ones. Since scarcity is over, the only reason anyone is lacking anything is because someone is keeping the infinite supply of things from getting to the person who is lacking.

I suspect that this illusion of scarcity having ended is a big part of why luxury beliefs seem plausible to so many people.