The laughter should have gone in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t you
laugh (maybe in private, to avoid being impolite) at someone who pays
more than 200 times as much as you do, and ends up with an inferior
product?
That is what the
Ukrainians have done. They could have bought an accurate, lightweight,
maintenance-free quartz watch that can run for five years, keeping virtually
perfect time, without ever being moved or wound. Instead, they paid far more
for clunkier watches that can lose minutes every month, and that will stop if you
forget to wind them for a day or two (if they have an automatic mechanism, they
will stop if you don’t move them). In addition, the quartz watches also have integrated
alarm, stopwatch, and timer functions that the other watches either lack, or that
serve only as a design-spoiling, hard-to-read effort to keep up with the
competition.
Why would any wise
shopper accept such a bad bargain? Out of nostalgia, perhaps? A full-page ad
for Patek Philippe has Thierry Stern, the president of the company, saying that
he listens to the chime of every watch with a minute repeater that his company
makes, as his father and grandfather did before him. That’s all very nice, but
since the days of Stern’s grandfather, we have made progress in time-keeping. Why
reject the improvements that human ingenuity has provided to us? I have an old
fountain pen that belonged to my grandmother; it’s a nice memento of her, but I
wouldn’t dream of using it to write this column.
Thorstein Veblen knew
the answer. In his classic The
Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, he argued that once the
basis of social status became wealth itself – rather than, say, wisdom,
knowledge, moral integrity, or skill in battle – the rich needed to find ways
of spending money that had no other objective than the display of wealth
itself. He termed this “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen wrote as a social
scientist, refraining from rendering moral judgments, though he left readers in
little doubt about his attitude toward such expenditure in a time when many
lived in poverty.
Wearing a ridiculously
expensive watch to proclaim that one has achieved an elevated social standing seems
especially immoral for a public official in a country where a significant
portion of the population still lives in real poverty. These officials are
wearing on their wrists the equivalent of four or five years of an average Ukrainian’s
salary. That tells Ukrainian taxpayers either that they are paying their public
servants too much, or that their public servants have other ways of getting money
to buy watches that they would not be able to afford otherwise.
The Chinese government knows
what those “other ways” might be. As the International
Herald Tribune reports, one aspect of the Chinese government’s campaign
against corruption is a clampdown on expensive gifts. As a result, according
to Jon Cox, an analyst at Kepler Capital Markets, “it’s no longer
acceptable to have a big chunky watch on your wrist.” The Chinese market for
expensive watches is in steep decline. Ukrainians, take note.
Wearing a watch that
costs 200 times more than one that does a better job of keeping time says
something else, even when it is worn by people who are not governing a
relatively poor country. Andrew Carnegie, the richest man of Veblen’s era,
was blunt in his moral judgments. “The man who dies rich,” he is often quoted
as saying, “dies disgraced.”
We can adapt that judgment to the man or woman who wears a $30,000 watch
or buys similar luxury goods, like a $12,000 handbag. Essentially, such a
person is saying; “I am either
extraordinarily ignorant, or just plain selfish. If I were not ignorant, I
would know that children are dying from diarrhea or malaria, because they lack
safe drinking water, or mosquito nets, and obviously what I have spent on this
watch or handbag would have been enough to help several of them survive; but I
care so little about them that I would rather spend my money on something that
I wear for ostentation alone.”
Of course, we all have
our little indulgences. I am not arguing that every luxury is wrong. But to mock
someone for having a sensible watch at a modest price puts pressure on others
to join the quest for ever-greater extravagance. That pressure should be turned
in the opposite direction, and we should celebrate those, like Sikorski, with
modest tastes and higher priorities than conspicuous consumption.
Peter Singer is Professor of
Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of
Melbourne. He is the author of The Life You Can
Save, and is the founder of an
organization with the same name.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.
www.project-syndicate.org
