From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   Even though Christmas is over, I’ve been thinking about the season just   
   gone. There is a tradition of complaining about its commercialisation,   
   portraying Christmas as a grotesque manifestation of consumer excess.   
   But it’s strange to use our seasonal extravagance to attack consumer   
   culture. That’s almost diametrically wrong. What Christmas really shows   
   is that consumer capitalism is doing a cracking job: it’s the rest of   
   the economy that’s a mess.   
      
   Consider food. The median family today, even if they’d spent December   
   shopping at Fortnum & Mason and Daylesford Organic, would have spent a   
   lower proportion of their income on food than an equivalent family would   
   spend just to survive in the 1970s. Most consumer durables have   
   similarly plummeted in price. In 1973, when Wizzard first sang ‘I Wish   
   It Could Be Christmas Every Day’, consumerism was gearing up to grant   
   them their wish. So what went wrong?   
      
   Well, just as everything we buy at Christmas was getting cheaper,   
   housing started to become inordinately more expensive. If food prices   
   had kept pace with house prices since the 1970s, six bananas would now   
   cost £9.50. In 1973, a colour TV cost more than 10 per cent of average   
   annual income; it’s now 0.8 per cent. A tumble dryer would have cost 3   
   per cent of annual income; today it’s 0.7 per cent. Back then, food   
   soaked up 31 per cent of annual expenditure rather than 13 per cent now.   
   A new family car is about at parity. But the average home has risen from   
   371 per cent to 677 per cent of average income. We’re in a   
   cost-of-housing crisis, not a cost-of-living crisis.   
      
   And in reality it’s more extreme than this. A 2025 Kia is inordinately   
   better than a 1973 Austin Allegro, to say nothing of improvements in   
   consumer electronics. But cars and televisions tend to end up on the   
   second-hand market, which further reduces instrumental wealth   
   inequality. Put simply, many consumer goods invisibly benefit other,   
   future, poorer people when you buy them. This is not true of housing.   
      
   Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘We had a £900,000 house in Berkshire   
   but after three years we sold it to a young couple for £450,000, because   
   they needed a place to live’? You would think of those people as   
   insanely altruistic. But that’s exactly what you are doing when you buy   
   a new car only to sell it three years later for half the price. Buying a   
   new Range Rover, a huge TV or a Mulberry bag is invisible socialism –   
   stealth philanthropy. By contrast, if you spend your money decorating   
   your dining room, you are spending it purely on yourself. There is a   
   huge trickle-down effect when you buy a sports car or a jet ski. This is   
   not true of housing, which is a trickle-up market.   
      
   And then it struck me. This is a perfect moral justification for buying   
   luxury goods rather than selfishly spending money on housing. Recently I   
   had a small windfall, and my wife wanted to redecorate our bedroom,   
   rebuilding the wardrobes and replacing the carpet. I had terrifying   
   visions of three-line-whip visits to Farrow & Ball and discussions of   
   colours barely distinguishable to the human eye. So I patiently   
   explained that, as a man, the only reason I could ever conceive of to   
   replace a carpet would be to remove forensic evidence. And then gently   
   explained that spending money on a bedroom was an immoral and selfish   
   act, since it would benefit no one but ourselves – it might even risk   
   making our flat more expensive for anyone else to buy.   
      
   So I went out and did the ethical thing. I bought a Lotus Eletre   
   instead. Bright red, 600 bhp, LiDAR, 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, the works. In   
   the long term, I’ll sell this to someone poorer than me – it’s really   
   just time-delayed Marxism. And it’s a lot more fun than a carpet.   
      
      
   Rory Sutherland   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)