Praise be to the modest spender
Peter Singer says public officials, especially, would do well to avoid conspicuous consumption
When Radosław Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister, went to Ukraine for talks last month, his Ukrainian counterparts reportedly laughed at him because he was wearing a Japanese quartz watch that cost only US$165. A Ukrainian newspaper reported on the preferences of Ukrainian ministers, several of whom have watches that cost more than US$30,000. Even a communist member of Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, was shown wearing a watch that retails for more than US$6,000.
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 towards 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.