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Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
Abstract
Robert Frank caused a national debate in 1995 when he and co-author Philip Cook described the poisonous spread of winner-take-all markets. Now he takes a thought-provoking look at the flip side of spreading inequality: as the super-rich set the pace, everyone else spends furiously in a competitive echo of wastefulness. Frank offers the first comprehensive and accessible summary of scientific evidence that our spending choices are not making us as happy and healthy as they could. Furthermore, he argues that human frailty is not at fault. The good news is that we can do something about it. We can make it harder for the super-rich to overspend, and capture our own competitive energy for the public good. Luxury Fever boldly offers a way to curb the excess and restore the true value of money.
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Citations
Cited by
Will Money Increase Subjective Well-Being?
Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2002) · Social Indicators Research · doi:10.1023/a:1014411319119 · Cited by 1,555
Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior.
Piff, P. K., Kraus, M. W., Côté, S., Cheng, B. H., & Keltner, D. (2010) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0020092 · Cited by 1,478
Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: How the rich are different from the poor.
Kraus, M. W., Piff, P. K., Mendoza-Denton, R., Rheinschmidt, M. L., & Keltner, D. (2012) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/a0028756 · Cited by 1,397
The role of income aspirations in individual happiness
Stutzer, A. (2004) · Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2003.04.003 · Cited by 1,049
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
Piff, P. K., Stancato, D. M., Côté, S., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Keltner, D. (2012) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1118373109 · Cited by 1,038
Metadata
- Authors
- Walker, D. M., & Frank, R. H.
- Venue
- Southern Economic Journal
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1999-07
- Volume
- 66
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 199
- ISSN
- 0038-4038 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2033614709
- Cited by
- 601
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 69.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
