This paper addresses the question: why does capital typically hire labor rather than the other way around? It models a situation in which a capitalist (owner of money capital) can choose between lending out his capital for production and using it to set up production under his own supervision....

The happiness literature has established that, in the developed countries, increasing affluence has not increased well-being in recent decades. We seek an explanation for this in terms of conspicuous consumption, a phenomenon originally identified by Veblen. We develop some simple general...