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...

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....