| Why are you being an obtuse "akshually" redditor? > The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more If he wanted to say masses work, because they have to pay rent and meet basic necessities (ie. under threat of homelessness and starvation), he would have clearly said so. The way this is worded very clearly refers to conspicuous consumption and consumerism - ie working as means to buying ever more funkopops and ever pokemon cards, ever larger houses to put ever more stuff in them, garage with ever more cars, a vacation house, a pool, a yacht and then a bigger one. And this being the primary motivator (rather than base survival) Thus no matter what your productive output is per hour of labour, you will always work as much as you can, because you are - presumably - insatiably driven to always consume ever more with no end to it. And frankly, he certainly is right, but only to an extent, as there definitely are people that operate like this, however them being majority? I don't think so. |
>Thus no matter what your productive output is per hour of labour, you will always work as much as you can, because you are - presumably - insatiably driven to always consume ever more with no end to it.
No, that's not how marginalism works. There's both diminishing marginal utility from consumption, and leisure.