As Thorstein Veblen showed in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the evils of bad standards of expenditure are not confined to the wealthy classes from which they spring. They propagate and perpetuate themselves by example and imitation right down the social scale from top to bottom. What is called snobbishness is a very potent social force, and it is one which can work for the good as well as for the harm of humanity. It has been said that mankind is nowhere more vulgar than in the way in which it spends its income.

No amount of time, effort, or thought is grudged in the acquiring of wealth, but when we come to consume it we dissipate the fruits of our labours, often with small gain to ourselves and with unforeseen and undesired repercussions on the welfare of the community as a whole. What Richard Henry Tawney termed The Acquisitive Society (1920) is the outcome of false social values inspired by the all-pervading impulse to acquire riches to the elimination, or at least repression, of other, higher ideals.

Moralists of all ages have attacked luxury on ethical grounds: the Stoics, because it ran counter to their ideals of simplicity of life; the early Christian Fathers, because they exalted asceticism and poverty into an ideal; the Puritans, because they feared that the distractions and temptations of luxury might imperil the immortal soul and endanger its chances of salvation. In later times the tendency was increasingly for the moral judgment of luxury to be associated with the general problem of the unequal distribution of wealth—a view which overlooks the fact that luxury is not confined to the richer sections of the community.

The rigid condemnation of all luxury on moral grounds is untenable, if only for the reason that there is no absolute measuring rod by means of which the ultimate social ethical value of expenditure can be tested. Economic progress and changing standards of life quickly alter contemporary notions of the types of expenditure that may be included under the category of luxuries. However, a great deal of luxury is undoubtedly a waste of life, not only because of the ill effects it may have upon the individuals themselves but also because the resulting satisfaction is frequently out of all proportion to the expenditure. As Arthur Cecil Pigou pointed out in The Economics of Welfare (1920),

It is at least arguable that, after a point, as growing wealth gives a man command over more and more luxuries, the satisfaction that he gains from each new one is, as it were, taken out of relaxed interest in the others, so that the economic satisfaction which he derives on the whole is not substantially increased.

Consumption has its ethical as well as its economic aspects, and there are heavy moral responsibilities involved in the exercise by an individual of the disposal of the wealth which economic forces and social laws have placed in his or her hands.