In 1899, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, which soon became one of the most influential works of economics and anthropology ever written. Today it is best remembered for its role in stigmatizing “conspicuous consumption,” a concept Veblen coins in the book. Veblen’s full theory is much broader. He describes the leisure class, a group of people whose vocation is performing aristocratic leisure in order to show that they are higher and more honorable than the common throng. It has been over a century since Veblen’s time, and the specific forms of reputable leisure which the privileged class engage in have changed completely. The basic structure of the leisure class, however, is much the same.
The most reputable displays of leisure were aristocratic in Veblen’s time. Veblen uses examples like hunting for sport, speaking Latin and Greek, and learning refined manners to demonstrate “good breeding.” By now, all of this is hopelessly old-fashioned. But the leisure class is far older than these aristocratic values and aesthetics, and did not cease to exist just because that ideology collapsed. Today the leisure class has adopted the new ideology, which we can roughly call “social activism,” and performs its conspicuous leisure in accordance with these newer values and aesthetics.
The Leisure Class of Today
When we talk about “the leisure class” today, we do not mean people who spend all day watching TikTok or playing video games or listening to true crime podcasts. We are talking about people who engage in conspicuous leisure. By conspicuous, we mean that they show off their exemption from unworthy labor through accomplishments which those without leisure cannot match, for want of time or money or energy. They spend their time and effort in “honorific” pursuits which place them above the base necessity of directly producing wealth.
A meatpacker illegally working twelve-hour shifts can watch Breaking Bad when he comes home, so watching Breaking Bad is just ordinary leisure, and having opinions about Breaking Bad does not demonstrate conspicuous leisure. But only a man of means and distinction can take three-week vacations to go scuba diving in exotic locations—and upload the selfies to social media—so this becomes a mark of honor. In the language of today’s economists, what Veblen calls “conspicuous” might be phrased as “suitable for costly signaling.” Conspicuous leisure often includes mastery of subtle and exacting speech codes, and adherence to precise forms of manners, carriage, and behavior, all of which requires careful study and training within the social milieu of the reputable elites.
This is why class expression is not the same thing as wealth. Many anthropologists of the modern United States, including Paul Fussell in his masterful Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, have observed that there is a large class of wealthy businessmen who own and operate valuable companies, yet do not code as part of the upper class. This is because they make their money through base production. They own and operate farms, or car dealerships, or construction businesses, or the like. They spend their energy in the work of creating wealth—not “creating wealth” in the sense of amassing dollars and stock options and intangible claims on other people’s labor, but “creating wealth” in the sense of manipulating physical objects, the food and cars and houses that people want to acquire with their dollars at the end of all the negotiating and fundraising and politicking about how the dollars will be distributed. In popular perception, perhaps even instinctively, this work of creating tangible wealth is considered inherently base. The entire point of conspicuous leisure is to prove that one is above such concerns, so no matter how much money a physical business operator may make this way, he cannot fully become one of the rarefied gentlemen.
Of course, a gentleman of means has far more wealth than he can spend on his own leisure, so he also needs other ways to make his station visible. One of these is conspicuous consumption, the most famous concept from Veblen’s book. This is when people buy expensive objects, not mainly because they think the physical Louis Vuitton handbag is so much better than another handbag or because the Lamborghini is so much better than another car, but to display their ownership of the object to others.
Conspicuous consumption has become less important in recent generations, although it is far from dead. As industrial mass production has made physical objects cheaper and widely available, they have become a poor way to distinguish the gentleman from the throng. When fine clothes were out of reach for most people, they were an extremely important way for the wealthy to distinguish themselves, and you could tell rich from poor at a glance. In 2025, it’s possible to buy a decent ballgown on a minimum wage salary, so there is little point in wearing ballgowns. Multimillionaires might as well wear a t-shirt and sneakers. We have seen less dramatic versions of the same trend with objects like fine tableware, furniture, televisions, and even diamonds.
Where conspicuous consumption of manufactured goods remains an effective social tactic, now it is often a matter of purchasing expensive brand names at deliberately inflated prices, rather than purchasing objects which necessarily require a great deal of labor to make, like a 19th century ballgown. A billionaire can buy a brand-name handbag, and a grocery store clerk can buy a “counterfeit” handbag which most people find indistinguishable.
The sharpest point in the decline of conspicuous consumption was the rise of the “counterculture” in the 1960s and especially 1970s. This ideology eschewed material status symbols, often using Veblen’s words to denounce them as crass and spiritually polluted. Instead, they turned back to conspicuous leisure—following rock bands on tour across the United States, backpacking the “hippie trail” across southwest Asia, cultivating mystic awareness, devoting themselves to radical activism, and a dozen other means of demonstrating their remove from labor and physical production. By the 21st century, when the counterculture had been fully recuperated into the mainstream culture, marketers spoke of the value of “experiences” over “things” in order to sell conspicuous leisure to the middle class.
There is another way for a gentleman to display his wealth beyond what he can expend on his own leisure, even more important than conspicuous consumption. This is vicarious leisure, that is, maintaining others to engage in nonproductive activities which redound to the honor of the master. Historically, the most basic form of vicarious leisure was maintaining a wife to engage in reputable leisure rather than household production, but it could reach much greater scale than that. In the Dark Ages, men like Hrothgar would throw massive feasts for his followers every night in his mead-hall and give gold bracelets to his favorites. In the Middle Ages, a lord would maintain a court full of retainers and knights and astrologers and jesters. As Adam Smith tells the story in The Wealth of Nations, it was only with the late medieval rise of craft production and long-distance trade that conspicuous consumption of luxury goods could absorb the money that had once gone to the vicarious leisure of maintaining a court.
By the time Veblen published in 1899, the middle class had come to the fore, so the leisure class had grown to include many people of moderate wealth. At that point he claims the main form of conspicuous leisure was employing household servants to maintain standards of exacting cleanliness far beyond the point required by hygiene and good health, “not so much for the individual behoof of the head of the household as for the reputability of the household taken as a corporate unit.”
We see a glimpse of this culture in the novel Peter Pan, written around the same time as The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the magical world of the story, the Darling family’s nanny is a dog, because they cannot afford to pay a human servant, to the mortification of the patriarch. “No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr. Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the neighbours talked. He had his position in the city to consider.” In his eyes, a nanny who merely takes excellent care of the children is inadequate if she does not also conspicuously demonstrate his household’s reputability—which is to say its wealth.
Household servants have since fallen out of favor, partly because the idea of the household as a “corporate unit” does not fit with today’s ideology, but largely because industrial mass production of household appliances—especially the washing machine—has made it so anyone can keep a household to high standards, not just the wealthy. As household servants hauling wood have been replaced by gas ovens and electric heaters activated at the press of a button, the leisure class redirected this money.
The most obvious of the new forms of conspicuous leisure is the college degree, which is long since mandatory as a mark of reputability. Even if the actual coursework has become a sick joke, and perfect grades no longer indicate any special skill or intelligence, a degree still represents four years of foregone earnings in an expensive environment. In fact, as college courses have become ever more useless, this arguably makes college a better mode of conspicuous leisure, for much the same reason that dog breeders now focus on breeding sickly show dogs rather than breeding productive working dogs as they once did.
In addition, today’s Mr. Darlings frequently use international travel as a mode of conspicuous leisure to distinguish themselves from the lower class. A trip to Berlin, for an American, or a trip to New York, for a German, serves as a mark of reputability and sophistication. Those who have never left their home country often feel that this makes them unworthy in comparison. The middle class goes to great pains to display their travel on social media or find excuses to mention it in conversation. More than once, on a first date, I have been explicitly asked “Do you travel?” in the tones that a Jane Austen character might use to inquire about a suitor’s income.
Activism Cements the Aristocracy’s Position
According to Veblen, the inherently honorific vocations which the leisure class naturally pursues are “government, war, sports, and devout observances.” Today’s elite ideology does not attach much honor to war or sports, unlike the aristocratic ideology of Veblen’s day. So how does today’s leisure class use its wealth to pursue government and devout observances?
Today, the ideology which awards honor to leisure class elites is social activism. The leisure class can use this ideology to justify their position in society, and to legitimize their pursuit of naturally honorific vocations. As a result, the social activist ideology has dominated moral discourse, intellectual institutions, and mass media for generations.
A good description of the psychology at play was written by one of its major practitioners. In 1997, the business magnate Michael Bloomberg coauthored an autobiography containing an unusually frank discussion of the motivations for his philanthropy. Bloomberg later entered politics, and in 2019 published a second edition of his autobiography with much of this material removed. Bloomberg was a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party at the time he first published the book. Soon after, he switched to the Republican Party as part of a successful campaign to become mayor of New York City, then switched to Independent for his third term as mayor, and later returned to the Democrats in an unsuccessful campaign to become President of the United States. According to Bloomberg, emphasis added:
“The reality of great wealth is that you can’t spend it and you can’t take it with you. All you can do is give it to other individuals (with large gift or inheritance taxes to pay), or give it to philanthropic organizations (usually with large income tax credits to receive). The issues left to your discretion are only to whom, how much, and when to give. … The real financial legacy I’m leaving my kids is much more powerful. They will be the key trustees of our family’s foundation and, as such, will possess great influence. For the rest of their lives, along with their mother and a handful of my closest friends, they’ll distribute large grants to worthy institutions and creative individuals needing support. In their hands will be the ability to channel cultural development, further scientific and medical research, shape the political process, mold our youth, and support their religious organizations. … What greater satisfaction could we possibly get than watching ourselves do great things for humanity? Not only great things, but things we, not someone else, think should be done.”
Philanthropically-funded activist groups—Bloomberg alone has given $21 billion to various nonprofits—have been behind most of the major changes in governance in living memory. Megadonors like Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, or MacKenzie Scott Bezos select which causes to push and which to pass over, and society is reshaped towards the ideologies and visions which get funded. The activist’s most important role is in laying the moral and intellectual foundations for transforming society, but they also groom leadership cadres to take political office; prosecute lawsuits to alter and enforce the practices of governing bureaucracies; and directly write laws which are passed verbatim by allied legislators. Because activists govern, in the most literal sense, activism is inherently honorable.
And while the comparison between activist ideology and religion is sometimes taken too far, it is inarguable that much of the psychological need for devout observances is now channeled through activist rites like parades, public murals and monuments, and the canonization of saints, while endowments to academia serve the same psychological purpose as the endowments of monasteries seen in medieval Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. This is another source of honor. As a result, activism is an ideal method for people like Bloomberg to display their wealth through vicarious leisure, maintaining other people to engage in leisure which makes the maintainer more honorable. He writes:
“Every year, my father received a publication listing contributors to his favorite charity. During dinner, he would look down each page of the book for familiar names and remark on the size gift made by people he knew, or the complete absence of other names from the list. … Philanthropy dominates the social lives of the wealthy in big U.S. cities. … The style section of our city newspapers chronicles which celebrities attend which philanthropic dinners each night; the most celebrated are honorees there, partially for their past achievements, but also for their current fund-raising abilities. Executives and socialites solicit each other for their favorite organizations. They attend events where they bestow small tokens of appreciation on one another after suitably flattering speeches. Fun evenings for fine causes.”
The most honor attaches to the megadonors who maintain the activists in their tens of thousands and can direct them to new causes as they will. But just as honor once attached to an individual knight in the household of a great lord, so honor now attaches to an individual activist at a Bloomberg-funded NGO. Some of the leisure class are very well paid for their activism, but many more happily take low salaries, and maintain their station with an inheritance or through a high-income spouse. Others make do without. Veblen writes:
“Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class—abjectly poor and living in a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the instinct of self-preservation.”
Of course, this is a familiar character to us today. As college degrees are printed by the truckload, Veblen’s “spurious leisure class” has become the subject of a great deal of commentary, now called the “downwardly mobile” or “overproduced elites.” Reams have been written about how their economic position draws them to radical activism, especially the populist brand of radical activism championed by organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. Most of these people—admittedly not all—would be able to make more money if they learned to code or went to trade school or some such career, but they prefer to be paid in honor rather than money. While some critics try to paint this preference as “economically irrational,” there is little basis for this critique. De gustibus non est disputandum.
None of this means that the new leisure class is insincere or cynical. The leisure class of 1899 mostly believed in its aristocratic ideology. The leisure class today are generally earnest believers in the activist ideology they preach too. Whatever ideology the leisure class someday finds useful to adopt after the activist ideology eventually fades away, our descendants will believe it with their whole hearts.
The old aristocratic ideology, long fraying, ultimately collapsed in World War I as its proponents finally lost faith in their vision of the world. It took decades for the activist ideology to cohere into the form we recognize today and become the most reputable vehicle for vicarious leisure. Megadonors like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Ford had pioneered these new methods of vicarious leisure. One major reason the activist ideology was able to fill the void is that its proponents did the best job of building out a full playbook of how to engage in honorific leisure, from the billionaire philanthropist honored by the vicarious leisure of the nonprofits they maintain and fêted at galas and in newspapers, to the conspicuous leisure of the heiress whose modest trust fund enables her to take a low-paying job for a cause she believes in, all the way to the spurious leisure class living in hip flophouses while they scrabble for the cause.
Future ideologies will no doubt provide scalable playbooks for these roles as well. It remains to be seen whether the current activist ideology will succumb to its current troubles and dissolve as the last of the Baby Boomers propping it up pass away, or whether their heirs will adapt it into a new form functional enough to endure for generations more, but no ideology lasts forever. Just as the seed that eventually grew into the activist ideology’s funding networks was formed by megadonors like Vanderbilt and Carnegie in the last decades of the aristocratic ideology’s heyday, alternative funding networks formed in the coming decade may also prove to be world-historically significant.