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That mordant critic of the social scene, the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his classic *Theory of the Leisure Class*, invented a phrase to describe the way the great nineteenth-century American *nouveaux riches* like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers once employed their surplus wealth in competitive display. He called it ‘conspicuous consumption’: the building of the great Rhode Island mansions which they barely used, the throwing of the massive parties which none but the hideously rich could equal. Driven by such sumptuary competition, they sometimes reached the point which Veblen identified as ‘conspicuous waste’ – the spending of very large amounts of money simply to defeat their rivals in a war of pointless ostentation.
Painfully Rich
John Pearson
More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known, told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.
Think and Grow Rich
Hill, Napoleon
From this Anaximander concluded that human beings arose from other animals with more self-reliant newborns: He proposed the spontaneous origin of life in mud, the first animals being fish covered with spines. Some descendants of these fishes eventually abandoned the water and moved to dry land, where they evolved into other animals by the transmutation of one form into another.
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