Somebody Always Eats It

In 1100, the dining room of the King of England was Westminster Hall. Not a hall in a building with a dining room in it. The dining room was the hall, and Adam Smith, writing about it almost seven centuries later, notes that for William Rufus it “might frequently, perhaps, not be too large for his company.”

That is what a great man’s money bought in 1100. Dinner, for everyone who showed up. Smith collects the details like a man who cannot quite believe them. “It was reckoned a piece of magnificence in Thomas Becket that he strewed the floor of his hall with clean hay or rushes in the season, in order that the knights and squires who could not get seats might not spoil their fine clothes when they sat down on the floor to eat their dinner.” And further up the scale: “The great Earl of Warwick is said to have entertained every day at his different manors thirty thousand people, and though the number here may have been exaggerated, it must, however, have been very great to admit of such exaggeration.”

Thirty thousand dinners a day. Not charity, and not a party. This was simply what a huge income was, because there was nothing else in England to buy with it. A lord’s fields produced more grain than his household could eat, and grain rots, and no shop sold anything a rich man wanted in quantity. So he ate it, which is to say he fed it to people. And the people he fed stayed, and did what he said. Smith puts the political arithmetic plainly: such a lord “is at all times, therefore, surrounded with a multitude of retainers and dependants, who, having no equivalent to give in return for their maintenance, but being fed entirely by his bounty, must obey him, for the same reason that soldiers must obey the prince who pays them.”

Then, over a few centuries, ships began arriving with things. Silk, sugar, glass, clocks, wine, and small hard objects of great price. Here Smith describes one of the strangest trades in European history, which no one signed and no one noticed:

For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them.

The lords believed they were upgrading. Instead of gnawed mutton bones and a hall full of men who smelled of horses, a beautiful thing, entirely one’s own. With each such purchase a few more retainers drifted off, because nothing kept them, and a few more tenants were told to pay in cash instead of service. By Smith’s day the process was finished. “A man of ten thousand a year can spend his whole revenue, and he generally does so, without directly maintaining twenty people, or being able to command more than ten footmen not worth the commanding.”

Smith’s verdict is almost biblical: “Having sold their birthright, not like Esau for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the playthings of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesman in a city.”

That is Smith’s reading, and it is worth saying at once that it is one reading among several. Historians since have handed much of the credit for the barons’ decline to plague and labor shortage, to the price revolution, to gunpowder and kings who could finally afford standing armies. Smith is not the last word on why feudalism ended. But he did isolate a mechanism, and the mechanism is the thing worth having, because it is still running and most of us have it backwards.

What Everybody Knows About Money

Ask anyone what you can do with money and you will get a version of the same three-part answer, because it is correct and because it is what every personal finance column and every introductory course teaches.

You can consume it. Buy dinner, buy shoes, buy a vacation. The money is gone and so, before long, is the thing.

You can invest it. Put it into a business, a machine, a field, a share of something that works. The money comes back, ideally with more attached.

Or you can exchange — trade one thing for another, which is how the first two get done in a world with more than one product in it.

Layered on top of those three, everyone also knows the moral ranking, which nobody had to be taught because it is in the air. Consuming is fine in moderation and slightly shameful in excess. Investing is grown-up. Underneath investing sits the real virtue, the one your grandmother had: saving. Not spending. Holding back. The money you don’t consume is the money that becomes a factory, a bridge, a retirement.

Smith wrote the definitive version of this. He divided all work into labor that “adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed” and labor that has “no such effect,” and he was blunt about which was which. “The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.” Actors, orators, musicians, soldiers, judges, and kings all went in the unproductive column, however honorable: “Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production.”

From there he drew the conclusion that turned thrift from a private habit into a public duty. “Parsimony, and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital. Industry, indeed, provides the subject which parsimony accumulates. But whatever industry might acquire, if parsimony did not save and store up, the capital would never be the greater.” And then the sentence that three centuries of bankers have quoted approvingly: “Every prodigal appears to be a public enemy, and every frugal man a public benefactor.”

The picture is coherent, it is intuitive, and it has real evidence behind it. Countries that pour their output into tools and schooling do get richer than countries that eat it. If you are deciding what to do with a windfall next Tuesday, the ranking is honestly pretty good advice.

It is also, at the level of what the three uses are, not quite right. The person who gives it away is Smith.

Adam Smith Gives It Away

Twenty pages after making frugality a civic virtue, Smith stops to explain what actually happens when a man saves, and he does not soften it.

What is annually saved is as regularly consumed as what is annually spent, and nearly in the same time too; but it is consumed by a different set of people.

The saved money is consumed. Not held, not withheld, not set aside. Consumed, and on roughly the same schedule as the money that went to the wine merchant. Smith spells out the transfer: the rich man’s spending feeds “idle guests and menial servants, who leave nothing behind them in return for their consumption,” while his saving is “immediately employed as a capital,” so the same food, clothing, and lodging goes instead to “labourers, manufacturers, and artificers.” Then the line that ought to be carved over the door of every business school:

The consumption is the same, but the consumers are different.

Nothing was abstained from. A quantity of bread, cloth, and fuel existed, and it got eaten, worn, and burned. The saver did not reduce the total. He rerouted it. He changed who was at the table.

Two clarifications, because without them this is either a trick or a triviality.

The first is about words. Modern economics uses “consumption” narrowly, to mean final goods bought by households, and in that sense saving obviously does reduce consumption, because the output goes into machines instead of dinners. Smith means the older and broader thing: used up, gone, absorbed. Both senses are legitimate and the whole difficulty lives in the gap between them. When the folk version says saving is “not consuming,” it borrows the moral weight of the broad sense, which is that you went without, to make a claim that is only true in the narrow one, which is that the goods you bought happened to be capital goods.

The second is that a trained economist has known this identity for two centuries and would shrug at it. The target is not the profession. It is the moral picture the rest of us carry around, in which the saver performed a small act of self-denial and the spender a small act of destruction. On the accounting, neither did anything of the kind. Both routed a quantity of real goods to a set of people, and that is the only decision either of them made.

So the three uses of property were never three destinations you could send a thing to. They are one event — something gets used up — sorted by two questions. Who did the using up? And did what they were doing leave behind a replacement? “Production” is not the opposite of consumption. Production is a particular consumption, performed by workers on materials and tools, which happens to leave a new thing standing when it is finished. The seed corn gets eaten too. It is eaten by the field.

This holds wherever the saved money actually buys something: a wage, a machine, a sack of seed, a ton of cotton. Money that buys nothing at all is a different animal, and it is the one worth hunting, because both John Locke and John Maynard Keynes went after it and came back with the same pelt.

It is also worth noticing that Smith’s categories did not survive, while his identity did. Nobody today divides labor into productive and unproductive; the national accounts count the musician’s tune and the judge’s ruling as output like any other, and the Adlerian summary of the whole debate concedes that these distinctions “have largely disappeared from modern economic literature and usage.” The scaffolding collapsed. The sentence about who eats is still standing, which is a decent sign that it was never resting on the scaffolding.

Aristotle had cut the ground differently, and more sharply, in the Politics:

Of everything which we possess there are two uses: both belong to the thing as such, but not in the same manner, for one is the proper, and the other the improper or secondary use of it. For example, a shoe is used for wear, and is used for exchange; both are uses of the shoe.

A shoe has two uses. Wearing and trading. Both are genuine, but they are not on the same footing: “He who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to him who wants one, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not its proper or primary purpose, for a shoe is not made to be an object of barter.”

Exchange, then, is not a third thing standing beside production and consumption. It is a maneuver, a way of converting a use you don’t want into one you do. Which means exchange has no natural stopping point of its own, and Aristotle spotted that too, with a test of almost cruel simplicity. Trading in order to get things stops when you have enough. Trading in order to trade does not stop. “Hence we may infer that retail trade is not a natural part of the art of getting wealth; had it been so, men would have ceased to exchange when they had enough.”

Three uses collapsing into something stranger: one real event, two ways of being on the receiving end of it, and one maneuver with no end in it.

Which raises a question the old books answer with more nerve than the new ones. If production and consumption are the same act sorted by who does it and what is left over, somebody has to do the sorting. Who?

Who Counts as the Consumer

Karl Marx read Smith closely, hated a great deal of him, and took this particular point further than Smith would have gone. If the line between producing and consuming really is a line about who is doing the using up, then it can be drawn in more than one place, and some of the places are unpleasant.

Start with a worker eating dinner. Obviously consumption. He bought the food with his wages, the food is gone, nothing is left. Smith would file it under unproductive without hesitating.

Marx points out that from where the employer stands, the same dinner is an input.

The individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production or not, forms therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing.

Just as cleaning machinery does. The man’s supper is booked under maintenance. And before anyone can object that the worker is enjoying himself and therefore must be consuming: “The consumption of food by a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of production, because the beast enjoys what it eats.”

The same plate of food is two different economic events depending on who keeps the books. Marx states the double entry outright: “In reality, the individual consumption of the labourer is unproductive as regards himself, for it reproduces nothing but the needy individual; it is productive to the capitalist and to the State, since it is the production of the power that creates their wealth.”

A great deal of the machinery Marx built on top of this has not survived, and it is worth being precise about which parts. The labor theory of value — the claim that a commodity’s value is set by the labor time inside it — was already being replaced while he was still writing; the marginalist accounts of Jevons, Menger, and Walras all appeared in the early 1870s, a decade before his death, and they won. The attempt to get from labor-values to observed prices, the so-called transformation problem, is widely judged a failure, and the sharpest demolitions came from inside his own camp rather than outside it: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz in 1907, Ian Steedman in 1977. A minority still argues the problem dissolves under the right reading, and the argument continues. If the paragraph above needed the labor theory of value to work, it would be a museum piece.

It doesn’t. The observation is about classification, not about value. Whether or not labor time explains prices, one plate of food can be filed under two different headings, the filing has consequences, and somebody does the filing.

Here the cross-reference that matters snaps into place: the ownership of the means of production. Ask what it means to own a factory rather than work in one, and the ordinary answer is that you hold the title. You could sell it. The deed says your name.

Locke, a century earlier, had given a much better account of where the deed comes from, and it was built entirely out of use. “The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” You own the acorns because you picked them up. You own the field because you tilled it. Mixing your work into a thing is what makes the thing yours, and Locke was so sure of this that he tried to estimate the share: “of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labour,” and on second thought, “ninety-nine hundredths.”

That leaves a puzzle Locke did not live to see. Under his own rule, the person who mixes his labor into the cloth owns the cloth. In a mill, the person who mixes his labor into the cloth owns nothing, and goes home to a dinner his employer’s accountant records as plant upkeep. Marx’s summary of the arrangement is one line long and needs no theory of value at all: “The Roman slave was held by fetters; the wage labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.”

The point is not that the mill hand is a slave; the invisible threads are real threads, and so is the difference between them and iron. The point is that owning the means of production turns out to be something more specific, and stranger, than holding a deed. It is holding the authority to say what a given act of using-up was. Whose eating counted as production. Whose counted as merely eating. The three uses of property are not properties of the thing. They are decisions about the thing, and property is the right to make them.

The Word Invented to Describe Nothing

If saving is consumption by a different set of people, a whole vocabulary comes loose, and it is worth watching it come loose, because the vocabulary is still in use.

In 1836 the economist Nassau Senior announced a discovery. Marx, who could not believe his luck, quotes it: “I substitute,” Senior proudly says, “for the word capital, considered as an instrument of production, the word abstinence.”

Abstinence. Not provision, not deployment, not advance. The word for going without. Marx’s response is the funniest sentence in Capital: “An unparalleled sample, this, of the discoveries of vulgar economy! It substitutes for an economic category a sycophantic phrase — voilà tout.”

Then he runs the word through its paces until nothing is left of it:

If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown — abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature — abstinence of the capitalist.

Sowing corn is not going without corn. Letting wine age is not going without wine; it is how you get wine. Something was done with the corn and the wine, and calling it self-denial takes an ordinary decision about what to do and dresses it as a decision about whether to have.

What deserves respect here is that the moral vocabulary was not cynical. It was sincere, and it did real work. Marx concedes the substantive point to Smith without blinking: “Classical economy is, therefore, quite right when it maintains that the consumption of surplus products by productive, instead of by unproductive, labourers is a characteristic feature of the process of accumulation.” Of course it matters whether the grain goes to the field or to the feast. Those are different futures, and Smith was right about that, which is why his advice is still good advice on a Tuesday.

What the vocabulary got wrong was the nature of the choice. It described a routing decision as a sacrifice, and once you describe it that way, the person doing the routing acquires a claim. He is owed something, because he gave something up. That claim is what “abstinence” was built to support.

You can see the sincerity in the early Manchester manufacturers, whom Marx quotes from a survey written in 1795. In the first period they “lived like misers, and were far from consuming even the interest on their capital.” Even in the early eighteenth century, “a Manchester manufacturer who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests exposed himself to the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbours.” An evening at the public house ran to sixpence for a glass of punch and a penny for tobacco. It was 1758 before anyone actually in trade was seen with a carriage of his own.

These men were not faking. They lived thin. But their thinness was in the service of an imperative Marx renders in four words: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” And it came with an accounting identity: “his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation, just as in book-keeping by double entry the private expenditure of the capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account against his capital.”

A man whose own dinner appears on his books as theft from himself has arrived somewhere peculiar. He is not choosing between having and not having. He is choosing between two sets of mouths, and he has been taught to call one of them virtue.

Which leaves the last possibility. What if you route the corn to nobody?

Locke’s Rotting Apples

Locke asked the question everyone asks about property and thought he had a clean answer. If the earth was given to all of us in common, what could entitle one man to fence off a piece of it?

His answer was labor, and his limit was spoilage. The limit gets skipped in the summaries, and it is the most interesting thing in the chapter.

As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in. Whatever is beyond this is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

There is a ceiling on property, then. But look where Locke puts it. Not at a quantity. He is explicit: a man may barter plums that would rot for nuts that keep, and he may swap his wool for a diamond and hold it his whole life, and in neither case has he wronged anyone, because — and this is the sentence that reorganizes everything —

the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it.

The limit on property is not how much. It is how much goes to waste in your hands. A man with ten thousand acres under the plow has broken no rule. A man with a hundred bushels of apples going brown in a barn is, in Locke’s plain word, a robber: he “took more than his share, and robbed others.” Locke will even call the hoarder stupid before he calls him wicked. “It was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of.”

A use rule, all the way down. And it enforces itself, which is its beauty. You cannot secretly hoard a wagonload of fish. The fish tell everyone.

Then Locke names the thing that breaks it, and he is perfectly clear-eyed about it:

And thus came in the use of money; some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that, by mutual consent, men would take in exchange for the truly useful but perishable supports of life.

Some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling. Locke’s rule had a built-in enforcement mechanism, and money is precisely the object that defeats it. Nothing rots, so nothing shows. He watches the ceiling come off in real time: the old rule would still work everywhere, he says, “had not the invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced (by consent) larger possessions and a right to them.”

Here the scholars fight, and honestly. Locke says “by consent… and a right to them,” which reads as though money does not hide the limit but legitimately cancels it. C.B. Macpherson built a famous hostile case on exactly that reading, arguing Locke had quietly licensed unlimited accumulation; James Tully and Jeremy Waldron have argued at length that the provisos survive. Locke never settles it. My own reading is that the sentence describes a mechanism rather than blessing it, given that the whole chapter grounds property in use and given the contempt in “foolish thing, as well as dishonest.” But the text will carry the other reading, and anyone who tells you Locke closed the question is selling something.

What is not in dispute is the mechanism, and Tolkien understood it better than most economists. A dragon on a hoard is Locke’s rule with the enforcement removed. Smaug is not eating the gold, spending it, lending it, or even looking at most of it. It is property with every use subtracted, and the only reason he can lie on it for the better part of two centuries is that gold does not rot. Had it been apples he would have been found out in a week. Tolkien then treats what comes next, the dragon-sickness that takes Thorin at the door of his own recovered treasury, not as ordinary greed but as an illness that comes off the hoard itself. That is a more precise idea than it looks. A thing that can be held without use, indefinitely, does something to the holder that a barn of apples never gets the chance to do.

Aristotle got there first, with the sharpest version of the joke. Of a man rich in coin: “he who is rich in coin may often be in want of necessary food. But how can that be wealth of which a man may have a great abundance and yet perish with hunger, like Midas in the fable, whose insatiable prayer turned everything that was set before him into gold?”

The One That Isn’t a Use at All

There is a fourth thing you can do with property, then, and it became possible only once money existed. You can hold value in a form that is never used by anybody.

The ordinary reply is that this is not nothing, it is deferral. You are not consuming now so that you or someone else can consume later. Saving is a bridge across time.

Keynes spent a long book explaining why that is not what a bridge is. His central claim about consumption arrives with a shrug: “Consumption — to repeat the obvious — is the sole end and object of all economic activity.” What is not obvious is the sentence a few lines down:

We cannot, as a community, provide for future consumption by financial expedients but only by current physical output.

The words as a community are doing all the work, and they are the difference between an insight and a stupidity. Your own savings account is not fake. You personally can move purchasing power across decades, and you should. The claim is about what happens when everyone does it at once, which is not the sum of the individual cases. You can store objects: grain silos, railway track, school buildings. Those are genuine provision for the future, things that will be used up later and are being made now. What cannot be stored is the using. A number in an account is not a deferred dinner; it is a claim on a dinner somebody will have to cook on the day. If nobody is cooking, the claim buys nothing, however large it is.

Keynes puts the consequence in the flattest available language: “capital is not a self-subsistent entity existing apart from consumption. On the contrary, every weakening in the propensity to consume regarded as a permanent habit must weaken the demand for capital as well as the demand for consumption.” Nobody builds a shoe factory for a country that has resolved to stop buying shoes. Thrift, past a point, does not feed investment. It starves it.

And so the moral ranking inverts, and Keynes says so with obvious relish: “The more virtuous we are, the more determinedly thrifty, the more obstinately orthodox in our national and personal finance, the more our incomes will have to fall when interest rises relatively to the marginal efficiency of capital. Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.” He runs back through the eight motives for saving he had catalogued a few pages earlier — Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride, Avarice — and dismisses the lot: “Virtue and vice play no part.”

To his credit he takes it back partway in the same paragraph, and the retraction is the honest core of the thing: “No, this is an overstatement. If the rate of interest were so governed as to maintain continuous full employment, virtue would resume her sway; — the rate of capital accumulation would depend on the weakness of the propensity to consume.”

That caveat is the whole live dispute, ninety years on. If interest rates adjust so that saved money reliably finds a productive use, thrift really is the engine and Smith’s ranking stands. If they don’t, because rates hit a floor, because money flees into safe assets, because financial provision and physical provision come apart, then thrift eats the economy that was supposed to reward it. Economists have argued about which world we live in since 1936 and the argument is not settled; it gets renamed every twenty years. Anyone who tells you the paradox of thrift is obviously true, or obviously a fallacy, has skipped the sentence where Keynes specified the condition.

Take the argument on its own terms for a moment, though, because it leads somewhere no summary ever quotes. If the problem is that money can be held without being used, then any activity that absorbs money without producing anything usable will serve as well as a real investment. Keynes noticed this, and rather than bury it he proposed it:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment.

He adds, deadpan, “It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.” Then the sting: “The analogy between this expedient and the gold-mines of the real world is complete.”

Gold mining is burying bottles and digging them up. It adds nothing anyone can eat, wear, or live in. And it is, as Keynes dryly observes, “the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance.” The prudent have always been willing to fund pure waste, provided the waste had the right shape.

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.

Two pyramids are better than one because nobody can use a pyramid, so the second does not spoil the market for the first. Two railways to the same city compete. In a world organized around holding claims rather than making uses, uselessness is a feature. And the phrase Keynes ends on names the fourth thing exactly, in the language of the account book, which is where the confusion started: we have schooled ourselves in “the maxims which are best calculated to enrich an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time.”

Claims to enjoyment he does not intend to exercise. Locke’s apples, with the rot taken out.

Hegel, who had no interest in economics and every interest in what ownership is, reached the matching conclusion from the other side. Use, he decided, is not something you do to your property afterward; use is the property being real. “My full use or employment of a thing is the thing in its entirety, so that if I have the full use of the thing I am its owner.” In his lecture notes, more bluntly: “he who has the use of arable land is the owner of the whole, and it is an empty abstraction to recognize still another property in the object itself.” He then hedges, insisting the owner’s will is the primary basis and use only its “manifestation,” which is fair enough, since that hedge is the difference between a legal system and a free-for-all. His two halves sit badly together, and the uneasy half is the one Keynes cashed.

Back in the Hall

Which brings us back to a man holding a pair of diamond buckles.

He believed he had made a choice about what to buy. Mutton for a hall full of coarse men, or a beautiful object that was his alone. Everyone he knew agreed that this was the choice in front of him, and everyone he knew thought the buckles were the better answer.

He had made a choice about who eats. The value was going to be consumed either way; that was never up for discussion, there was no world in which the grain sat quietly in the barn. So the entire content of his decision was the distribution of mouths. The old arrangement fed a thousand men who therefore had to do as he said. The new one fed a few hundred strangers in workshops across Europe, each of whom, in Smith’s careful accounting, drew “a tenth, to many not a hundredth, and to some not a thousandth” of their annual maintenance from him, and each of whom was consequently free to ignore him. “Though he contributes, therefore, to the maintenance of them all, they are all more or less independent of him, because generally they can all be maintained without him.”

The same quantity consumed. The consumers different. And his power had never been in the quantity.

You can trace where his consumption ended up, because Smith did. “What was formerly a seat of the family of Seymour is now an inn upon the Bath road.” And better: “The marriage-bed of James the First of Great Britain, which his queen brought with her from Denmark as a present fit for a sovereign to make to a sovereign, was, a few years ago, the ornament of an alehouse at Dunfermline.” A king’s bed, in a pub. That is what a use looks like when it finally lands on somebody.

Smith had a phrase for the impulse driving the whole exchange, and he did not soften that either: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” What the buckles bought was not more for himself. It was fewer people at the table, which he had been taught to experience as a rise in his standard of living, and which was in fact his abdication.

We are still holding the buckles. The vocabulary has improved, since we say portfolio and runway and store of value rather than abstinence, and a hall full of retainers has nothing much to recommend it. The mechanism has not changed at all. Every act of putting property somewhere is a decision about who uses it up, wearing the costume of a decision about whether to use it up. And a claim to enjoyment that nobody ever exercises is not a stored dinner. It is a pyramid, and its great advantage is that no one can eat it.