Luxury Needs Exclusivity

The Agony of Good Times

Monday, December 29, 2025

Charles Dickens’s opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities are about the contradiction of sentiments we’re all familiar with: Times have never been better, yet we (in the imaginary collective of the human mind) feel as though conditions have never been worse. The sensation in modern times seems all the more acute, even as we see the statistics on wealth and prosperity indicating that everything is better now than it was ten, twenty, or much less 50 years ago.

If we look at the United States in particular, measures of GDP per person, life expectancy, overall national income and wealth, we should acknowledge that perception and reality are divergent.

One explanation for this is the negativity bias of the human psyche. We find it easier to over-emphasize bad news, to which we are more sensitive by nature. Bad news draws our attention because—as the theory goes—our evolutionary ancestors had to be perpetually on the lookout for threats to their survival. And in our media-saturated environment, in the attention economy, overemphasizing threats attracts eyeballs.

Perception is at odds with reality when we look at long-term surveys. They show Americans believe politics and governance generally are going in the wrong direction, while they also say that their own lives are great and better than ever. Satisfaction with the direction of the country is always about 70 to 30 percent negative, while satisfaction with one’s own life is about 80 to 20 percent positive.

Of course, some will appear more justified in their satisfaction than others. The well-off, it is said, are growing in number in America. And how they use that wealth to make their lives more satisfying has been undergoing change.

Wealthy people celebrate success by consuming luxury goods. The past few decades have been boom times for the major global luxury goods manufacturers. But the trend has taken a turn down in just the last several years. The numbers of super wealthy individuals have risen, but so too have the product offerings of designer clothes and accessories from the likes of, say, Christian Dior or Yves St. Lauren. They’ve tried to expand their reach to larger numbers of the well-off. But this has come at the price of exclusivity. The more exclusive an item is, the greater its signifying value. Something that a larger segment of the population can own is no longer an object of envy.

One arena the hyper-wealthy can still compete in, by way of contrast, is experiences. One person’s ticket to the Super Bowl represents a seat that someone else can’t occupy. Such exclusive experiences—the ultimate Veblen goods—have been booming in price.

The Economist recently posted a YouTube Short on the subject:

https://youtube.com/shorts/sUdF2A_ovac?si=6A3eq6xGFX2xEGv8

[Embedding the video is apparently blocked; the clickable link to YouTube is here.]

The trend makes me wonder whether this indicates a real phenomenon, or if it’s a passing fad among the super-rich. Those businesses playing it as a trend will be trying to create new “experiences” that are exclusive. Experiences are by nature exclusive: If you occupy a seat at the Super Bowl, someone else can’t also occupy it. Luxury goods, such as clothes or fashion accessories, can be mass-produced.

Luxury goods themselves are not exclusive enough if the aim is to show off one’s wealth. But being there on the red carpet ahead of some unique event that draws global attention cannot be mass produced. It cannot be stolen, either, for that matter.

As we bumble along across the threshold of a new year, the thing I’m left wondering is whether the growth in wealth we’ve been blessed with will continue, or whether the worst fears finally come true and national and global wealth creation all start going in reverse.

Are the worst of times about to dawn, or is the perennial anxiety once again going to prove excessively pessimistic?