Conspicuous education

Veblen’s conspicuous consumption rides on:

Rather than filling garages with flashy cars, the data show, today’s rich devote their budgets to less visible but more valuable ends. Chief among them is education for their children: the top 10% now allocate almost four times as much of their spending to school and university as they did in 1996, whereas for other groups the figure has hardly budged.

Book review in the Economist: The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. By Elizabeth Currid-Halkett