It’s really quite shocking isn’t it? It reminds me of the conspicuous consumption of the roaring twenties. Fat cats smoking cigars rolled with hundred dollar bills. That sort of thing.

Just two weeks ago, they published this bill by a businessman in London who is clearly not feeling the pain of austerity and slump like most Britons.

Not least because he’s a Russian.

I see Tim J is duty troll today.

So there is a residency qualification when it comes to Conspicuous Consumption, then?

He’s someone doing business in London and consuming conspicuously in London. I doubt the watering holes of New York were too concerned about the nationality of the Vanderbilts.

I don’t think it made him happy.

Of course it’s class war, doesn’t mean it can’t be other things as well.

Read the bloody article – it was a RUSSIAN businessman.

Ok… I suggest you all stop aiming at your feet…

£20,000 on champagne means a lot of money just went to the government in the form of Alcohol Duty and VAT…

I don’t know why you are complaining about a private business man spending this kind of money when Parliament bars have subsidies that keep the alcohol there at half the price of the market around them.

The later is flagrant abuse of tax money, while the former is adding to government’s coffers.

Sort your priorities and targets out Sunny.

Can anyone advise on swapping bottle labels? I have a cunning plan…

3 – I struggle to get too engaged with a story about a Russian businessman being obscenely vulgar in a London nightclub. But that’s probably because Russian businessmen have been extremely vulgar in London nightclubs since the fall of Communism. It’s what Russian businessmen do.

And the Vanderbilts were American, from back before there was an America. What on earth are you talking about?

The spending of rich and vulgar brutes like this keeps others of us in jobs.

15% service charge = £2,502 (or more than most people make in a month).

Fuxxake!

@8 To be honest it won’t have been the label so much as the venue. After the switch to capitalism in Russia there were a number who became very wealthy, and who had no-where to be really extravagant with their dosh. So in response some ’boutique’ stores opened up selling the exact clothes you could buy from nearby traders markets for Primark prices at almost 1000 times the cost. They shifted too, the product actually being sold was status.

How spoilt you sound, over 99% of people in britian have a home, they have three square a day, they have access to education and healthcare.

I bought a sausage and egg mcmuffin to try and curb my post derby day hangover, half went in the bin.

Imagaine what a fly ridden, starving african child would think of that?

How much energy have you wasted writing this crap – thats the real crime.

Russia is indeed a vilely unequal place.

It’s the way the government has such power over the economy you see: those in government can make sure that their friends profit hugely.

I’m glad Russian oligarchs spend their money in London. It provides jobs for British people and profits for local businesses.

@ Bobski

“Ok… I suggest you all stop aiming at your feet…

£20,000 on champagne means a lot of money just went to the government in the form of Alcohol Duty and VAT…”

…yes, just as it would have done if instead of going into the pockets of one rich businessman, that £20,000 had gone into the pockets of 99 of his employees – and they had each spent £200 on champagne. This isn’t about the fruits of economic growth vanishing from the economy, it’s about them being spread around more fairly.

To be fair, a jeroboem is the equivilent of four bottles and a magnum is two, so he really bought seven bottles of champagne in total, which he must have shared. Heart of gold that one.

@16.

Define ‘fair’.

Does ‘fair’ mean everyone getting the same?

Does ‘fair’ mean no-one going without?

Does ‘fair’ mean every individual getting what they think they are owed?

Does ‘fair’ mean each individual getting what everyone else thinks they deserve?

What does fair mean? Because of those four variations of ‘fair’ above, no two are the same.

@ 18

We can do without the concept of ‘fairness’ if you like, and instead make do with the claim that the UK would be a nicer place to live if the fruits of growth were spread around more equally.

The idea that it’s fair (as well as desirable) to promote equality is based, I suppose, on the idea that the proceeds of growth should (in fairness) be shared around in a way that reflects the contribution to growth made by different groups through their investment of time, skill, labour, capital etc., and that the contribution made by those who invest capital is not so much greater than the contribution of those who invest labour as the present distribution of income might suggest.

erm – the big question is – How much money has he had help with salting away to a nice British protectorate tax haven? I gather city types are rather helpful on these matters.

Osborne’s tax deal with Switzerland effectively destroyed a EU initiative to control Switzerland and other tax havens. As over half are ex-Empire islands and Osborne has many chums in the City he felt it wouldn’t be right.

NOT a London businessman, so the headline is, as Tim J pointed out, a lie.
Last time I counted a majority of Russian oligarchs had been active members of Komsomol, which is how they got to be oligarchs. So, maybe, there are grounds for commenting on the unfair distribution under authoritarian statist regimes rather than attacking those of us who work bloody hard in London for fairly modest rewards.

I don’t think this is a good idea. Targeting individual incidents of conspicuous consumption just plays into the right wing narrative that this is not about fairness, but about envious types demanding payment for no work. Also, the problem is not that the rich are bad people. If people believe the problem is that the rich are evil, like in many revolutions in history, they will just defenestrate the current rich people and the economic system generating that inequality will remain untouched.

Tim W: “It’s the way the government has such power over the economy you see”

Nah, it’s the way the economy has such power over the government, or to be more accurate, the way the largest economic interests in the country have wholly captured the institutions of democracy for their own exclusive benefit.

GO @ 19:

Which of these two societies would you prefer to live in?

Society A, in which the average pay of the top 10% is £100,000pa and the average pay of the bottom 10% is £5000pa

Society B, in which the average pay of the top 10% is £500,000 pa and the average pay of the bottom 10% is £15000 pa.

If you want “more equality”, you will choose A, even though the poorest 10% will be worse off than in B. If you want to maximise the minimum for the poorest 10%, you will choose B, even though it is a much less equal society.

@10 – Ah right, yes, it keeps the rich in jobs. Shame about the other clases.

@23 – You have a strange and biased idea of “average” as a single calculation. There’s more than one type of average.

@14 – Which is why you’re cheering the ConDem’s massive increases in inequality on. Right.

The debate seems initially concerned with whether a Russian doing business in London is just that, or a London businessman.
Would that be the same debate as South Africans, Samoans, Australians et al playing rugby or cricket for England, where they are described as ‘English’?
At least when the poor have all gone he can eat his money, whatever country he comes from.

Visceral hatred worthy of a fresher just recruited to the SWSS. Scratch a moderate Labour man and so often you find a sulky Trot, eh?

If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gave it to. By the second bottle he wouldn’t have known if it was Cava and by the third it could have been Tizer or meths. Recently I read a piece on conspicuous consumption by the rich, £6000 handbags, a £20,000 dessert, half a million for a watch that’s less accurate than one that costs £50 and even gold plated cowboy boots for the person who has everything except good taste

If capitalism begins as the practical idealism of the bourgeoisie, it ends in an orgy of materialism.
Talcott Parsons.

@23 theophrastus
Read The Spirit Level: absolute wealth isn’t everything; relative wealth may actually be more important for one’s sense of wellbeing.
And does your example assume that cost of living and other variables are held constant? Because I would rather live in Society A if it had strong state benefits and cheap housing, even if I earned less in absolute terms than in Society B. (These aren’t independent variables: the 10% earning £500K in B are likely to invest heavily in property, driving house prices up for everyone else; and many of them are likely to have made pots of money off privatised services that might be delivered publicly in A.)
Money is just a marker of social relations you know – it doesn’t have any intrinsic value.

Good for trickle-down economics supporters : I would rather that £20k was in the wild and speading itself round the block than doing sod all in a bank.

When 99% of people in a country are suffering while only the top 1% benefit, it isn’t class war but institutional robbery.

I agree. That is a fair description of Russia where thugs linked to the people in power loot the state of all it is worth for no one’s benefit except their own.

It is not a fair description of Britain. So this example is utterly worthless.

Unless you want us to become more like Russia. Which is seems you do. I would suggest it would be better for Russia to become more like us.

22. jungle

Nah, it’s the way the economy has such power over the government, or to be more accurate, the way the largest economic interests in the country have wholly captured the institutions of democracy for their own exclusive benefit.

That is not true of Russia – the oligarchs are not powerful because they are wealthy. They are wealthy because they are powerful. Most of them were not businessmen but Communist Party cadres who used the break up of socialism to loot the state of all it was worth. The model that the West is rapidly approaching – Solyandra in the US did not get the attention of Obama because it was wealthy, it got billions in loans because it had the ear of the President. Crony Capitalism at work. Britain does not want to go down this route.

30. Gordon Ingram

Read The Spirit Level: absolute wealth isn’t everything; relative wealth may actually be more important for one’s sense of wellbeing.

Read the criticisms of the Spirit Level. It is crap.

Because I would rather live in Society A if it had strong state benefits and cheap housing, even if I earned less in absolute terms than in Society B. (These aren’t independent variables: the 10% earning £500K in B are likely to invest heavily in property, driving house prices up for everyone else; and many of them are likely to have made pots of money off privatised services that might be delivered publicly in A.)

And you will, no doubt, be waiting in queues for a hell of long time for that socialised house in Society A as available housing is held by the state against private competition and handed out to their favoured clients. Not you.

Money is just a marker of social relations you know – it doesn’t have any intrinsic value.

I don’t think that Russian was drinking social relations.

The restaurant must have been beside itself when the businessman told them he had lost his wallet and had to go get some cash.

What were the chances he would actually pay as opposed to doing a runner?

LW @ 25

Choose whatever type of average you prefer: the point remains. My thought-experiment shows that socialists must prefer a scenario in which the poorest are poorer in absolute terms if that scenario involves more equality than the other options available.

GI @ 30: ‘The Spirit Level’ is discredited. Try for starters the BBC R4 ‘Analysis’ on the book. The podcast is on the i-player archive.

Yes, I assume the cost of living and all other variables are constant. The thought-experiment is derived from ‘A Theory of Justice’ by John Rawls, where he shows that rational agents behind a veil of ignorance about the place they would occupy in society would choose the scenario in which the minimum is maximised, not the scenario in which equality was maximised.

LW @ 24:

“Ah right, yes, it keeps the rich in jobs. Shame about the other clases.”

Rich Russians guzzling over-priced champagne in nightclubs help keep waiters, cleaners and delivery drivers, among others, in work. Such people are hardly rich themselves.

@33 So Much For Subtlety:

>>Read the criticisms of the Spirit Level. It is crap.

LOL, it must be really crap if you don’t even have to tell me what the criticisms are, or who made them. Or maybe you don’t remember? But that’s OK, it doesn’t fit in with your worldview and you read/heard a few criticisms of it somewhere, so it must be “crap”.

>>And you will, no doubt, be waiting in queues for a hell of long time for that socialised house in Society A as available housing is held by the state against private competition and handed out to their favoured clients. Not you.

Firstly, I never wrote or implied that all housing in Society A would be state-owned; I just wrote that housing would be cheaper there.

Secondly, even if all housing were allocated by the state, who is to say that I wouldn’t be among their favoured clients? As an Oxbridge graduate, I have a fair amount of social and cultural capital, with a large network of successful, influential friends. However, I have close to zero net economic capital, because my job (as a university researcher) has been massively devalued compared to certain other jobs (mainly those connected to the financial sector).

>>I don’t think that Russian was drinking social relations.

So you are confident, then, that you (or he) could tell the difference between the three bottles of bubbly on that receipt in a blind taste test?

Social relations were EXACTLY what he was drinking: As several others have pointed out here, he couldn’t have drunk it all alone, so he was showing off his wealth (and, to a certain extent, his immorality) to friends / business connections / girls he wanted to pull.

If some fizzy wine had been all he’d been drinking, he could have had much the same experience for £200 or so. Or better still (as someone else pointed out) he could given £200 to each of his employees and they could ALL have had that experience. But no, that would make him a *socialist,* apparently…

@36 I suspect the group keeping those in work is significantly more broad than “rich Russians guzzling over-priced champagne in nightclubs”, and indeed may also include themselves.

@35 theophrastus:

>>‘The Spirit Level’ is discredited. Try for starters the BBC R4 ‘Analysis’ on the book. The podcast is on the i-player archive.

“Discredited” is too strong a word, even if you disagree with the book. In academia, the word is usually applied when there is evidence of dishonesty (or possibly gross incompetence) such that totally false data has been presented in support of a certain conclusion. It is a consensus word: you shouldn’t apply it if there is still a significant section of a discipline which believes in the data

And let me rewrite something I wrote in my last response: Maybe you don’t remember what the criticisms are, or who made them? But that’s OK, it doesn’t fit in with your worldview and you read/heard a few criticisms of it somewhere, so it must be “crap”.

Arguments are supposed to work by marshalling evidence in support of your data, not telling someone to go and listen to a podcast somewhere and then they’ll understand why an idea is wrong.

>>Yes, I assume the cost of living and all other variables are constant. The thought-experiment is derived from ‘A Theory of Justice’ by John Rawls, where he shows that rational agents behind a veil of ignorance about the place they would occupy in society would choose the scenario in which the minimum is maximised, not the scenario in which equality was maximised.

Yes, I recognised Rawls’s idea – a 40-year-old theory (*theory*, not empirical demonstration) which, as far as I am aware, only considers absolute wealth distribution and not relative wealth distribution. This is why I pointed to _The Spirit Level_. Even if one disagrees with Wilkinson and Pickett’s empirical analyses (and I understand there are issues there, as there are with any empirical data) one surely has to acknowledge that the omission of considerations of relative wealth is a big hole in Rawls’s theory. Intuitively, we all know that sometimes it feels better to be a big fish in a small pond, or “first among equals”; and these are the sort of phenomena that his theory misses.

As usual in these debates, what is omitted from responses is as significant as what is considered, and you say nothing about my points concerning the effects on cost-of-living (especially housing costs) in Society B compared to Society A.

@36

Rich Russians guzzling over-priced champagne in nightclubs help keep waiters, cleaners and delivery drivers, among others, in work. Such people are hardly rich themselves.

Indeed. I don’t know about you, but I’ve constantly dreamed of the opportunity to be a menial servant to some more-money-than-sense Russian oligarch as he blows more money on an evening’s fizz than some people see in a year. My careers teacher would be so proud.

Not shocking at all but yeah I think it puts paid to the “no money left! Poor ole rich people are squeezed supporting everyone and can’t afford taxes” blah blah blah.

@40 I wonder if our perception might be different if he had been a footballer? Or if he had blown the money on a roulette wheel or a hand of cards ? Just because times are tough doesn’t mean that we should all be philistines, in fact if you can afford it then now is the time to spend, spend spend… PS, I wonder what size the tip was

37. Gordon Ingram

LOL, it must be really crap if you don’t even have to tell me what the criticisms are, or who made them.

Yes it is and no I don’t. The internet was full of people talking about this. Their wikipage is too. Why do you not know?

Or maybe you don’t remember? But that’s OK, it doesn’t fit in with your worldview and you read/heard a few criticisms of it somewhere, so it must be “crap”.

Cherry picking their data mostly. They excluded countries like Japan when it suited their argument and included them when it didn’t. They ignored race in America – virtually all their claims, when corrected for race, disappear. It was, as I said, crap.

Firstly, I never wrote or implied that all housing in Society A would be state-owned; I just wrote that housing would be cheaper there.

Then you are living in some fantasy land of your own. The only impact of socialised anything is higher housing prices. Or queues. Or both.

Secondly, even if all housing were allocated by the state, who is to say that I wouldn’t be among their favoured clients?

By all means. Good for you. But I don’t think that is a sensible argument. It is beside the point. Because if you are a favoured client, millions of other people won’t be.

However, I have close to zero net economic capital, because my job (as a university researcher) has been massively devalued compared to certain other jobs (mainly those connected to the financial sector).

So …. you work in the socialised sector and complain that you are not paid as much as the private sector? This is the fault of those nasty capitalists? Perhaps it is the fault of the University system not being in the capitalist world and relying on the government? One of the reasons the NHS is so cheap is that it is a monopoly employer and so does not pay well.

So you are confident, then, that you (or he) could tell the difference between the three bottles of bubbly on that receipt in a blind taste test?

Not really.

Social relations were EXACTLY what he was drinking: As several others have pointed out here, he couldn’t have drunk it all alone, so he was showing off his wealth (and, to a certain extent, his immorality) to friends / business connections / girls he wanted to pull.

You assume. Why do you think drinking champagne is immoral?

Or better still (as someone else pointed out) he could given £200 to each of his employees and they could ALL have had that experience. But no, that would make him a *socialist,* apparently…

Well no it wouldn’t, but how do you know he doesn’t?

Gordon Ingram

“Discredited” is too strong a word, even if you disagree with the book. In academia, the word is usually applied when there is evidence of dishonesty (or possibly gross incompetence) such that totally false data has been presented in support of a certain conclusion. It is a consensus word: you shouldn’t apply it if there is still a significant section of a discipline which believes in the data

Sorry but that is nonsense. Discredited in academia more usually means that the Leftists therein don’t like the book or its conclusions. No more. There is some pretty compelling evidence of, at least, gross incompetence here. The data does a good impression of being false – that is what cherry picking means.

Arguments are supposed to work by marshalling evidence in support of your data, not telling someone to go and listen to a podcast somewhere and then they’ll understand why an idea is wrong.

Your poor students. The podcast is evidence. Evidence of that consensus even.

Zarathustra

Indeed. I don’t know about you, but I’ve constantly dreamed of the opportunity to be a menial servant to some more-money-than-sense Russian oligarch as he blows more money on an evening’s fizz than some people see in a year. My careers teacher would be so proud.

How frightfully middle class of you. Not everyone in Britain had your head start in life. Some of them might like to work in a restaurant serving Russian billionaires. Why are you so snobbish about it?