I / The car
“It’s blue,” he said, matter-of-factly but with a tinge of surprise.
I nodded in the affirmative and sighed, as if making a painful concession: “Yeah.”
We stood in the driveway, side by side, contemplating the car, a 2026 BMW 530i. He held a Gamecocks koozie hugging a Heineken. I was an upright, clothed Rodin Thinker reflecting on my latest vanity procurement, right hand to chin. A quotidian suburban neighbor scene.
“I thought it was black when I first saw it,” he said. I raised my eyebrows and nodded again, contorting my lips into a self-mocking simper: “I thought it was black until I first washed it.”
He laughed. “No, seriously,” I batted his arm with my left hand. “I really thought it was black when I bought it.” He laughed again, took a sip of Heineken and introspected: “Well, it’s a subtle blue.” “Very subtle,” I concurred, with a deepening smirk.
He’s an Acura guy, or he was until a petty dispute with the higher-ups at Honda cost him his job and part of his legacy pension benefits. There are two sides to every story, and I’ve only heard his. But if it’s even half true, he was a casualty of corporate greed, which makes him the unwitting butt of his own Zohran Mamdani socialism jokes. (Thankfully, he had three decades of savings to fall back on. And his wife’s gainfully employed. He’s not actively looking for a new job.)
The only thing we have in common besides a neighborhood is a nostalgic affinity for Honda’s struggling luxury unit. I was an Acura guy too until my vanity demanded I upgrade to German engineering in 2023. That same vanity got the better of me last month as I mapped out another road trip. I’d be stopping at one of the same hotels I visited in July and it’d be embarrassing, Narcissus whispered, to show up to the same valet in the same car. Hence the BMW, my fourth German luxury vehicle in three years.
The BMW’s actually a downgrade. I swapped a high-end, performance variant Mercedes for a base model Beamer, with an important caveat. Despite being a base model, the BMW has M Series trim kits from the factory, both inside and out, which means it looks far more expensive than it is. You won’t fool anyone who knows BMWs (a group of people which, ironically for my purposes, includes valets), but you might fool your neighbors.
“It’s not a real M,” I told him. “Oh, really?” “No,” I laughed. “It’s just got the trim packages.” “What’s a real one run?” he wondered. “A brand new M5? ‘Bout $130,000.” His eyebrows rose. “Whew.” He looked down at his beer, then back up at the car. “Well, I’d be happy with this one.”
II / The paradox
The Easterlin Paradox says that although happiness and income are positively associated within countries at a given point in time (richer people are happier than poor people), the relationship disappears (or, more accurately, doesn’t show up reliably) over time in the presence of progressively better living standards.
The apparent antinomy isn’t, perhaps, as counterintuitive as it seems. You can explain it a number of ways, including by reference to a simple truism: If everyone’s rich, no one is. You secretly begrudge your neighbor his raise not because you wish him ill, but rather because it negates some, all or all and then some, of your relative well-being advantage.
At the economy-wide level, the implication is that past a certain point, happiness won’t continue to rise with real incomes. Because everyone will realize that no one’s becoming better off, relatively speaking. In the moment, a financial windfall may engender a personal happiness boost, but that psychological fillip will likely prove fleeting in the presence of rising overall living standards (or simply as a result of hedonic adaptation).
The phenomenon’s named for economist Richard Easterlin, who first proposed the paradox in “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence.” Originally published as a book chapter in a collection of papers compiled to honor the work of Moses Abramovitz, Easterlin’s 37-page exposition would go on to become the cornerstone of happiness economics and Easterlin the godfather of the subdiscipline.
The paradox is still actively (and vociferously) debated today. In July of this year, for example, Bloomberg Opinion’s Allison Schrager invoked it in a brief editorial puzzling over America’s so-called “vibecession,” the term coined by macro blogger-turned-celebutante Kyla Scanlon for the glaring disconnect between record-low readings on national gauges of household sentiment and an ostensibly buoyant economy.
In her piece, Schrager described the interplay between expectations and relative income in the course of summarizing one explanation for the purported absence of an over-time relationship between income and happiness within rich countries. “It could be that today’s America is already so rich that gains in income no longer pack the same punch,” Schrager wrote. “Then there are the constantly rising expectations for what is considered an acceptable living standard, which outpace Americans’ (also rising) incomes.”
Easterlin elaborated at length on expectations and relativity in his original piece. In the presence of secular income growth, each successive generation “embodies a higher level of living and correspondingly generates a higher level of consumption standards,” he wrote, of the expectations effect. “Even within the life cycle of a given generation,” progressively better living standards put “continuous upward pressure on consumption norms,” in turn “offset[ting] the positive effect of income growth on well-being that one would expect on the basis of economic theory.” Summarized in one short sentence: “The increase in [economic] output itself makes for an escalation in human aspirations, and thus negates the expected positive impact on welfare.”
As to relativity, Easterlin dutifully cited James Duesenberry, but he also channeled Karl Marx who, writing more than a century earlier, said, “A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But if a palace rises beside the little house, the little house shrinks into a hut.”
III / The bag
“Now that’s a machine, bruh,” he declared, pronouncing on the BMW with an air of authority.
We were standing in the parking lot of the DICK’s Sporting Goods attached to West Town Mall in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was in town for the second time in five weeks, this time to take my niece shopping for school clothes. She’s my niece like he’s my brother, which is to say not literally. But, well, “Ain’t the question,” as Lefty told Donnie. “Even if you had a family. If this is your family, then this is your family.”
He bent down to examine the wheels. I’d paid extra for the M Aero Bicolor Black/Grey 939Ms. Like the rest of the trim package, they made the car look like the performance 5 series. To the untrained eye, anyway. “You like it better than the Benzes?” I wondered, already knowing the answer. “A hundred percent,” he confirmed, without looking up from the rims.
He always wanted a 5 series Beamer. Three years previous, nearly to the day, I talked him out of buying one, and certainly not because I don’t want nice things for my brother. He was perilously close to rolling up the negative equity on his Cadillac into an 84-month loan on a BMW that only had 15,000 or so miles left on the factory warranty. It was an objectively bad idea.
“It’s soooo hot out here,” my niece complained, tossing her head back as though she might faint and stamping her feet. “She’s ready to go in,” I told him. “You think?” she jeered, in the heedless cadence of a spoiled 13-year-old. We scolded her in unison, Sopranos-style (“Oh!” “Aye!”). ” “Niyah, you tell your uncle C sorry,” he demanded. “Or you won’t be gettin’ anything today.” It was an empty threat and she knew it. Still, she obliged: “Sorry uncle C.” “That’s ok,” I told her. “And it is hot. So let’s go inside.” She skipped ahead of us. He took one last look at the car. “Damn, C. Them wheels go haaard.” “Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s not a real M, though.”
We spent the entire shopping trip in Rue21, as is custom. I’d rather not buy cheap clothes for my niece and nephew, but I accept the premise that there’s no point spending inordinate sums on things they’re going to grow out of in a year, if not sooner.
“How much can I get?” Niyah asked, grinning. I looked around at disheveled racks of sweatshop-made fast-fashion, all of which looked like knock-off Palm Angels. As usual, sales were rolled into other sales, promotions stacked atop other promotions. (Is a BOGO deal that’s also 50% off free?) “As much as you want,” I told her.
An hour and a half later, we walked out with four enormous bags filled to the brim, which he and I had to carry — she couldn’t have managed two of them, let alone all four, by herself. She begged us to go to Dillard’s, and we both said no. Then I remembered I was nearly out of Rouge 540. “Actually, I need something in there,” I told my brother. “Ok, but C, she’s gonna want that Kirk– what is it?” “A Kurt Geiger bag!” she shrieked.
I’d never heard of Kurt Geiger, but once we were in Dillard’s I surmised that it’s a brand on par with Kate Spade, Dooney & Bourke and, worst of all, Coach. I was mortified. “Niyah, I’m not buying you this. Any of this,” I said, waving my hand around at the collection of so-called “accessible-premium” bags and women’s footwear. “It’s not real,” I told her.
She didn’t understand: “It’s real!” My brother tried to explain: “He’s saying it’s not good enough for you, Niyah.” “Exactly!” I nearly shouted. “What’d I tell you?” She looked confused. “About your grades,” I reminded her. “Keep them up and I can have Gucci,” she said, with a melodramatic shoulder slump. She’d get As and a real bag for Christmas or not. Either way, there’d be no Kurt Geiger.
I tried to show her the difference. I unslung my Givenchy Antigona backpack and put it next to one of Kurt’s finest clutch bags. “That’s real,” I said, of the backpack. “That’s not,” of the clutch. “Help me out here, man,” I beseeched my brother. He was no help. “Honestly C, she don’t know the difference,” he said. “She’d be happy with Coach.”
IV/ The debate
As an academified variation of an old adage (maybe money can “buy happiness” for a given person at a given point in time, but greater and greater amounts of national wealth won’t provide for steady and commensurate increases in nationwide happiness over time), the Easterlin Paradox appeals to our affinity for platitudinous folk wisdom. And yet, there’s something undeniably counterintuitive about the idea that nations don’t become happier in the presence of secular economic growth.
Of course, that’s why it’s a paradox. The dictionary definition of “antinomy” describes “a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that seem equally reasonable.” Contradictions, by their very nature, invite criticism. It’s thus hardly surprising that the Easterlin Paradox has its share of critics, chief among them former US Labor Department economist Betsey Stevenson and her partner, Justin Wolfers, a happiness economist and public policy scholar.
In a widely-cited 2008 paper, the duo sought to “reassess” Easterlin’s namesake phenomenon. Across 84 pages (more than 100 if you include the references and a section for “comments and discussion”), Stevenson and Wolfers arguably overstate Easterlin’s original formulation, including in the very first sentence, which reads, “The Easterlin paradox suggests that there is no link between a society’s economic development and its average level of happiness.”
As written, and forgetting the ensuing 19,845 words, that’s probably too strong. Or too broad. Both. The paradox, to quote a 2020 paper by Easterlin and Kelsey J. O’Connor, a frequent collaborator in Easterlin’s final years, says that “at a point in time, happiness varies directly with income, both among and within nations, but over time the long-term growth rates of happiness and income are not significantly related.” By removing the temporal distinction at the very heart of the conundrum, Stevenson and Wolfers created a straw man. By using the phrase “no link,” they made for Easterlin a more sweeping claim than the paradox makes for itself.
They did something similar in describing the “discordant findings” that comprise the enigma. The dissonance, they wrote, is between the idea that “income is an important predictor of individual happiness, yet apparently irrelevant for average happiness.” That too could be interpreted as a significantly broader claim than Easterlin actually made. His argument was that higher incomes are indeed associated with happiness, but only on a cross-sectional basis and/or in the short run.
It’s not that income (or growth) is “irrelevant” for average happiness, it’s that outside of, say, one business cycle, trends in income aren’t sufficiently predictive of subjective well-being to assume a positive link between output and welfare. As Easterlin and O’Connor put it in the 2020 paper mentioned above, “growth does not in itself increase happiness in the long-term.”
Thankfully, Stevenson and Wolfers are more precise when they need to be and they do ultimately address most of the key issues, but their seeming penchant for oversimplifying Easterlin’s central observation is indicative: In their years-long back-and-forth, critics and proponents of the paradox, including Easterlin himself, often appeared to talk past each other, perhaps deliberately.
Rather than try to reconcile Easterlin’s paradox, Stevenson and Wolfers purported to show in 2008 that on inspection, it doesn’t exist. That a closer look at the data, both new and old, shows “a clear positive link between average levels of subjective well-being and GDP per capita across countries” and that there’s “no evidence of a satiation point beyond which wealthier countries have no further increases in subjective well-being.”
The implication: Academics who focused on squaring the circle by way of reference-point analysis (e.g., expectations) and relative income (Marx’s house-to-hut transformation, better known in modernity as the “Keeping up with the Joneses” phenomenon) were assuming the presence of a fictional conundrum.
This debate matters for public policy. Although Easterlin himself wasn’t a degrowth economist, the degrowth camp leans on his work to make their case. After all, if long-term happiness isn’t correlated in a meaningful way with long-term GDP growth rates, then chasing ever more output at the expense of, among other things, the environment, is a fool’s errand to the extent the ultimate goal of public policy is improving well-being.
As O’Connor wrote in a recent article, “if the paradox is true, then economic growth alone does not constitute development or societal progress.” That might seem self-evident to some readers, but to a macroeconomic consensus still very much wedded to the idea that there’s no such thing as “too much” growth, it’s heresy. Modern economic orthodoxy accepts the general premise that more growth’s better than less, that no growth’s bad and that contractions are inherently injurious.
Although difficult to refute when contextualized by the dramatic increase in living standards since humanity escaped the Malthusian trap (and particularly over what Brad DeLong calls the “long 20th century” from 1870 to 2010), dogmatic assertions about the primacy of economic growth in explaining human well-being unavoidably clash with what most of us recognize as diminishing returns on incremental wealth gains. The friction’s especially evident when wealth manifests as material possessions.
At a basic level, the “law” of diminishing returns is more intuition than rule. You don’t have to study any stylized depictions of the production process to grasp the concept. Forget input-output curves, diminishing returns is a feeling. In the realm of happiness economics, it’s formalized as the “income satiation point” or, more simply, the “happiness plateau.”
The idea of such a plateau represents a qualified Easterlin paradox. Stevenson and Wolfers addressed it in a 2013 paper. “[S]ome researchers have argued for a modified version of Easterlin’s hypothesis, acknowledging the existence of a link between income and well-being among those whose basic needs have not been met, but claiming that beyond a certain income threshold, further income is unrelated to well-being,” they wrote.
Not surprisingly given their determination to refute Easterlin at every turn and in sometimes abrasive language, Stevenson and Wolfers found no evidence to support the existence of such a threshold. “The relationship between well-being and income… does not diminish as incomes rise,” they concluded. “If there is a satiation point, we are yet to reach it.”
Other researchers disagree, or at least contend that this remains an open question. In a 2010 paper, Daniel Kahneman — history’s most celebrated behavioral economist — and Angus Deaton — whose Deaths of Despair, with Anne Case, now supersedes Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone as the canonical study of American socioeconomic decline, in my humble view — delineated two “aspects” of subjective well-being, “emotional well-being” and “life evaluation,” in an attempt to determine whether, in fact, money buys happiness. Emotional well-being assesses the “quality of an individual’s everyday experience,” as defined by “the frequency and intensity of joy, stress, sadness, anger and affection.” Life evaluation, by contrast, refers simply to “the thoughts that people have about their life.”
After analyzing nearly half a million responses to a daily Gallup survey of 1,000 Americans, Kahneman and Deaton found that the distinction between the two aspects of well-being matters quite a bit when it comes to the relevance of income for happiness. “When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily,” they wrote, summarizing their conclusions. “Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of $75,000.” (Emphasis mine.)
Adjusted for inflation, that suggests that in 2026, the income satiation point for emotional well-being is about $115,000. “High income buys life satisfaction,” Kahneman and Deaton wrote. “But not happiness.”
That finding was replicated in 2018 by researchers at Purdue. “Does happiness rise indefinitely with income, or is there a point at which higher incomes no longer lead to greater well-being?” Andrew Jebb, Louis Tay, Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi asked, in “Happiness, Income Satiation And Turning Points Around The World.”
The study, which reviewed data from Gallup’s World Poll and controlled for demographic factors, found that income satiation sets in just below $100,000 for life evaluation and far lower (somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000) for emotional well-being. “There is substantial variation across world regions, with satiation occurring later in wealthier regions,” the authors wrote, but added that “in certain parts of the world, incomes beyond satiation are associated with lower life evaluations.” (Emphasis mine.)
Crucially, those results are for individuals, not families. Still, the findings were notable. As Jebb, then a graduate student, put it, the results “might be surprising as what we see on TV and what advertisers tell us we need would indicate that there is no ceiling when it comes to how much money is needed for happiness.”
Last year, a trio of academics from Austria presented similar evidence in favor of an income satiation point. Their work suggests such a threshold exists in Europe, even as “only a few” European countries have met or crossed it.
A related phenomenon suggests a role for mean reversion. “Hedonic adaptation” posits a baseline level of happiness that can shift with circumstance, but will ultimately serve as an anchoring point. One consequence is that economic windfalls won’t produce long-lasting increases in subjective well-being. The pursuit of happiness is thus a “treadmill,” in the famous framing of Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, whose 1971 essay “Hedonic Relativism And Planning The Good Society” introduced hedonic adaptation into the lexicon.
“In specifying only the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right of man, the writers of our Declaration of Independence may well have expressed an intuitive understanding of adaptation-level theory, as indeed have certain philosophers since the time of the Stoics and the Epicureans,” Brickman and Campbell half-quipped, writing three years before Easterlin introduced his paradox. “While happiness, as a state of subject pleasure, may be the highest good, it seems to be distressingly transient.”
Again: The notion that more growth will everywhere and always correlate with higher levels of overall happiness is actually at odds with what humans have intuited for millennia based on their own lived experience. Seen through that lens, it’s ironic that someone like Easterlin was considered “an intellectual iconoclast,” as Andrew Oswald, a close friend and colleague, wrote in memoriam early last year.
It’s not possible to settle this debate with numbers. The data’s heterogeneous, incomplete and thereby ambiguous. There’s no settled definition of happiness. It means something at least a little bit different for each individual person. Hence subjective well-being. And even today, more than five decades on from Easterlin’s original paper, what data we do have’s woefully inadequate for the purposes of proving or disproving anyone’s hypotheses.
More generally, this debate’s an example of the absurdity underlying what I’m confident in describing as “most” social science disputes: The propositions and conclusions on both sides are intuitive such that even in cases where it’s possible to establish something definitively, that something almost always falls into the self-evident category.
That’s one (but hardly the only) reason I’ve become so disillusioned over time with economics, political science and the like, disciplines I once embraced with open arms. As I put it here, the notion that the soft sciences “can be refined, reformed and forged in the image of physics through iterative metricizing and tortured mathematicalization [is] comically quixotic, inherently futile and, worse, risk[s] sterilizing the disciplines in the name of claiming for them a kind of rigor not well-suited for inquiry into the vagaries of human behavior.” All that to arrive at self-evident conclusions.
Easterlin and his critics spent half a century — take a beat to wrap your mind around that: half a century — arguing the merits of two ostensibly conflicting propositions, neither of which regular people would deny in everyday conversation.
Curious as to whether that characterization counts as unduly dismissive, colored as it is by what, after all these years, has hardened into something not unlike outright aversion to the soft sciences, I asked a super-intelligence if I was perhaps too jaded to be objective. I was surprised by the response I received. “The durable insight” from the 50-year back-and-forth between Easterlin and his critics “is almost banal,” OpenAI remarked, after “thinking” for a few seconds. “Money plainly matters, especially when it relieves scarcity [but] it also plainly fails to purchase a permanently higher collective position once everyone’s material baseline rises together.”
I chuckled to myself, then asked if I was right to suggest that Easterlin and his critics spent decades of their lives deliberately talking past one another, and if so, whether that’s just the sort of petty behavior a higher form of intelligence would expect from our species. Sam Altman’s creation concurred on both counts. “The quarrel metastasized because each camp kept privileging a different question — individual versus country, levels versus changes, short-run windfalls versus long run adaptation — and then treating its answer as dispositive of all the others,” it told me. “Whether consciously or not, that is very human.”
In the same fond farewell cited above, Oswald, an economics professor and a behavioral science scholar at the University of Warwick, described Easterlin’s postulation in almost Copernican terms. It’s “either wrong or one of the most profound notions ever put forward by a researcher in any field of academia,” Oswald said. Either way, he went on, the mere prospect that nations might not grow happier as they grow richer “ha[s] in principle to be faced by each prime minister, finance minister and president on our planet.” Climate change, he said, “may hasten the uncomfortable reckoning.”
V/ The storm
When last I wrote about degrowth economics, I was in the process of ending seven years of self-imposed exile on an island off the coast of South Carolina. One impetus for my decision to leave was climate change.
“The storms weren’t always hostile,” I wrote, in the first line of “Oblivion,” the July 2023 Monthly Letter. I went on to describe how the island weather used to be, once upon my childhood vacations, and how it was then, three decades later.
That summer, the world broke heat records in June, July and August, with July counting as the warmest month ever recorded to that point. Whether or not the island itself logged any such milestones, I was weary of climatic drama. Headlines trumpeting all-time-high ocean surface temperatures globally and new record lows for Antarctic sea ice were the last straw.
“Assuming it’s not too late to save the species, humanity has two options: Transition rapidly to renewable energy or cut back dramatically on the kinds of activities that are making the planet inhospitable,” I declared, typing furiously amid taped-up U-Haul boxes and furniture wrapped in moving plastic.
In the same piece, I expressed considerable doubt about humanity’s collective willingness to cut back in the interest of staving off an environmental cataclysm. Cutting back, I said, “is generally seen as a non-starter to the extent it means people should abandon the ‘more, more, more’ mentality that undergirds not just consumerism, but the religion of growth.”
Then I expounded the Easterlin Paradox and income satiation without naming them. To wit, from “Oblivion”:
It’s debatable whether people living in advanced economies are actually getting happier and living more fulfilling lives as time goes on. We might’ve bumped up against diminishing returns in that regard decades ago. That still leaves plenty (billions) of people with room to get happier in locales where living standards are still lower than they were in the developed world a few decades ago, but if it’s true that there’s a threshold beyond which ‘more’ doesn’t translate into better subjective experiences, or actually contributes to depression and anxiety, then the pursuit of growth for the sake of it in locales where that threshold has been breached is a fool’s errand, at best.
The fact that I penned those lines in a rush, without consciously referencing Easterlin or mentioning the formalized, academic debate around his paradox, speaks to the notion that although a degrowth agenda may be iconoclastic in the context of mainstream economics, it’s far from counterintuitive.
In 2012, ecological economists Giorgos Kallis, Christian Kerschner and Joan Martínez-Alier availed themselves of Easterlinian analysis to make the degrowth case. Indeed, they treat the existence of an income satiation threshold not as a contentious theory, but as settled fact. “Growth above a level that satisfies basic needs does not improve psychological well-being,” they wrote, in “The Economics Of Degrowth.” The citation is to a 2010 paper by Easterlin.
“The core question for 21st century economics is no longer how nations get rich, but how can degrowth become stable and prosperous,” Kallis, Kerschner and Martínez-Alier went on, adding that mainstream and even most heterodox economists “ignore this question, since for them growth is an axiomatic necessity.”
French economist Timothée Parrique is more emphatic. The Easterlin Paradox, which he equates with the saturation hypothesis, answers the question posed by Kallis, Kerschner and Martínez-Alier (and other questions like it) with a “resounding yes,” as he put it in 2022.
Three years later, Parrique published the provocatively-titled Slow Down Or Die, a 272-page volume which modestly suggests we “look beyond the vagaries of GDP and measure our economies through how well we provide for each other.” We should strive, Parrique says, to create “a just, equitable and sustainable society,” not for the “infinite accumulat[ion] of wealth.”
Suffice to say the degrowth camp, and ecological economics more generally, believes they have a friend in the Easterlin Paradox, whether its namesake counted himself such or not.
Although my exit from island exile ultimately landed me back in Knoxville, the site of my academic career and the movie set for my life’s most cinematic decade, I was for a time in early 2023 considering relocating to Asheville, North Carolina. As I sat in my downtown Knoxville loft the next year watching what I thought was America’s foremost climate change haven swept away by biblical flooding, I chuckled grimly at the tragic irony that could’ve befallen me: I would’ve been the man drowned by the remnants of a hurricane after fleeing to the mountains to escape Atlantic storms.
Had that been my fate, “Oblivion” would’ve stood as tragicomedy to posterity. “Recent events appear to suggest a cataclysmic tipping point could happen in my lifetime — that I may live to see a Hollywood-style climate catastrophe,” I wrote, 14 months before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on a destructive collision course with Asheville. “I’ll confess to being morbidly fascinated by that prospect, not so much because I’m afraid of it, but rather in a, ‘Wow, wouldn’t that be something?’ sort of way.”
Since nowhere’s safe anyway, I moved back to South Carolina shortly after Helene.
VI/ The attorney
After checking in at the Kimpton Hotel Arras in Asheville, I walked back outside to find both valets staring at the car. “Jesus guys, it’s not that nice,” It thought to myself.
I quickly realized they weren’t admiring the 5 series, but rather an impressive praying mantis alighted on the hood. “He said ‘This is the nicest car up here right now, so Ima just hang out right here,'” one of the attendants said, imagining the insect’s internal monologue. “It’s not a real M,” I told him. “Huh?” the valet asked. “Nothing. Never mind.”
I handed him a five and asked for a luggage rack. He retrieved one, and I got to work piling shoe boxes on the bottom and hanging jacket options from the hooks at the top. I was in town for one night on my way to Knoxville and I’d be back three nights later on my way back to South Carolina from Tennessee.
I had reservations at Table in two hours, just enough time to log a couple of miles, take a shower and a choose a dinner ensemble. I was impressed with the hotel, and I’d be even more impressed with Table, which delivered the single-best restaurant meal I’ve been served since Manhattan over a decade ago.
On my return trip through Asheville, I couldn’t resist booking Table again, but I limited myself to a few appetizers so as to save room for dinner somewhere else. “Other than here, what’s the best place to eat downtown,” I asked the bartender. He thought about it for a few seconds. “It’s hard to pick a ‘best,’ but if you’re only in town for tonight I’d try Luminosa.”
Luminosa’s an Italian restaurant on the bottom floor of The Flat Iron Hotel. It’s unapologetically haughty. Google describes a “relaxed eatery,” and while I suppose you can indeed “relax” at Luminosa, I wouldn’t recommend wearing shorts and flip flops.
After waiting at least 15 minutes for one of five unoccupied spots at the bar, a hostess finally invited me to sit. Inexplicably, she wedged me between two other bar diners despite a row of four open seats, any one of which would’ve given me more elbow and leg room. “Are those reserved?” I asked. “No,” she said curtly, then sashayed away.
On my left were two businessmen, apparently just off work. To my right, a late-fortysomething with what I recognized as a small (or medium) Prada Bonnie. “Great bag,” I said. “Oh!” she glanced at it, as though surprised to see it sitting next to her. “Thanks.”
“Is that the medium or the small?” “It’s the small,” she sighed. “I wish I’d gotten the medium. I carry too much stuff.” I nodded enthusiastically. “Me too. That’s why I got this.” I hoisted my Givenchy backpack up onto the bar top. “Oh I love that!” she said. “So cute.” I was inwardly crestfallen. “Cute” wasn’t the adjective I was looking for. I should’ve known better. Givenchy, nice as it is, isn’t Prada.
She was an attorney from Raleigh, in town to represent someone for legacy litigation related to the 2024 storm. Despite being just five years my senior, she spoke to me as one would a small child. I didn’t take it personally. She plainly occupied a tier at least one, and quite possibly two, above my own on the socioeconomic pyramid. She wore a gold Lady-Datejust with a diamond face and bezel.
She was staying at the Arras too, it turned out. A younger, naive me might’ve invited her for after dinner drinks at District 42, the hotel bar. Middle-age me knew better. I was Explorer 40, Oystersteel and Givenchy. She was Lady-Datejust, President bracelet and Prada. (“Not a chance, kid.”)
We talked a little more, almost entirely about fashion. Just as I strive for her rung on the class ladder, ashamed that my Beamer’s not an M, my Givenchy not Prada, my Rolex not gold, she longs for the exclusivity of the next level above hers. She wants a Birkin, but knowing she’ll never get one, she’d settle for the crocodile leather Bonnie. I looked it up on my iPhone. “They only make the crocodile in a mini,” I said. “That’d be even smaller than yours.” “But it’s crocodile,” she said, wistfully, with a sideways glance at her “plain” leather purse.
When I got back to the hotel, I was suddenly disenchanted with my backpack. I reminded myself that I have two Goyard messengers, one of which is on par price wise with the lawyer’s Prada Bonnie. Still, I couldn’t suppress the urge to “Keep up with the Olivias.”
I opened my laptop, went to Prada’s website and found the men’s Bonnie selection: 10 totes and two shoulder bags to choose from, $4,000 for the cheapest, $4,400 on the high-end. There was no crocodile option for men, but that was fine. The women’s mini croc Olivia favored was $28,000. A “man-sized” croc Bonnie might’ve easily cost as much as my 530i.
I made it all the way to the checkout page on an unthinkably handsome denim and leather variant, before I got cold feet. “Sleep on it,” I told myself. “It’ll still be there tomorrow.” I bookmarked the page, closed the window and checked my e-mail. Nothing needed immediate attention.
I took a klonopin and changed into my sleepwear: Camo Chrome Hearts pajama pants and a plain black Palm Angels tee. I laid down, but couldn’t sleep. I was late starting the Monthly Letter, and was beginning to worry an epiphany wasn’t forthcoming.
I thought about the trip, the car and the bags. And Asheville and “Oblivion.” Then it came to me, finally, as a faint echo from some undergrad econ seminar suffered many, many moons ago.
I fetched my laptop and brought it over to the bed. I couldn’t remember the name, but I knew what I was looking for. One Google search for “happiness, diminishing returns” brought it from the tip of my tongue to out-loud eureka: “The Easterlin Paradox!”
A few minutes later, I’d located the original 1974 book chapter. I scrolled down to the summary section to refresh my memory and, hopefully, find my muse.
“Is there any reason to suppose that the present generation has reached a unique culminating stage, and the next will not have its own catalog of wonders, which, if only attained, would make it happy?” Easterlin asked, rhetorically, of Americans in the 1970s.
“An antimaterialistic cultural revolution may be in the making, but it seems dubious that a major cause is an unprecedented affluence which American society has recently attained,” he went on, before setting out the hypothesis that would make him famous. “If the view suggested here has merit, economic growth does not raise a society to some ultimate state of plenty, rather, the growth process itself engenders ever-growing wants that lead it ever onward.”
“There it is,” I said. “Halle-fuckin’-lujah.” I minimized my browser window, opened Word and started typing: “‘It’s blue,’ he said, matter-of-factly but with a tinge of surprise.”
