The new beautician at my mother’s retirement center has raised prices for a simple haircut. A clip that previously cost  $17 now costs $20 for a woman and $15.00 for a man. Discrimination of that kind raises my hackles, but, of course, we women aren’t new to it.   Some might arg

Using wealth to build monuments to oneself isn’t easy.  A person has to work to spend with panache, because bragging rights are becoming  competitive.  Recently, a Saudi Prince spent $450.3 million at Christie’s for Leonardo da Vinci’s, Salvador Mundi. (Click)

Like the Marsh Hare from Alice In Wonderland, Extremely Important People (EPI) are wringing their hands and fretting.  “There’s nothing to buy.  There’s nothing to buy.”  That’s because large scale luxury providers have “sanded down” their merchandise and shifted thei

The United States is both practical and idealistic writes Siva Vaidhyanathan as he paraphrases the conclusions of Thorstein Veblen, a sociologist and economist who wrote at the turn of the 20th century.   Almost from the start, our educational system represented those polarities: Ha