Raghuram Rajan Quotes

I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their tax bracket.

A Rolex watch or an expensive car are the things guys often use to show status, wealth, and basic desirability.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

Wealth has never been a sufficient source of honour in itself. It must be advertised, and the normal medium is obtrusively expensive.

These days, the media is defining what cultural capital is, and it's easily learned. If you have money, anything can be bought. We see this in China and Russia with what I call the "Bling Dynasty and New Oligarchy" in Generation Wealth. As people got rich and everybody started buying Louis Vuitton bags, it became clear that to distinguish yourself you had to have more than an expensive bag. People began to want the things that money is not supposed to be able to buy - history, tradition, education, and culture.

Luxury hasn't been democratised; it's been globalised.

I'm a slave to the culture, so I see an Audi, a Denali, or an Escalade, my neighbor got the four-door Porsche. I have a really nice truck. But it's a Durango and I like frontin'! I like to ride by and show off.

It's not just the kid who's spent every penny from his job to upgrade his car to tell the world he cares about sports cars, it's also the person driving around in a fuel-conscious hybrid electric car, because it's more a message to the world than an effective means of saving fuel, to be quite honest.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.

Socially smart people have always mocked the threateningly mobile, and anti-branding is a central strand of high-end status conflict now.

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.

I just don't like conspicuous consumption. I find it distasteful.

A big diamond necklace is nouveau riche, really. People who have wealth a long time don't wear such things.

I learned what a Birkin bag is from the price tag. You'll never forget what it is once you've paid for one.

I've decided that I am totally against jewelry. So I have all fake. There's no reason to have real diamonds. People think it's real anyway.

Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty.

I want young people to be able to buy into what I design. When I was young, I wanted to buy designer brands even if all I could afford was the cheapest wallet, the cheapest pen, the cheapest T-shirt because I wanted to be a part of it.

It's just as easy to buy a $12,000 watch in East Hampton as it is to pick up a carton of milk, and new homeowners are so impatient that they landscape their front lawns with 'mature gardens' of full-grown trees.

I always say to my people, 'If you don't sell a Ferrari to a football player, you make a big present to me.' Really. Because they buy to just show off. I don't like.

Unlike Milan, Italy's banking capital, or Rome, its religious center, Florence was the place where the rich went to buy goods that would showcase how wealthy they were.

To me, growing up in South Wales, a pair of Diesel jeans were the thing to have - if you could afford them.

At some point, extra incomes don't go to sate desires but to attempt to buy status through 'positional goods' - like the hottest car on the block. The problem is that there can only be one hottest car on the block.

There's nothing - I've bought everything I want. I don't like yachts or anything; you know, I'm not a yacht person, and I've got pretty much the nicest plane I'd want to have.

It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.

When a celebrity is spotted carrying a particular bag, everybody wants to own the same thing.