leisured class

When not idling in drawing rooms, members of the leisured class took long walks and stared at trees.

Paid for with hydrocarbon cash and built largely by South Asian laborers, Saadiyat has been fabricated primarily as a destination for a global leisured class.

As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes,“The fact that culture requires leisure, is however, hardly a sufficient justification for the maintenance of a leisured class. For every artist which the aristocracy has produced, and for every two patrons of the arts, it has supported a thousand wastrels.”

As Niebuhr notes, “An intelligent society will know how to subsidize those who possess peculiar gifts … and will not permit a leisured class to justify itself by producing an occasional creative genius among a multitude of incompetents.”

Ever since Thorsten Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisured Class in 1899, economic status has been signaled by conspicuous consumption and grandstanding leisure.