The age of affluence

We live in an age of such affluence that luxuries become mundane very quickly. Flying from London to...

We live in an age of such affluence that luxuries become mundane very quickly. Flying from London to New York for a weekend's shopping no longer seems very exclusive when any website can sell you return fares for a few hundred pounds. There's nothing special about jetting off to Thailand or buying a house in Provence. Everyone does that these days. In the 1950s, satirist Stephen Potter wrote a book called One-Upmanship, which he defined as the subtle, yet necessary, art of making your associates feel inferior to you, elevating your own status, and being generally one-up on them. In that s...