In the book Revisiting Keynes, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga argue that our excitement over buying a new thing is intense but short-lived. “The average consumer,” they said, “grows accustomed to what he has purchased and…rapidly aspires to own the next product in line.” So while Keynes predicted that we’d all be working very little by now, the rise in unnecessary consumption was part of what made him wrong.
