comes to mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a
more creditable showing of accumulated wealth. Among the motives
which lead men to accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope
and intensity, therefore, continues to belong to this motive of
pecuniary emulation.

In making use of the term "invidious", it may perhaps be
unnecessary to remark, there is no intention to extol or
depreciate, or to commend or deplore any of the phenomena which
the word is used to characterise. The term is used in a technical
sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating
and grading them in respect of relative worth or value -- in an
aesthetic or moral sense -- and so awarding and defining the
relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately
be contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious
comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of
worth.




Chapter Three

Conspicuous Leisure

If its working were not disturbed by other economic forces or
other features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of
such a pecuniary struggle as has just been described in outline
would be to make men industrious and frugal. This result actually
follows, in some measure, so far as regards the lower classes,