Conspicuous Consumption

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who popularized the the idea of “creative destruction,” notoriously once claimed:

Early in life I had three ambitions. I wanted to be the greatest economist in the world, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the best lover in Vienna. Well, I never became the greatest horseman in Austria.

Who knows whether Schumpeter lived up to his boasts, but the photograph on the cover of a new biography does prove that he was at least the most dapper economist in the world, and conceivably the most arrogant.