Purchase or Perish.

Mr. Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is completing a book on upscale culture in America.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess, by Robert H. Frank (Free Press, 336 pp., $25)

Let's say you're a professor of economics at Cornell and you get offered a job at Northwestern. You go out there to look around and it's pretty exciting: beautiful campus, smart kids, the attractions of Chicago just a few minutes away. Then you start thinking about your quality of life. In Ithaca, you were near the top of the economic pyramid. But in Chicago there are all those brokers and high-powered lawyers and corporate executives with incomes that tower over yours. In Ithaca, you could afford a handsome 1911 Arts and Crafts-style house, fully restored. But in Evanston that house would be way out of your range. Let's say a full professor at Northwestern makes a paltry $110,000 a year, but you'd need at least $170,000 a year to carry the mortgage on the charming house. Instead, you'd have to settle for a charmless split-level or a small colonial or something. You might even have to move into a neighborhood full of middle managers.

Such an experience is bound to make you contemplate social justice. Why, you might wonder, does the market reward people who lead inferior lives, who neglect their families so they can grind out more hours at work, who fill their days with anxiety-inducing corporate strife, who choose careers that don't allow them the intellectual freedom to contemplate the things that really matter? Maybe society can be restructured so that people would have incentives to lead calmer, more satisfying lives, and people like you could afford charming houses.

As it transpires, Robert H. Frank has come up with a plan. Frank is a professor of economics who lives in a handsome 1911 Arts and Crafts- style home in Ithaca. He was offered a job at Northwestern and made that awful discovery about the Evanston real-estate market. And he's done some thinking about the way we Americans earn and spend our money.

In Luxury Fever, he divides American consumption into two categories. There is conspicuous consumption, which is spending on the sorts of things shallow commodities traders buy: yachts, Rolex watches, $5,000 outdoor grills, premium cigars, $80,000 Jaguars, cosmetic surgery, and big houses with big yards. Then there is another form of consumption, which he calls non-conspicuous consumption, which means making work and spending choices in order to get the sort of things professors tend to prefer: free time, flexible hours, intellectual freedom, tight-knit communities with plenty of common areas, and large government agencies that offer an abundance of services. Frank thinks the second lifestyle- with lots of time to play with the kids and think deep thoughts-is better than the first. He proposes steep tax increases, to take money away from the rich so they don't have any incentive to work too hard or neglect the common good.

Now my first impulse is to tip my hat to Frank. In this age of cultural relativism and rampant pluralism, here finally is one person who says that one way of life is superior to another. But as I read further into Luxury Fever, I observe that Frank doesn't actually make a moral or philosophic argument that the contemplative life is better than the getting-and-spending life. That would be too judgmental. It would be out of step with the times.

Instead, Robert Frank turns to everybody's favorite ally these days, neuroscience. It seems that every non-fiction book I read lately has a few chapters that show that the structure of the human brain proves that the author's point of view is vindicated by science. I've read books that claim that the latest developments in neuroscience prove that the traditional male-dominated family is best, or that the communal family is best, or that man is naturally violent, or that man is naturally communal, or that man is communal so he can be violent against other communities. I confess I am not an expert on neuroscience, so I can't tell which interpretation of the literature is right. I only observe that neuroscience seems to offer a pretty gummy body of research, since it can be twisted in so many directions. And maybe that's one of the reasons it has become so fashionable. Philosophy and religion are in the doghouse, but brain chemistry dominates the age.

In any case, Frank uses neuroscience to prove that we would all be happier if we were liberals. "On the best available scientific evidence," he writes in that pseudo-objective tone I just love, "we seem not to be spending our money in ways that would most promote our own interests. We should be buying smaller houses and less expensive cars, the evidence seems to say, and spending more on a variety of less conspicuous forms of consumption." Also, our prefrontal lobes would have more serotonin in them (or something like that, I'm a little fuzzy on the chemistry) if we had bigger government and more social programs, especially environmental and safety regulations, urban-parkland programs, and a more generous social-safety net. (He detours into arguments for things like the minimum wage, but I'm not sure that is connected with brain chemistry.) And there would be other benefits. If the rich had less money, they wouldn't bid up the prices of things like Arts and Crafts homes in places like Evanston, Illinois. People earning, say, $110,000 would be able to afford them.

The reason we have gotten into this mess is that we are caught up in a competitive spiral (or at least most of us have, not Frank). We want to show we are as good as or better than our neighbors (there's something in our brains). So if they buy a $1,500 grill, suddenly that becomes our jumping-off point when we go shopping, and we start comparing $2,000 grills. (Again, all of us but Frank. He says he looked at the expensive grills and somehow was able to rise above the base desires that grip the rest of us. He didn't purchase one.) In any case, soon we have to work harder and harder to spend more and more for the sake of competitive display. But we don't wind up feeling any happier since our neighbors are spiraling up their work and spending just as quickly, so relatively none of us is better off. Frank's goal is not to dissuade people from showing off (he's a flinty-eyed realist), but rather to simply lower the standard at which they compete. He argues that we'd all be happier if collectively we were forced to live our lives on a smaller scale.

At this point the reader may wonder why he is wasting his time reading a book by an economist. If brain chemistry is so important, why bother to try to change brain chemistry by manipulating our lifestyles? Why don't we go straight to the heart of the problem and inject a little serotonin (or whatever) straight into our skulls? Then it wouldn't matter if we could afford that fully restored home. With enough chemistry, we'd be happy in a split-level.

But the second, larger problem that runs through this book is that Robert Frank doesn't seem to have observed the world around him very closely. Maybe in Las Vegas or in the upper reaches of Dallas there are some people who compete to see who can have the most expensive grill. But through most of upscale America-whether it is in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston-people think the way Frank does. They reject vulgar displays of consumerism.

They channel their spending toward natural, organic, and wholesome goods, the accouterments of the simple life. The model is conspicuous cultivation, not conspicuous consumption. It's not a race of incomes, it's a race of sensibilities. And very often the way you go up in status is to go down in display. Frank has a simplistic model of how people compete for status. You buy glitz, I buy glitzier. But the texture of spending in upscale America is far more complicated. In fact, one of our problems is that Frank's elevated sensibility has become too popular. Now hip corporate moguls aren't as keen to buy those massive Norman castle-style mansions you see on Chicago's North Shore. They want the sophisticated Arts and Crafts-style homes that in earlier decades would have been of interest mainly to academics or bohemians.