A video of Hannah Neeleman making a casual lunch of roast fish, grilled cheese on homemade sourdough, and pumpkin soup is not providing instruction or advice for other mothers. It’s aspirational, performative, and entertaining rather than useful. The tradwife is working, but she is not performing what Veblen would call productive work—her work is enriching her husband, not society at large. It is not about rigorously tested, practical recipes for making homemade Nutella. Nobody makes Nutella for survival. It’s for show.
A performance, yes, of gender and wifely subservience, but also of class and open time. Likewise, influencing is, for sure, a job, and one which requires some serious skills and a nous for the zeitgeist. It’s also a job which is only possible for the tradwife because of the security provided to her by the leisure class and which broadcasts her place in it.
There were fewer explanations for wealth disparity in Veblen’s time. Who were these coarse new millionaires? Veblen offered a credible history that still resonates: In agricultural societies, clerks, priests, warlords and monarchs controlled the community’s wealth and were honorifically and economically more important than the agricultural worker. With their access to the agricultural surplus, they developed titles, symbols and a culture of etiquette—things that have no economic value but gave them distinction and superiority (and made it easy to exclude the common laborer). The 1900 wedding of Louisa Pierpont Morgan, daughter of financier and industrialist John Pierpont Morgan, to Captain Herbert Satterlee in New York saw unforeseen ostentation and a cascade of gifts of diamonds, oriental rugs and gold tableware. Now, we would call this signaling.
Industrialization, and the transformation to a society based on consumption, made this class system more dynamic. Mass production made a lot of everyday goods low-cost, and it created very particular niche products that only the new leisure class could buy: a new hierarchy of consumer items, with luxury goods at the top. Profiting from new markets of steel, oil, business and finance, these new capitalists had their own desires, divergent from those who had inherited their wealth.
They exhibited their wealth in a novel manner, and their conspicuous leisure took on the forms that were not productive. They engaged in ridiculous, time-intensive sports like riding and polo. Yachting. Mansions. Gourmet foods and liquors. Baby furniture. But even Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, couldn’t have dreamed of the financialization of society and the spectacular wealth we know today, generated through speculation and rampant digital monetization rather than mechanization.