Left-leaning elements of the Catholic church continue to condemn "conspicuous consumption" and the inequalities attendant on the retail sales boom.
Yet inequality remains conspicuous by its absence from the agenda for the post-2015 development goals.
But the wealth does not completely hide a malaise, born of stubborn inequality and conspicuous corruption and discharged in bursts of violent discontent.
"It's this flaunting of inequality and conspicuous consumption that people get agitated about," said Ben Roberts, a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council, which recently conducted a survey of South Africans documenting widespread disillusionment with local government.
Such inequalities are highly conspicuous in Gujarat, a state with a wealthy, entrepreneurial population and a government committed to supporting the private sector.
If you put a person in an environment that worships wealth and favors conspicuous consumption, add gross income inequalities that breed envy and competition, mix in stagnant wages, a high cost of living and too-easy credit, you get overspending, high personal debt and a "treadmill-like existence," as Whybrow calls it: compulsive getting and spending.
So far, the most conspicuous piece of the Democrats' inequality agenda has flopped.
But in Manhattan, where the giddy heights of wealth, status and ego can induce as much vertigo as the tallest Trump tower, parents at all levels evinced a reluctance to discuss with their children issues of class inequality or its subset, conspicuous real estate, leading to the sort of finding that Dr. Johnson, the Lehigh sociologist, found chilling.
Consensus binds and inequality, while increasing, is less conspicuous than elsewhere in the West.
In Conspicuous Consumption, a book published in 1899 when inequalities in wealth and income matched those of today, economist Thorstein Veblen captured this social dynamic well.
