THE other day during lunch, a colleague of mine volunteered a few tips on how to identify ernai, mistresses kept by successful people.

They are generally young, good-looking, and can be seen sometimes in high-end neighborhoods, usually accompanied by a perfectly groomed dog, while most other people are slaving away at work.

Simply stated, they have leisure, and they are not afraid to show it.

Such is the traditional Chinese emphasis on living by honest labor, that many Chinese are reluctant to flaunt their leisure time.

One of my relatives had been laid off for several months a couple of years ago, and during that time he took care not to show up in the neighborhood during office hours.

For people who have never known much leisure, suddenly imposed leisure can have damaging consequences.

It was recently reported that in Hangzhou in 2003 the homes of some peasants were demolished, displacing the people who were handsomely compensated.

One village couple got nearly a million yuan (US$160,000) and several flats as compensation.

On May 2 this year, the wife went on trial in a local court, owing more than a million yuan in debts. In less than two years the former peasant had visited Macau more than 40 times and squandered their compensation.

The couple were not exceptions. Today nearly 10 percent of the families in the same area have already wasted their fortune, mostly by gambling.

Most of us can manage our routine employment well, providing it's not too exacting, but only the resourceful few can cope with leisure. As a Roman poet observed, "Leisure always breeds an inconstant mind."

Generally speaking, there is less fear of an inconstant mind today, what with growing thirst for wealth and such leisure-defeating inventions as mobile phones, gadgets, the Internet, and TVs.

Lack of leisure spares us the pain of doubts, reflections, and remorse. Therefore, consumption today enjoys far higher status than in the old days.

Still, if you have the leisure to go through Thorstein Veblen's classic satire "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (first published in 1899), the book will probably enrich your understanding of the underpinnings of our society, the rationale of property ownership, and the global superstitions about consumption.

As Veblen observes, only a few, very primitive societies lack a leisure class, and those societies tend to be peaceful and honest.

The leisure class consists of those members of a population who are exempt from productive work and, in fact, are often forbidden to perform it.

The leisure class does not produce, but consumes what others have produced. Leisure is respected in two ways: it demonstrates that you are not engaging in productive labor and, therefore, you are not an inferior, and it also demonstrates that you have sufficient means to engage in leisure, that is, you do not need to work.

Alienation

Today we tend to have a more sympathetic view of the "leisured class" compared to people in Veblen's time.

As a matter of fact, few of us would even associate high-flying Wall Street financial professionals with a leisured class, since they often work overtime to design new financial derivatives.

Although they suffered a little debunking during the recent financial crisis, they are still eagerly wooed by the many cities ambitious to become global financial centers.

These Ponzi scheme architects and fraudsters no longer grab by violence or through wars, though they are no less predatory than their forefathers. They merely prove that for transferring money, systematic cunning and deception are more effective tools than violence.

As Veblen observes, productive or industrial work involves manipulating and using objects. Nonindustrial work involves manipulating and using humans, sometimes as objects.

Karl Marx used alienation to explain the fact that workers in capitalist societies invariably lose the ability to determine their own lives and destinies; instead their goals and actions are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who owns the means of production in order to extract from workers the maximal amount of surplus value.

This changed relationship between workers and employers have important implications.

In traditional agrarian societies (as China once was) respect was paid to an honest, hardworking farmer (irrespective of the result, for a good harvest will also be subject to the whims of the Providence), but in this capitalist mode of production, success (money) is the only measure of merit, and the only means to show your money is to consume it, visibly.

Thus, conspicuous consumption becomes an honorable employment, with the most fitting objects for such consumption being cars, real estate, jewelry, mistresses.

Marginalized

The more one consumes, the more honorable one is.

The multiplicity of luxury brands such LVs, iPads, or BMWs enrich the means of expression.

Men do not pursue wealth merely to satisfy their physical needs. They amass it to satisfy their appetite for status.

Worship of luxury brands helps perpetuate the perception that productive work is base, discreditable and shameful, to be avoided by those who pretend to dignity and honor.

Given the myriad means of expression through consumption, today's new rich no longer have much leisure for mastery of useless languages and sciences, grammar, poetry, or music, as noted by Veblen of his own times.

"The habit of gauging merit by the leisure-class canons of wasteful expenditure and unfamiliarity with vulgar life, whether on the side of production or consumption, is necessarily strong in the individuals who aspire to do some work of public utility," he observes.

The long-term consequences of marginalization of the producers are unknown.

Although in recent years, agricultural products have experienced exponential price hikes (we are in the middle of another), the peasants continue to flee the farmland.

Their plight is not dissimilar to that of construction workers whose toil has fueled a decade of construction boom, but their share in the profits of the China's skyrocketing home prices is negligible.

In a new game known as globalization, probably unforeseen by Veblen, the separation of production and consumption is furthered facilitated in a process whereby some countries are specialized producers, while some other countries are pristine consumers, with growing esteem assigned to the latter.

It is heartening to fantasize about the day when all producers would have been successfully sanitized from our views.