Theory of superfluous

why do you need what isn’t necessary to you?

Postulate

Postulate

Once you have the things you need, the superfluous ones gain more value than the necessary ones, for the simple reason that you own the necessary ones already.

Corollary

Since superfluous things become necessary once you extausted the necessary ones, they are in a continuous spectrum. Apparently there is no real qualitative distinction, only an order relationship. But once you try to represent them in a cartesian graph, the differences become clearer.

Each dot represents an univocal item. They keep growing moving toward right; y represent the utility (or necessity) of an item; x is a time-like dimension: you can only move toward right (akin to time) exhausting the utility of each item as you pass by, therefore the following items decrease in utility — if you could pick a very luxurious car and you didn’t own a runabout car, then the luxury car would be at the very least as useful as the runabout car. But if you already own a runabout car, then buying a luxury car would result in much less utility. I chosed this representation way to simplify the graph. I’m not sure about the linear increase in the number of items, but I’m sure that they grow from very few to infinite.

The tractation is as simplistic and conceptual as it happens to be when you apply math to an open system: for example, I don’t consider the utility margin function for each element: how does the utility of the good change according to how many equal or similar items I own? Does it even get harmful (the opposite of useful and necessary) to own too many?

We could represent this value adding a Z plane — but I’ll stick with a more prosaic explaination for the sake of simplicity. Doing so we would notice that, after a certain threshold, the most useful goods start being progressively less useful: you can only eat so much food everyday, if you have more you need to barter the exceeding food with someone who needs it more than you do, to get some of the food utility back.

I noticed that nowadays most necessary items are commodities — many of these were not in ancient times. Now they can be produced in mass quantity and satisfy the basic needs of everyone: electric energy, food, water, and so on.

There are things that cannot turn into commodities for the time being, but the more they are bought because of their mere utility, paying as few as it is convenient, the more they are treated as commodities.

For instance, you can buy a car just because you need to travel. You ignore every kind of comfort and the soft allure of branding. You pay only the utility that you need. So you buy a car for as little as possible, considering that it will fulfill its duty nonetheless. You end up paying five hundred euro. A runabout car is as useful as a BMWi5, but it cost only a penny if compared to a luxury or a premium car.

What’s curious is that a runabout car uses up all his value with just one car, meanwhile very expensive cars don’t: you can collect Ferrari cars whereas none collects runabout cheap cars.

The more you go right on the graph and more you get yourself into luxury, where much of the value is given from the brand and the unicity of the product, leaning toward unique artforms — or into premium products, where technology novelty, comfort and performances make the item valuable.

If you progress through the graph from left to right, owning every single item on the X-axis passing by, then the utility you get from the items more on the right keep decreasing, while the number of items keep increasing.

In this acception, what makes qualitatively different an useful item from a superfluous one is that there are only so many distinguishable goods on the left that absolve to the same function (same utility), whereas there is a plethora of goods that fulfils the same utility going toward right. Furthermore they keep increasing going forward.

There is no strong distinction from a runabout car and another, it either work or it doesnt, but there is between luxury cars.

Some Mathiness

So how can we define the qualitative difference between necessary and superfluous items?

The number of superfluous items increases, and it seems like that this could make up the progressive loss of utility, if only it was possible for an individual to own infinite superfluous items. But an hypothetical person, for how rich he could be, can only own so many superfluous things. Then because of a human upper limit for the number of possessions, superfluous things remain in proportion less useful than necessary things.

Moreover mathematically it would still be impossible as it is shown through the limit formula below: its result tends to zero.

This limit must be paired with the “cartesian” graph above to get a better grasp of its meaning. P is a set which contains the result of f(x): this function has multiple solutions in every x, as it is shown in the graph above. K is the cardinality of the set (how many elements it contains). f_utility(x) is the sum of the utility of all the elements that belong between 0 and x (utility_n represents the utility of the n-item). We proceed to calculate the limit when the cardinality of P goes to infinite. As stated, the utility of items on the farther right tend to zero (utility_n -> 0). The result of this double limit, according to limit properties, is zero.

In spite of everything this shows why luxury is such a good market: it allows to sell an infinite number of very expensive items to people who don’t worry over money.

I’ve always asked myself what make superfluous things desiderable. I hope to have given at least a partial answer to this question in the above disquisition. This doesn’t answer fully to another question that oftetimes I’ve asked myself: can we blame most of the wealthy people because they buy a lot of superfluous things? Is their consumer behaviour juvenile and unethical?

I believe that they have the moral and ethical duty to spend a lot of money in (almost) useless ssuperfluous things. Immobilization of capital damages the economy whereas its circulation makes a nation and its people wealthier — or less poor depending on the observer point of view and the condition of the nation.