The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a...

Once you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s hard to know where to put it all. Art is transportable, unregulated, glamorous, arcane, beautiful, difficult. It is easier to store than oil, more esoteric than...

Where I had felt a victim, I had become a determiner by recognizing I had choices. When considering a purchase, I stopped saying, “I can’t afford it,” and started saying, “That’s not where I want...