How to spend it?

Among the papers that get delivered here on a Friday is a colour supplement from the Financial Times that bears the name in the title. It's full of all the little and large treasures that an industry designed around making the rich and opulent feel, well, rich and opulent.

While looking at apartment designs involving lots of marble, glass and wood I couldn't help wondering how much of the resources required to live like that had to be taken from others on the planet. If the price of shiny but ordinary IT kit here is huge workforces in China on low wages, how much more must the kind of incomes required to acquire this kind of stuff require others to be kept in poverty.

A childishly simple, and slightly incorrect way of looking at things, but I cannot help seeing grubby children wearing jumpers with holes in behind those pictures of exotic wrist watches and exciting clothes in which to dress the trophy wife.