Opinion – Leandro Narloch: R$5,950 Easter egg makes the world a better place

R$5,950: a bakery in the Cidade Jardim mall sells an Easter egg for R$5,950.

Colleague Marcos Nogueira, from the Cozinha Bruta blog, found the 12 kilo egg to be absurd and expressed it here in sheet all your indignation.

“It’s the shitty elite in their wasteful, ostentatious, excluding and tacky parallel universe. From the complete lack of sensitivity or any trace of interest in the outside world.”

The chocolate egg would be “degrading” even more considering that “24% of the Brazilian population does not have enough food at home.”

My humanities college hippie background makes me agree that luxury often comes close to tacky. I still can’t avoid a slight prejudice even with those who go around wearing the alligator polo shirt.

But I disagree that spending on luxury is excluding or demeaning.

Criticisms against very expensive items seem to imply that money, once spent, disappears. Hence the idea of ​​waste precisely while so many are starving.

But the money does not disappear. From the consumer’s pocket, it spreads among sellers, pastry chefs, producers of selected ingredients, kitchen assistants, social media managers, pastry schools and their teachers.

Isabela Suplicy’s confectionery generates relatively more jobs – and higher-paying jobs – than the popular chocolate brands. Whoever spends a fortune with her, and not with Lacta or Garoto, strengthens a more qualified and remunerated production chain.

Luxury, in fact, is a way of convincing the rich to voluntarily deconcentrate their wealth.

“Instead of paying R$600 for a 12 kilo egg, how about you give me R$5,000?” Anyone who cares about inequality should look kindly when millionaires pay BRL 200 for what ordinary people buy for BRL 20.

Another common moralistic reaction is to advocate higher taxes on luxury goods.

But as Gregor Mankiw teaches in “Introduction to Economics,” one of the world’s most used textbooks by students in the field, taxing jets and yachts often undermines the least elastic part of the business: the salespeople and workers.

If the price rises too much, the tycoon may simply stop buying the yacht. The seller and the manufacturer do not have that option: they have to sell. When they lower the price to maintain sales, most of the cost of the fees falls on them, not the buyers.

Another advantage of the luxury market is that it gives strength to incipient markets that gradually become popular. It is not exclusive: on the contrary, it helps to make the market more inclusive.

The best example is the cell phone, a luxury item during my adolescence.

In the soap opera “Pedra sobre Pedra”, from 1992, cell phones were used by people who spent R$ 5,000 on Easter eggs. Madame Rosemary arrived by helicopter in the city of Resplendor snubbing a cell phone and complaining that the brick had no signal.

I still remember, from my half-hippie and half-left times, finding anyone who had the audacity to flaunt their cell phone in college hallways snobbish. But these early snobs helped finance the market. Today, there are more cell lines in Brazil than Brazilians.

Just like the cell phone, almost everything the reader has around him has traveled the path from luxury to popularization: windows with curtains, tea, coffee, artificial lighting, glass objects, refrigerator, bathroom inside the house, computers.

Of course, the advantages of luxury do not exempt people from contradictions. If the person considers himself anti-capitalist, it is not coherent to pose for a Prada campaign.

It also sounds a little contradictory for the former president to participate in the commemoration event of the Communist Party of Brazil wearing a R$70,000 watch.

But then the problem is with consistency, and not with the R$5,950 Easter egg.