# Frivolous Utility Adam Smith as Judge of Consumption **URL:** **By** Paul Mueller, Daniel B. Klein **Published:** September 23, 2026 --- Economists talk about increasing people’s ability to consume. Adam Smith also talked about what people should consume. Economists often treat consumption as a proxy for happiness: being able to consume more is better than being able to consume less. Economists often describe making people “better off” in terms of relaxing budget constraints and increasing consumption choices. More consumption generates more “utility” in people’s “utility functions.” The discipline impresses students with ideas of maximization and optimization. Deirdre McCloskey has aptly dubbed it the Max U approach to economics.[1](#_edn1) If you ask an economist how consumption delivers utility, he may say: “Well, that depends on the subjective tastes and preferences of every individual.” The matter of tastes and preferences is supposedly outside the realm of scientific economics. Who is to say which consumption choices are good and which are bad? Adam Smith ambled into realms of human existence that many modern economists fear to explore. He thought that judging one’s own consumption, tastes, and preferences, as well as those of others, was a natural part of being human; and the economy is human beings. Smith argued that ethical judgment develops as one person enters into another’s situation, a process he calls “sympathy,” and compares their respective sentiments—with approval in harmony between the two sentiments and disapproval in discord. The sentiments themselves concern objects: “The beauty of a plain, the greatness of a mountain, the ornaments of a building, the expression of a picture, the composition of a discourse, the conduct of a third person,”[2](#_edn2) as well as objects like: “a picture, or a poem, or a system of philosophy.”[3](#_edn3) Smith sympathetically entered into people’s consumption choices and experiences and declared that people sometimes pursue “frivolous utility.”[4](#_edn4) Consider your own consumption. Food, clothing, housing, travel, and entertainment often involve a sharing of sentiments about the objects of consumption. Rarely do people go to a fine restaurant, travel destination, or movie theater alone. Sentiment and judgment naturally extend to cultural products—“the composition of a discourse . . . a system of philosophy.” Right now, you are consuming (and evaluating) discourse. Smith sees himself as another trader selling “a system of philosophy” to his readers. At the beginning of _The Wealth of Nations_, he writes that “philosophy or speculation becomes, like every other employment, the principal or sole trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens.”[5](#_edn5) Writers and philosophers specialize just as mechanics, carpenters, and accountants do. Smith received income from his books. In peddling a system of philosophy, he was surely concerned not only with enhancing his profits but with benefiting his readers—and not only his readers, but society as a whole, including those who did not read his books. He sought to improve people’s philosophy consumption and thereby benefit all mankind. He offers guidance, advice, and instruction as well as insights and understanding. Pins, watches, and woolen coats are useful but far from sufficient for human flourishing. Besides helping his readers understand the world, he wants them to admire certain aspects of it (the invisible hand, universal benevolence, opulence, innovation, virtue) and criticize others (the stultifying effects of the division of labor, the injustice of local restrictions on migration, the meddling of the magistrate, trade restrictions). ### Smith's Readers Smith’s readers were diverse, but there were two main types: the ordinary person who seeks social and career guidance and the policymaker or magistrate. For both types of reader, Smith helps to satisfy not only the reader’s immediate gratification but his deeper desire to improve his tastes and preferences. _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ (_TMS_) addresses the ordinary person or citizen more than the government policymaker. As for _The Wealth of Nations_ (_WN_), Smith suggested that the book belongs to “the science of a statesman or legislator.”[6](#_edn6) In both books, however, Smith judges ordinary people and policymakers by their choices. In both books, Smith looms as judge of the reader’s consumption. In advising policymakers, Smith advances a presumption of liberty “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”[7](#_edn7) Smith took the everyman’s preferences as a given when considering policymaking. Does Smith therefore endorse every man’s interest and how he pursues it? Not at all. To instruct someone’s consumption choices, a teacher must explain the difference between better and worse consumption choices. At the same time, Smith says that the prudent man “never rashly or unnecessarily obtrudes his opinion concerning either things or persons.”[8](#_edn8) He says that from a “want of reserve . . . the one half of mankind make bad company to the other.”[9](#_edn9) So, although Smith had a pervasive, even severe, sense of judgment, he avoids obtruding his judgments rashly. His judgments, though frequent, often come briefly or indirectly.[10](#_edn10) ### Smith as Judge of Consumption: _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ In _TMS_, Smith wrote about virtue and vice, approbation and disapprobation, and the nature of happiness. People can make choices that lead to misfortune and unhappiness over time. Such decisions arise from many kinds of error—a lack of self-command, a defective sense of justice, and other vices such as pride and vanity. Happiness does not come primarily from having more dollars to spend on consumption but from having, so to speak, a good utility function—making one’s living more integrated or wholesome over time. Smith writes, “Happiness consists in tranquillity and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no enjoyment; and where there is perfect tranquillity there is scarce any thing which is not capable of amusing.”[11](#_edn11) You can’t buy tranquility. You can only cultivate it. Neglecting tranquility to pursue greater means of consumption becomes self-defeating. Those who pursue material wealth and success may discover that: > wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility . . . enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body . . . ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor.[12](#_edn12) In fact, the chief differences between modest fortune and great fortune are the pleasures of vanity and superiority. Smith says that “the pleasures of vanity and superiority are seldom consistent with perfect tranquillity.”[13](#_edn13) Smith says that apart from the pleasures of vanity and superiority, we may find “in the most humble station, where there is only personal liberty, every other \[pleasure\] which the most exalted can afford.”[14](#_edn14) Virtues such as temperance and prudence correspond to approval by the impartial spectator. The impartial spectator, Smith writes “does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites. To him their present, and what is likely to be their future situation, are very nearly the same.”[15](#_edn15) In his parable of the poor man’s son, Smith says that the son, now elderly and rich, “begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of _frivolous utility_, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys.”[16](#_edn16) Smith suggests that “many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of _frivolous utility_.”[17](#_edn17) Clearly, Smith deems some utilities to be frivolous. ### Smith as Judge of Consumption: _Wealth of Nations_ In _WN_, Smith says that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.”[18](#_edn18) Yet Smith turned a skeptical eye to high time-preference decisions, both public and private. “\[T\]he conduct of every prodigal, by feeding the idle with the bread of the industrious, tends not only to beggar himself, but to impoverish his country.”[19](#_edn19) Smith does not limit his criticism to people who spend more than they make. When a man of fortune squanders wealth on “frivolous objects . . . \[and\] gewgaws,” it signals “not only a trifling, but a base and selfish disposition.”[20](#_edn20) He criticizes “the service of plate, and the other _frivolous_ ornaments of dress and furniture”[21](#_edn21) which flatter one’s vanity. The value of gold and silver fluctuates in part because of “the continual waste of them in gilding and plating, in lace and embroidery” requiring “a continual importation, in order to repair this loss and this waste.”[22](#_edn22) The consumption choices that Smith condemns play a substantive role in historical developments. He describes how medieval and early-modern lords’ taste for luxuries eventually undermined both their material standing as well as their reputations and moral authority. > For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as _frivolous_ and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them.[23](#_edn23) He makes a similar point earlier in _WN _about the diverse consumption choices available to the wealthy: > A man of fortune, for example, may either spend his revenue . . . in maintaining a great number of menial servants, and a multitude of dogs and horses; or contenting himself with a frugal table and few attendants, he may lay out the greater part of it in adorning his house . . . in useful or ornamental furniture, in collecting books, statues, pictures; or in things more _frivolous_, jewels, baubles, ingenious trinkets of different kinds; or, what is most trifling of all, in amassing a great wardrobe of fine cloaths.[24](#_edn24) ### Is Your Optimization Problem Optimal? Ronald Coase said: “Adam Smith would not have thought it sensible to treat man as a rational utility-maximiser.”[25](#_edn25) Smith knows that consumer goods are often pursued in service to higher or deeper personal goods. Humans have direct tastes about food, clothing, and cultural products. But they also have more complex preferences about their tastes. Philosophers and economists such as Amartya Sen sometimes speak of “meta-preferences.” But the “meta-” becomes recursive. Not only do we have preferences regarding our tastes, but we can also have preferences about our preferences regarding our tastes. You might prefer to be the kind of person who has a taste for reading good books or you might prefer that you were someone who _wanted _to be that kind of person. But where do higher preferences come from? And how deep do they go? The question is ancient: “In the system of Plato, the soul is considered as like a little state or republic,” writes Smith in _TMS_. Smith gives a few pages to Plato’s account of propriety, which he says, “coincides in every respect with” his own account.[26](#_edn26) Christian theology posits that human beings are complex creatures with body, mind, and soul. It makes sense that people have different levels or kinds of preferences that may conflict. The Apostle Paul describes having deeply conflicting desires: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”[27](#_edn27) The passage describes conflict between layers of desire. Afterall, how can one do what one hates? Or not be able to do what one wants? It seems that, within the single human being, there is a struggle between multiple spirits. We are not as integrated as we pretend to be. Much of the New Testament describes salvation in terms of transforming people’s desires or “utility function,” with relatively little to say about their budget constraints. A wholesome transformation might be seen as the subduing of unwholesome tastes and desires. Smith himself devotes a section of _TMS _to the importance of self-command over troublesome passions, notably vanity and pride. The problem with the Max U approach is not just the “U” (for utility) but the “Max” (for maximization). Optimization presupposes an optimization problem, but that optimization problem is itself a selection, and we must ask whether that optimization problem is optimal. Behind every human optimization problem, it would seem, must lie a higher optimization problem. Smith sees that his science is not separable from the matter of man’s relationship with God and His perspective of universal benevolence. ### What Consumption Is Worthy? Does Smith tell us what we _should_ consume? Taking “consumption” to include ideas, thoughts, and sentiments, Smith indicates wholesome consumption in his affirmations, sentence upon sentence, page upon page. In _TMS_, he refers to many thinkers and comments on their offerings. As for authors in literature, in his _Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres_, he shows warmth and admiration for many authors, including (in chronological order) Homer, Thucydides, Polybius, Cicero, Seneca, Lucian, Temple, La Bruyère, Swift, Addison, and Pope. Putting aside intellectual consumption, what about the consumption of time in common life? Smith would say that a person’s enjoyment of the sublime and beautiful in common life is highly dependent on the person’s history, capabilities, and situation. Smith writes that the rules of aesthetics are “loose, vague, and indeterminate.”[28](#_edn28) It is no wonder that, though shooing readers away from certain unwholesome habits, he would refrain from telling his readers exactly where to find wholesome habits. Again, Smith is not one to obtrude his opinion. As for broad advice, there is some paradox in Smith’s counsel, as he teaches both that “\[m\]an was made for action”[29](#_edn29) and a person tends to settle into a natural spiritual state irrespective of his “permanent situation.”[30](#_edn30)  Something that one cannot miss in Smith, however, is that there is pleasure in shared sentiment, and it is a wholesome pleasure when the sentiment is just. Consider the following passages from _TMS_: > \[W\]e can scarce express too much satisfaction in all the little occurrences of common life, in the company with which we spent the evening last night, in the entertainment that was set before us, in what was said and what was done, in all the little incidents of the present conversation, and in all those frivolous nothings which fill up the void of human life. Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness, which is always founded upon a peculiar relish for all the little pleasures which common occurrences afford. We readily sympathize with it: it inspires us with the same joy, and makes every trifle turn up to us in the same agreeable aspect in which it presents itself to the person endowed with this happy disposition. Hence it is that youth, the season of gaiety, so easily engages our affections.[31](#_edn31) > > With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other; where freedom and fondness, mutual raillery and mutual kindness, show that no opposition of interest divides the brothers, nor any rivalship of favour sets the sisters at variance, and where every thing presents us with the idea of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment?[32](#_edn32) > > Lest one imagine that Smith holds a different vision of the social good when he writes _WN_, notice that, in blasting mercantilist fetishes, he says that over-accumulating gold and silver makes no more sense than over-accumulating pots and pans when it comes to what really matters, “the good cheer of private families.”[33](#_edn33) Perhaps that is the _nature_ found in Smith’s inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. ### Free to Err If people’s voluntary consumption choices are often frivolous and unworthy, does that mean that such choice should be overridden by government coercion egged on by nudgy economists and others who anoint themselves expert in the human spirit? It is a non sequitur to say that because voluntarism is imperfect, government intervention is needed. Whether the diagnosis is inequality, positionality, free riding, negative externalities, or frivolous, unwholesome consumption, it is illogical to assume that the governmentalization of social affairs avoids such problems. The non sequitur reflects an obsequious double-standard in understanding alternative institutional arrangements. For example, in Smith’s story of lords coveting frivolous luxuries, it has been argued that politics was a major reason for why lords went for luxuries and that Smith himself saw it that way.[34](#_edn34) Critics of decadent luxury have often pointed fingers at commerce, “the arts” (artifice), modernity, and competitiveness, but not so often at government. Personal well-being is a moral and spiritual matter. Happiness arises in part from better integration of your being. In the first chapter of _WN_, Smith says that practice “necessarily increases very much the dexterity” of the practitioner.[35](#_edn35) Were that one become more virtuous, let him practice virtue. That requires freedom for conduct cannot be virtuous if it is not willed. We quoted Coase saying that Smith would not have thought it sensible to treat man as a utility-maximizer. Coase concludes by writing: > \[I\]f one is willing to accept Smith’s view of man as containing, if not the whole truth, at least a large part of it, realisation that his thought has a much broader foundation than is commonly assumed makes his argument for economic freedom more powerful and his conclusions more persuasive.[36](#_edn36) ## Endnotes [1.](#_ednref1) Deirdre N. McCloskey, _Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), esp. chaps. 1–2, on the “Max U” model of economic man. [2.](#_ednref2) Adam Smith, _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 19.2 (hereafter cited as _TMS_). [3.](#_ednref3) Adam Smith, _TMS_ (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 21.5. [4.](#_ednref4) Adam Smith, _TMS_ (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 180.6, 181.8. [5.](#_ednref5)Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 21.9 (hereafter cited as _WN_). [6.](#_ednref6) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 428.1. [7.](#_ednref7) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 664.3. [8.](#_ednref8) Adam Smith, _TMS_ (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 214.8. [9.](#_ednref9) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 34.6. [10.](#_ednref10) For further treatment of Smith as judge of consumption, see Paul D. Mueller, “Adam Smith’s Views on Consumption and Happiness,” _The Adam Smith Review _Volume 8 (pp. 293-308). Routledge. [11.](#_ednref11) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 149.30 [12.](#_ednref12) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 182–183 [13.](#_ednref13) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 150.31. [14.](#_ednref14) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 150.31. [15.](#_ednref15) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 215.11. [16.](#_ednref16) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 181.8, italics added. [17.](#_ednref17) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 180.6, italics added. [18.](#_ednref18) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 660.49. [19.](#_ednref19) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 339.20. [20.](#_ednref20) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 349.42. [21.](#_ednref21) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 192.34, italics added. [22.](#_ednref22) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 62–63.40. [23.](#_ednref23) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 419.10, italics added. [24.](#_ednref24) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 346.38, italics added. [25.](#_ednref25) Ronald H. Coase, “Adam Smith’s View of Man,” _Journal of Law and Economics_ 19, no. 3 (1976): 545 ([link](https://econjwatch.org/articles/adam-smith-s-view-of-man)). [26.](#_ednref26) Adam Smith, _TMS_ (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 267.2, 270.11. [27.](#_ednref27) Romans 7:15, 18–19 (English Standard Version). [28.](#_ednref28) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 175.11; 327.1. [29.](#_ednref29) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 106.3. [30.](#_ednref30) On Smith on man’s “natural and ordinary” state (_TMS _45\.7), see Yahya Alshamy and Daniel B. Klein, “Adam Smith on Upside and Downside,” _Just Sentiments_, January 24, 2024, [link](https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/adam-smith-upside-and-downside). [31.](#_ednref31) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 41–42.2. [32.](#_ednref32) Adam Smith, _TMS _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 39.2. [33.](#_ednref33) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 440.19. [34.](#_ednref34) See Hall \& Klein “Why Lord Went for Luxuries” in _The Independent Review_ 30(4), Spring 2026: 627–640, [link](https://www.independent.org/tir/2026-spring/why-lords-went-for-luxuries/). [35.](#_ednref35) Adam Smith, _WN _(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 18.6. [36.](#_ednref36) Coase, “Adam Smith’s View of Man,” _Journal of Law and Economics_ 19, no. 3 (1976): 545.