Reference reading
Profligacy
Letting the pleasure or display of expenditure overrule the purposes of entrusted resources.
Habitually indulging expenditure or consumption without fitting regard for the resources entrusted to one's care.
Imagine this: An impressive discretionary purchase consumes resources whose ordinary purposes have barely received a hearing.
How the pattern works
The fountain circulates its coins beautifully while the ordinary lamp remains broken. An expensive purchase can be justified, and a modest purchase can be wasteful. Profligacy concerns the indulgent disposition that treats expenditure as desirable without fitting regard for what the resources are meant to make possible.
Executive spending can acquire an audience: a prestigious address, an elaborate event or a dramatic expansion becomes evidence of ambition. The cost is defended through the attractiveness of the gesture, while alternatives and continuing obligations receive less attention. The person enjoying the decision may be insulated from the sacrifices required to fund it.
What it costs the work
The enterprise can lose room for necessary provision, useful experiments or resilience. Staff may be asked to economize on ordinary needs while protecting a conspicuous discretionary expense. The contrast weakens the credibility of future claims that there is simply no capacity to spend.
A distinction worth keeping
Cost alone is not the test. Investment, celebration, comfort and good design can serve legitimate purposes. Miserliness withholds warranted provision; Profligacy indulges expenditure without fitting regard. Greed seeks an excessive gain, which may finance lavish spending but is a different motive. An unsuccessful investment is not automatically profligate.
What a useful response can change
Identify the purpose, alternatives and continuing commitments before defending the impressive option. A purchase should be examined as part of an allocation, not as an isolated object of enthusiasm.
Include the people who bear the opportunity cost in the account. What provision must wait, and is there a reason that could be defended to those affected?
When an expenditure has become an image to protect, reconsider its remaining use rather than defend it through the amount already spent. A modest correction can serve the purpose better than completing an expensive mistake.
Questions for reflection
- What purpose survives after the spectacle of the purchase is removed?
- Whose necessary provision has become the quiet source of this discretionary expense?
Other perspectives
Not, of course, without some trouble and some expense; you can do nothing much worth doing, in this world, without trouble, you can get nothing much worth having without expense.
John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source
Ruskin insists that worthwhile work can require expense. This is a counterweight to equating economy with the cheapest option; its value does not excuse expenditure detached from a purpose.
Thus too the virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self interest.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source
Smith is presenting Aristotle’s account of a mean between avarice and profusion. The historical distinction invites judgment about attention to resources; it supplies no universal budgeting formula.