Luxury Cars on Broken Roads

Every time I return to Northern Cyprus, one contradiction strikes me more strongly. Potholes, poor street lighting, rubbish, weak infrastructure, and the occasional failure of even fairly basic public services have become such ordinary parts of daily life that many of us seem to have learned not to notice them anymore. Yet within this environment, another image has become increasingly difficult to ignore: brand-new cars, enormous villas, the latest phones, expensive brands, and a constant appetite for something newer, bigger, and supposedly better.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with wanting a comfortable home, a good car, or a new phone. This is not an argument about what people should or should not buy with their own money. However, what interests me is the distance between the standards we expect from our private consumption and those we tolerate in our shared environment. It has somehow become ordinary to drive an expensive new car over a road full of potholes, to own one of the most advanced smartphones available while complaining that the telecommunications infrastructure barely functions properly, or to build an increasingly luxurious home in a neighbourhood where pavements, planning, waste collection and public spaces remain neglected — unless, perhaps, an election is approaching.

This tension has a long history in economic thought. In The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith drew attention to what he described as an atmosphere of “private opulence and public squalor”, in which public services fail to keep pace with expanding private consumption (Galbraith, 1958, ch. 18). More recently, Lansley (2023) has revisited this imbalance, arguing that economic activity can become tilted towards private wealth and luxury consumption while public provision and essential needs are crowded out.

Northern Cyprus gives this tension a distinctive setting. Annual consumer-price inflation stood at 37.7 per cent in August 2026 (KKTC İstatistik Kurumu, 2026), yet the private consumption described above remains highly visible. One possible explanation lies in what researchers describe as ‘conspicuous’ or ‘status consumption’. Veblen's concept of “pecuniary emulation” proposed that people compare themselves with those of higher social standing and may use consumption to signal their own position (Veblen, 1899). Pybus et al. (2022) define status consumption as an attempt to improve social standing through goods that confer and symbolise status, and review evidence suggesting that greater inequality can intensify attention to social rank and status anxiety.

Experimental evidence also shows that visibility matters. Banuri and Nguyen (2023) found that consumption increased when purchases were both observable to others and capable of signalling status or ability. This does not mean that every expensive purchase is motivated by display. It does suggest that, under some social conditions, what an object communicates can become part of its value alongside what it actually does.

Another possible mechanism is compensatory consumption. Consumer goods can have psychological value beyond their practical function and may sometimes help people respond to perceived gaps in status, identity or self-worth (Mandel et al., 2017). More specifically, Rucker and Galinsky (2008) found that feelings of low power increased willingness to pay for status-related products, supporting the idea that status consumption can sometimes compensate for a perceived lack of power.

Undoubtedly, this question of control also has a distinctly Northern Cypriot dimension. Considering the north’s international legal status and wider political circumstances, Özdemir (2026) argues that the TRNC’s dependence on Turkey has constrained its sovereignty and increased Turkey’s influence over its domestic political, economic and cultural affairs. This approach may not account for every dimension of the relationship on its own, but it provides an academic framework for examining a particular aspect of these relations of power and dependency, while also adding an important dimension to the question of control.

Of course, this does not demonstrate that Turkish Cypriots generally feel politically powerless, or that political frustration leads to luxury consumption. It does, however, allow us to ask the following question: if people feel that their influence over important collective outcomes is limited, could private consumption become one of the areas in which the ability to choose and exercise control is felt most directly? The road, telecommunications system or town plan may feel beyond my control; the car, phone and home are not.

Living abroad and observing everyday life elsewhere has also made me question the assumption that greater prosperity necessarily creates a constant need to replace what we own with its newest version. Japan, often cited as an example of technological advancement, is also interesting in this respect. According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan, its member companies produced approximately 104.5 million CDs and a total of 33.2 million music DVDs and Blu-ray discs in 2024 (RIAJ, 2025). Japan’s Digital Agency, meanwhile, only abolished the final regulation requiring the use of floppy disks and similar recording media in June 2024, after having already removed 1,033 comparable requirements (Digital Agency, 2024).

These are small but interesting examples showing that technological advancement does not necessarily mean that everything old is quickly discarded. It is therefore difficult to draw a simple or inevitable connection between a society’s level of prosperity and how frequently people replace the things they own.

In the end, perhaps the real issue is not how visible wealth is, but how much of it is reflected in our shared life. When individual living standards rise while roads, infrastructure, public spaces and services remain unchanged, it shows that prosperity does not automatically translate into collective improvement. Northern Cyprus has structural challenges that cannot be ignored, including its international status, economic vulnerability and external dependencies, but their existence does not make every shortcoming inevitable or impossible to change. It is therefore important to distinguish between problems that stem from external conditions and those that result from choices about priorities, governance and accountability.

Perhaps, then, the issue is not that people want a better car, a nicer home or a newer phone, but that while we seem to know very well what ‘better’ looks like in our private lives, we have become accustomed to much less in the life we share. That is the contradiction luxury cars on broken roads bring into focus. We know how to pursue better in the things we own. But neither can a luxury car repair the road beneath it, nor can a beautiful home fix the neighbourhood beyond its walls.

At some point, we need to ask ourselves: is having better things really the same as having a better life?

References

Banuri, S. and Nguyen, H. (2023) ‘Borrowing to keep up (with the Joneses): Inequality, debt, and conspicuous consumption’, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 206, pp. 222–242. doi: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.12.001.

Digital Agency (2024) ‘Scrapping of regulations governing the use of floppy disks and other recording media’, 19 July. Government of Japan. Available at: https://www.digital.go.jp/en/news/d0d894b1-9d2e-4e0a-a538-dab1acee296d (Accessed: 17 September 2026).

Galbraith, J.K. (1958) The Affluent Society. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

KKTC İstatistik Kurumu (2026) ‘Tüketici Fiyat Endeksi – Ağustos 2026’, 4 September. Available at: https://istatistik.gov.ct.tr/ (Accessed: 17 September 2026).

Lansley, S. (2023) ‘Rethinking “crowding out” and the return of “private affluence and public squalor”’, The Political Quarterly, 94(3), pp. 377–383. doi: 10.1111/1467-923X.13297.

Mandel, N., Rucker, D.D., Levav, J. and Galinsky, A.D. (2017) ‘The compensatory consumer behavior model: How self-discrepancies drive consumer behavior’, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 27(1), pp. 133–146. doi: 10.1016/j.jcps.2016.05.003.

Özdemir, Y. (2026) ‘The illusion of sovereignty in the TRNC: The AKP regime in Turkey and changing dynamics in the de facto state in Cyprus’, Mediterranean Politics, 31(3), pp. 475–503. doi: 10.1080/13629395.2025.2459557.

Pybus, K., Power, M., Pickett, K.E. and Wilkinson, R. (2022) ‘Income inequality, status consumption and status anxiety: An exploratory review of implications for sustainability and directions for future research’, Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 6(1), 100353. doi: 10.1016/j.ssaho.2022.100353.

Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) (2025) RIAJ Year Book 2025. Tokyo: Recording Industry Association of Japan.

Rucker, D.D. and Galinsky, A.D. (2008) ‘Desire to acquire: Powerlessness and compensatory consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research, 35(2), pp. 257–267. doi: 10.1086/588569.

Veblen, T. (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: The Macmillan Company.