The Anglo model values predation and total dominance and sees them as primary goals, over and above any other consideration - including product quality, sustainability, employee, customer and partner relationships, and ethical standing.

In the Anglo model, marketing is valuable because it enforces dominance over culture and consumers, and  dominance over creative talent - that might be wasting its time making art, instead of selling sneakers.

The Euro model shares some of the same aims, but tends to be slightly more relaxed about diversity and experimentation. I think Europeans are also more cynical about corporate aims, and find it harder to derive their identify from them.

'Reasonable' is culturally determined. Therefore it would in principle be possible to live in a reasonable way at widely different standards of living. You propose what is reasonable to you given what you know and the culture you live in.

However, because humans are bastards they tend to create unequal social organizations. While some societies are relatively egalitarian, the historical evidence is that it is possible for a culture to survive for a long time even if a substantial number of people have an 'unreasonably low' standard of living. Then there's both ex-post-facto cultural justifications for some people's misery, as well as individual adaptation to their living conditions.

Recall

Easy credit prevented things coming to a head earlier, but they would have and for the same reason - people will consume the culturally-determined "necessaries of life" whether or not this entails living above their means

Project Gutenberg: Wealth of Nations

Consumable commodities are either necessaries or luxuries.

By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensibly necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person, of either sex, would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France, they are necessaries neither to men nor to women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend, not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries, without meaning, by this appellation, to throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them. Beer and ale, for example, in Great Britain, and wine, even in the wine countries, I call luxuries. A man of any rank may, without any reproach, abstain totally from tasting such liquors. Nature does not render them necessary for the support of life; and custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them.

The necessary change is cultural as well as political.


En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma