When the asset and economic bubbles began to inflate ten years ago, most Vietnamese people who were beginning to recognize the situation were shocked by the fast formation of a lavish society.

By then, multi-million-dollar apartments were hot topics, and everyone dreamed of living in high-grade buildings with advanced protection and a doorman, a swimming pool nearby, and supermarkets inside.

Toyota cars, once a dream of so many, were treated as cabs, as the popular standard for personal cars must be Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and even Lamborghini. Going abroad for health treatment, studying, and even buying a home in the United States gradually became habits of those getting rich through the inflating bubbles.

Just 15 years ago, all these luxuries were still strange to Vietnam, and were even looked at with contempt and suspicion, because such a flashy world could only be seen in Hong Kong movies (we had no Korean films then).

The old-fashioned Vietnamese had experience in well-off society, either in Hanoi or Hue, or in an old Saigon, but no society so luxurious had ever existed in the traditional thinking of many local people.

So, in fact, are we rich, or poor?

A small belt of luxurious live

In the morning, as I travel from my house in the outlying Go Vap District to the center of Ho Chi Minh City for work, I find myself passing through four worlds.

The first simple story is breakfast, which varies from a VND20,000 bowl of beef noodles sold by a neighbor to VND35,000, VND65,000 and VND80,000 for nearly the same dish in Phu Nhuan District, District 3, and District 1, respectively.

Breakfast has its price increased four-fold when sold at places closer to the central business districts.

Since work requires me to meet with foreign partners of large companies, after parking my motorbike I often find myself jumping into a Lexus with fragrant leather to get to meeting rooms in high-class air-conditioned office buildings, surrounded by roads that look like they are straight out of a foreign film.

After a meeting, my next stop is often a coffee at Mojo in the Sheraton hotel, where the price for a drink is at least VND100,000. Lunch sometimes amounts to VND1.5 million ($70) for a Kobe beef steak dish at the Park Hyatt hotel.

In the evening, on the way back home on my motorbike, I have my VND25,000 dinner, a rice noodle dish at a shop near Tan Son Nhat Airport, often accompanied by some very average factory workers who have just finished their busy day.

I often experience such different lifestyles from day to day.

Through such experiences, which are considered "cross-stratification", I realized I am not as rich as I have been living. The high-end market of the country is very small, just a belt comprising a few wards in central business districts like District 1.

The cost of living and the value of many services in outlying districts gradually drops as I travel to the suburbs, where I see many workers, male and female, attempt to find smaller bunches of cheap vegetables and food for their tiny dinners.

Such strong differentiation in the market segments, with major varieties in the purchasing power, will reduce the ability to develop strong trade, service and manufacturing sectors.

The chains selling products and services of big brands, often foreign ones, can simply hang around the center areas, as they will find it hard to survive the reduced purchasing power if they spread out of the belt.

In contrast, in the peripheral belt, there are many good locally made products, but as the sellers cannot afford the cost of space to gain a foothold in the central belt, their brand recognition and expansion is limited.

In general, it is not an exaggeration to say that there are only two such tiny, wealthy belts in Vietnam, specifically in HCMC and Hanoi. No other urban area has the same high purchasing power.

As a result, it is hard to say that we have reached the level of a middle-income market, lett alone the level of a luxury one.

The PR illusion

We all know the social psychology around luxury largely arises from businesses creating demand and markets. The most typical example is trying to analyze the cost structure of a perfume bottle.

If an Italian-styled perfume bottle costs $100, the price of the perfume inside is just $30, the price of the bottle design and packaging is $20, and the rest makes up the costs for advertising and PR, including hiring real actresses with dreamy eyes and red-berry lips, standing next to a champagne-colored Audi on the ancient streets of Italy. The cost also covers video and photographic advertising that creates the perfume’s appeal.

So, a $100 price tag is the price to pay for passion, luxury, and an illusion of beauty.

Housing businesses, on the other hand, are selling a dream. Real estate developers no longer sell houses to fulfill urgent needs, instead they have gone very far into the creation of an illusion.

Among the real estate developers that I know, only a few think about building a basic house, letting people cleverly make use of space so that they can live well in a small area, taking advantage of the wind and sunlight and saving energy.

Most are trying to imagine magical things for houses, and for that reason, we have a pool, but few people have time to swim and sunbathe or read a book as we often see in the movies, so the pool is now full of moss and becomes a place for mosquitoes to lay eggs.

They also build apartments with bathtubs and massage faucets, but no one has time to take advantage of them. Such details have contributed to high housing prices, driving them away from the true value of someone who just needs a house with basic equipment, a very popular trend in Vietnam.

Even worse, many capable Vietnamese businesses and their capital have been channeled into this luxury housing segment, thus causing a lot of money to be spent on the import of unnecessary luxury goods.

On the other hand, a very large market share of necessities and essential consumer goods draw less attention, leading to the fact that many have been acquired by foreign companies.

Smart living - living within your means

In this world, success doesn’t usually mean a rich and stylish way of life.

"We are the provider of the best skilled construction workers in the world" – the Philippines emphasized while promoting the country in the world press, and they publicized that the country is offering professional maids globally.

In Thailand, the government has built a traditional product development program, entitled OTOP (One Tambon (Thai Village) One Product), a program that harnesses traditional products scattered among the population, attached with new technologies and more modern marketing techniques, helping to standardize the products so that they can be offered for sale on the international market.

Globally, society must be built on a major class. The United States is based on the middle class (depending on the state and the annual income of $25,000-200,000), which comprises the majority in their own country. China is trying to build a moderately prosperous society.

However, in Vietnam, everyone knows that about 70 percent of the population is farmers with unstable income, and the middle class also concentrated at the lower end of the middle-class standards in the developing countries, with a common monthly income of VND15 million ($720).

So, in fact, what we need is to build a foundation of social consciousness, and an economy based on those standard social components.

Throughout history we have had a frugal and consistent society based on such a foundation. Our ancestors proved that although most people were farmers, workers, urban poor and lower middle class, and purchasing power was not high, we can still have an elegant and intellectual style of consumption.

Slowly, we need to build a smart society that knows how to live within our means.

To quote Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of late American president John F. Kennedy, "Just as important as the need to have a prosperous economy, we also need prosperity of kindness and humility."