Thorstein veblen conspicuous consumption

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Veblen sees this competitive and predatory behavior in modern industrial societies, ultimately leading to a perceived need to conspicuously consume. But as fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the resulting new standard of wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater satisfaction than the earlier standard did.

When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase of life, the conditions of emulation change. The result is that, in order to keep up a decent appearance, the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater extent than the latter. These latter are expressions of status.

The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the way of retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that go to physical comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity or absence of children, is perhaps seen at its best among the classes given to scholarly pursuits.

In all such useful articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve. All these lines of utility are better served by a larger number of more highly specialised servants.

Critics also point to the evolution of consumer habits wherein experiences, sustainability, and authenticity often outweigh traditional displays of wealth. Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income of the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is also more imperative.

Selling Sunset (2019–present) Created by Adam DiVello.

Habits of industry and thrift, therefore, are not uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary emulation. In the process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles of his consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being.

Economically, this form of consumption can drive demand and spur innovation within industries. Social consequences include widening economic divides, reinforced class systems, and heightened interstatus competition. The exemption comes more tardily the remoter the relation in which the servant stands to the person of the master.

And on the other hand, whenever an accession of pecuniary strength puts the individual in a position to unfold his life process in larger scope and with additional reach, the ancient propensities of the race will assert themselves in determining the direction which the new unfolding of life is to take. Substantially the same proposition is expressed in the commonplace remark that each class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those below or with those who are considerably in advance.

The tendency in any case is constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the point of departure for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new standard of sufficiency and a new pecuniary classification of one's self as compared with one's neighbours. Labour would unavoidably become dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under the ancient tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage.

The men of the upper classes are not only exempt, but by prescriptive custom they are debarred, from all industrial occupations. He should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of the spectators. The performance of labour has been accepted as a conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically base.