Conspicuous consumption

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Conspicuous consumption is a term introduced by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The term is used to describe the consumption of expensive goods, commodities and services for the sake of displaying social status and wealth. The term is generally reserved for those forms of consumption that are motivated by societal factors and is not used to describe impulsive behaviours associated with personality disorders, such as binge eating or compulsive spending.

1 Regarded as an addiction
2 Marketing
3 In the context of psychoactive substances
4 Applications in activism
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

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Regarded as an addiction

Conspicuous consumption has been discussed widely since the 1960s, including most often as a form of addiction arising from consumerism but also from productivism where this encourages the production of excess unwanted goods, which must be consumed to justify continued production.

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Marketing

In marketing-terminology the term conspicuous consumption refers to the consumption of goods for the sake of displaying wealth, power, or prestige to others. Usually it denotes luxury goods that are expensive rather than cheap everyday items. Invidious consumption is the term applied to consumption of products and services for the purpose of inspiring envy in others.

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In the context of psychoactive substances

Some link this also to chemical addiction, arguing that self-titration of psychoactive substances, or "self-medication", becomes near-pandemic in cultures where pleasure-seeking behaviors have reached such pathological proportions. Inflamed hedonic expectations among the affected population can then result in normalizing of anti-social, borderline and narcissistic behaviors as economic and political processes, e.g. a "moral panic" leading to mob violence, support for religious fundamentalism, or an unexamined push to a war. An alternate view is that most civilizations have accepted one or more drugs of choice and embedded them into their society, e.g. caffeine, coca, alcohol, tobacco, peyote, cannabis, and that it is encounters with strange poorly-socialized drugs that lead in general to these unpredictable behaviors, not the consumption urge as such. Historically, epidemics of pathological consumption among large groups have ended when a group exhausted available resources or when the pathology of consumption led to self-destructive behavior.

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Applications in activism

An extreme view is that over-consumption threatens emotional destabilization of the global population, and that behavioral health professionals need to document and analyze the large group etiology that develops a subculture of pathological self-medication. This is seen to have impacts far beyond the immediate consumer group. While resources to confront the crisis must be developed within geographic areas inhabited by the affected population, interest and motivation is often prompted and facilitated by efforts from outside the areas most affected. Such methods as boycotts or moral purchasing, for instance, often exclude dealings with a population pathologically consuming an ecosystem or species - these are often successful at ending such consumption, e.g. European Union boycotts of Canadian seal fur from the Newfoundland seal hunt.

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