Conspicuous Consumption

White desert.  Overnight a snow storm covered cactus and sage in a temporary illusion. At sunrise all I could see were rabbit tracks around the house.

A good time to read.  The idea of illusion and probability came to mind as I sipped on my morning coffee. Wagering when the snow will melt, when the desert will be sand, rock, ebony and mesquite again. I knew it was just a question of hours before the warm ground would melt everything.

To enjoy the moment, went out with my dog.  A file or so away was a man using a powerful snow thrower.  There was less than 2 inches of snow but he was using a machine people in the North East commonly use when they get many feet of snow for at least 3 months a year.

As I walked back, I was wondering why this man had a powerful and expensive snow cleaning machine when we get only one snowstorm a year and the snow melts in a few hours. What was he trying to prove?

… I had found the topic of my reading.

It was in 1899 that the economist Thorstein Veblen introduced the term conspicuous consumption. He defined it as the behavior of people who, given their ability to afford material goods, buy and publicly display these goods to manifest their social power. In other words, they are consumers of goods they really do not need but can afford buying, for leisure and prestige.

I recalled the definition from a sociology course I had taken almost four decades ago. Since I had not read more about this topic since, I did a search.

Interestingly, I ended up reading about a 1996 book by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko where they found that millionaires tend to practice frugality instead of conspicuous consumerism. As an example they report that millionaires tend to buy used cars with cash rather than new cars with credit in order to not pay a loan on a new car and avoid depreciation of the car.

At first glance, that is not surprising. I believe people have a natural impulse, or at least impulsiveness, to continue and perpetuate what they have and who they are.  Being frugal can be one mechanism toward that end. But it has to be genuine, not to give the appearance of a false frugality in one act and undisclosed indulgence in another facet of behavior.  Immanuel Kant called such behavior “self-love”. One can encounter this argument along the spectrum of behaviors and attitudes perhaps ranging from aesthetic surgery to the intriguing thesis put forth by Richard Dawkins in his provocative book “The Selfish Gene”.

However as I pondered a bit more, I ended up with the simple question “Is it conspicuously selfish to have the leisures one can legitimately afford?” Eventually, if the man I met uses his snow thrower only once a year is that enough to give him the indulgence of playing with snow while in the high desert?

… By the time I typed this page the snow had melted.

November 16, 2105

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

About the photograph: I took it on Old Route 66 on my way to New Mexico.