Conspicuous Consumption: The Crude Oil of the American Economy
Pecuniary emulation is simply fancy talk for what we now call “keeping up with the Joneses.” Veblen’s idea of pecuniary emulation is based on ownership. The concept is that material needs must first be met, then once we’re well taken care of we begin to consume products for an entirely different reason: to emulate those with more, those whose earnings ability are beyond our grasp. Pecuniary emulation doesn’t just stop as the level of the consumer, however. It weasels its subversion into the overall economic system and the very culture of society. In the words of Thorsten Veblen, “The possession of wealth confers honor. Nothing equally cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any other conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not for any incentive to accumulation of wealth.”
Karl Marx’s theory on commodity fetishism lies behind Veblen’s statement that possessions have capacity for conferring honor upon a consumer. This is the reasoning behind almost all advertising, though Veblen’s honor has gradually been transformed into something else. Something that today we call “status.” The advertising industry spends billions in both dollars and manhours to convince us 24 hours a day that status is something that can be purchased.
It is almost eerie to read the words of Karl Marx and apply them to contemporary advertising. The following words are from Karl Marx and are about commodity fetishism, but they could be describing any commercial. “The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value.” How many commercials today explain how to use a product? How many focus instead on how your status can be improved; how much more desirable you will be to the opposite sex, how many friends you can get; how much more superior you can feel to others?
The informational purpose of advertising is no longer the objective. Some commercials today don’t even show the product at all! This revolution in advertising is tied to the move from production and toward consumption as the key economic ingredient that occurred when technological advancements allowed material needs to be so quickly met. This led to more goods being produced than were needed. To solve that problem, industry began looking for new products to make that weren’t needed. Avertising became the source for convincing people to buy unnecessary things rather than the source of information about where to buy necessary things. By the end of the century the entire American economy was dependent upon this cultural ideology which required that its citizens engage in a frenzy of buying items according to those items’ fetishistic value rather than their use-value, but beyond that was the need to create in the consumer the belief that he could not only achieve status, but afford it as well despite rapidly decreasing real wages.
The major shift in the concept of conspicuous consumption from Thorsten Veblen’s time to contemporary society is that when Veblen coined the term only the wealthy engaged in it; nowadays Americans situated at every point along the economic spectrum freely and willingly engage in consumption that is purely, and all too often only, conspicuous in nature. (Perhaps the epitome of present day conspicuous purchasing are wheel spinners: incredibly expensive decorations that one puts on the wheels of one’s car and which can’t actually be physically enjoyed by the driver since their use-value-the spinning-can only be seen from outside the automobile when the car is either in motion or has just come to a sudden stop.)
One needn’t be an economist to figure out that economic growth will be sluggish at best if the primary driving force is a low-profit endeavor. It didn’t take long for American industry and politics to figure out that they needed to saturate all aspects of American society with the urge to drive home the need to buy and spend beyond one’s means. In essence, the act of buying transformed from something that was necessary for survival into forms of entertainment, education, self-identification, and even therapy. Gigantic malls with their own zip codes have become tourists destinations from which visitors never have to leave from the time they arrive in the morning to the time they go back to their hotel room at night. In fact, many of the supermalls are built with attached hotels so visitors theoretically could spend their entire vacation without having seen anything of the city they are visiting.
The Mall of America in Bloomington, MN, boasts forty million visits a year and, beyond being a site for voracious consumption, has even become a place where people go to get married. The Mall of America also employs 10,000 people and it’s chilling to think that nobody involved in that enterprise has ever stopped to think what would happen to the town’s economy if one day they opened the doors and no shoppers showed up.
While it is perhaps the stuff of George Romero’s imagintation to imagine a scenario in which all the potential shoppers at one mall decided on the same day to give up conspicuously consuming, it’s also worth remembering that at one time many people never thought the auto industry would abandon the state of Michigan or that thousands of “mom & pop” stores all across America would be forced to close down because of the ubiquitous presence of just one company. Enter Wal-Mart.
Consumer spending makes up the overwhelming bulk of US Gross Domestic Product; the US economy depends on people buying things they don’t need and can’t afford more than most of those people realize. Health care and oil are good old-fashioned necessities, but with the cost of both continuing to rise, how much longer will it be before more than just anti-consumer agitators choose to live for the long term without some of the things they may be forced to live without for short term?
