Time, Leisure and Well-Being by Jiri Zuzanek

Author:Jiri Zuzanek [Zuzanek, Jiri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Time Management, Social Science, Sociology, General, Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9781317213154
Google: HGgPEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-08-02T01:01:36+00:00

Critique of conspicuous consumption

Veblen formulated a sophisticated theory of social competitiveness. So long as a comparison of one’s situation with the situation of others is distinctly unfavourable, Veblen argued, “the normal, average individual will live in a chronic dissatisfaction with his present lot”. When this individual has reached

what may be called the normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and the average standard.

(1953: 39)

It is not the propensity to save or truck and barter that animates the man in the modern world, but the propensity to excel his neighbour.

The desire for wealth, according to Veblen, can never be satiated. If the incentive to accumulate would be based on the want of subsistence or physical comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of the community could conceivably be satisfied at some point by advances of industrial efficiency, “but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability, no definite attainment is possible” (1953: 39). As fast as a person makes new acquisitions and becomes accustomed to the resulting standard, this new standard ceases to afford appreciably greater satisfaction than the earlier one. According to Veblen, we are dealing with an ever-expanding circle of consumption aspirations and acquisitions of new items, some of which serve utilitarian purposes but most are just partly or completely useless status symbols. Conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditures, Veblen insists, are often perceived as more indispensable than expenditures administered to the ‘lower’ wants of physical well-being or sustenance (1953: 81).

Veblen’s violent condemnation of virtually all consumption, save the subsistence one, did not endear him to most economists. They were not prepared to accept Veblen’s distinction between the ‘serviceable’ (legitimate) and ‘non-serviceable’ (wasteful) needs. As observed ironically by David Riesman (1953), if one were to read Veblen literally, it would seem that he wanted men to live by bread alone, ‘provided Consumers’ Research had studied the ingredients’ and no middleman had made a profit of the loaf.

It is not easy to distinguish between legitimate and conspicuous (wasteful) needs or aspirations. Things which seem wasteful at first are often incorporated into ‘decent consumption’ and become badly needed. Veblen appeared sometimes as a moralist rather than a critical analyst. And, yet, there was something in his critique that resonated with the feelings of his contemporaries and continues to resonate with us. Veblen, who was, according to Mills, an ‘unfashionable mind’, established a fashion of critical thinking, which applies to the middle-class America of the 1930s and the ‘mass society’ of the Post-World War II era no less than to the America of the late 19th century. “As a critic”, Mills wrote, “Veblen was effective precisely because he used the American value of efficiency to criticize American reality. He merely took this value seriously and used it with devastatingly systemic rigour” (C. W. Mills, in TLC, xi).

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