One cannot help but notice the numbers of luxury saloon cars and expensive sports-cars on the roads nowadays. Never before have Irish people spent money with such abandon. The term "conspicuous consumption" comes to mind. The phrase has a modern feel to it, but in fact it was coined over 100 years ago by the economist and social scientist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
Thorstein Veblen was an unconventional man. He grew up in a spartan pioneer household in rural Minnesota, the son of immigrant Norwegian farmers. He remained rather insulated from mainstream American life until going to Carleton College where he graduated with a BA in 1880. He graduated from Yale University in 1884 with a Ph.D. in philosophy, but, unable to get a job, he then spent seven unhappy years at home.
Veblen resumed his academic career in 1892, teaching political economy at the University of Chicago until 1906 where he gained a reputation as a brilliant but eccentric thinker. His first and most famous book The Theory of the Leisure Class established him as a formidable social critic. Veblen attacked the shaping influences that laissez-faire economics and big business have on modern society and culture.
Veblen led an unconventional personal life which, coupled with a gruff manner, did not help to make him popular with the university administration. He left the University of Chicago (with some encouragement) in 1906 to teach at Stanford for three years. He became a founding member of the New School for Social Research in New York in 1919.
The Theory of the Leisure Class is a witty and satirical analysis of the engine that, as Veblen saw it, drove the consumer culture of 1899. Since American society today is driven even more by consumerism than it was in 1899 and since this model has been exported worldwide, Veblen's analysis remains entirely relevant today. In a nutshell he concluded that the "shop-till-you-drop" mentality is driven by a single rule of human behaviour - man's insatiable thirst for status.
Veblen used an evolutionary model to explain his thesis. He reckoned that class distinctions did not exist in the earliest societies when people worked together in groups to survive and work was acknowledged to be a most valuable activity. A natural competitive element spurred men to try to outperform each other in hunting, and those who were more successful had privileges granted to them.
Veblen reasoned that a culture developed where the most accomplished hunters satisfied their own needs by taking from others, whether by force or by accepting tribute. Consequently they no longer had to work, and work became a sign of a lack of accomplishment, a badge of inferiority. Society became layered into a leisured class and a working class.
Visible possessions (wealth) became a mark of social superiority and the greater the wealth the greater the status. Consequently a spiralling contest to achieve more wealth developed. And of course in our present money-economies, being bank-wealthy in itself does not advertise your wealth. No, the only way to broadcast your wealth is to flaunt it by buying things not needed to satisfy basic needs - luxury cars and boats, expensive clothes and large houses.
Veblen also noted that people are much more interested in impressing those just beneath them on the social ladder, those with whom they might be mistakenly identified. He further noted that conspicuous consumption was not confined to the rich, they are merely the most flamboyant exponents of the practice. The behaviour can be seen at all social levels, proportional to capacity to spend.
This latter observation offers a competing explanation of social class tensions to that of Karl Marx who held that workers wait for a time in sullen resentment of the rich owners of capital before rebelling against them. According to Veblen, poor people don't want to fight the rich, they want to be like them.
I have just come across Veblen's work and I certainly cannot claim to have a mature opinion of it. However, it does seem to me to be extraordinarily insightful. If he is right that humans have an innate and voracious thirst for personal status, then what is the appropriate "medication" for this condition? Of course, this is to assume that the condition calls for treatment but presumably it does since the unbridled pursuit of status is wasteful not only of scarce natural earthly resources, but also of our personal psychological resources.
Innate tendencies cannot be abolished and the only hope is to override or control them. This can be done by the application of wisdom and, as far as I am aware, all the main traditions of wisdom teach that happiness is to be found only by moderating our appetites.
And now, to help you cultivate a tendency towards frugality here are a couple of quotations on which to meditate: "God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind of person he selects to receive it." (Austin O'Malley); "Money can't buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy." (Spike Milligan).
(William Reville is a Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry and Director of Microscopy at UCC.)