Conspicuous Consumption in the 21st Century

Conspicuous Consumption in the 21st Century

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen (1899) coins the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the practice of lavish spending in order to impress others with one's wealth and to demonstrate power. He describes the evolution of the practice, which began with the wealthiest leisure class showing off its opulence in an effort to justify its place in society and invoke envy and esteem from the lower classes. As time went on, the practice permeated all social classes, as the members of each class aimed to attain the way of life and social status of the classes above it. Veblen writes, “The members of each stratum [of society] accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal.” Even the lowest class became enthralled with obtaining a certain level of comfort and luxury, leaving no layer of the social hierarchy unaffected. Though the practice of conspicuous consumption was ever present in Veblen’s society, it has dramatically increased in the twentieth century due to the development of the internet and an expansion in the use of social media.

As Veblen mentions, a key element to conspicuous consumption is that one’s excess spending is easily viewable by others. He writes that “the only practicable means of impressing one’s pecuniary ability on…unsympathetic observers of one’s everyday life” is to write “in characters in which he who runs may read” (Veblen, 1899). Both in his time and today, in order for conspicuous consumption to continue to successfully attain its purpose, there must be a low-cost and accurate mechanism for transmitting information regarding one’s consumption to society as a whole (Schor, 2007). With the advent of the internet and, most recently, the rise in social media, a simple, inexpensive method for displaying opulence was created. Veblen could not have anticipated such an easily accessible tool...