Consumption - Conspicuous

In the 19th century, the term conspicuous consumption was introduced by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), in the book The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899), to describe the behavioral. Characteristics of the nouveau riche (new rich) social class who emerged as a result of capital accumulation during the Second Industrial Revolution (c. 1860-1914). In that 19th-century social and historical context, the term conspicuous consumption was narrowly applied to describe the men, women, and families of the upper class who applied their great wealth as a means of publicly manifesting their social power and prestige, either real or perceived. In the 20th century the significant improvement of the material standard of living of a society and the consequent The emergence of the ... of the middle class, broadly applied the term conspicuous consumption to the men, women and households who possessed the discretionary income that allowed them to practice the patterns of economic consumption of goods and services-which were motivated by the Desire for prestige, the public display of social status, rather than by the intrinsic, practical utility of the goods and the services proper. In the 1920s, economists, such as Paul Nystrom (1878-1969) proposed that changes in the style of life made feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced to the mass of society a philosophy of futility" that would increase the consumption of goods and services as a social fashion? an activity done for its own sake. In that context, conspicuous consumption is discussed either as a behavioral addiction or as a narcissistic behavior or both, which are psychological conditions induced by consumerism, the desire for the immediate gratification of hedonic expectations. The 19th century view of "conspicuous consumption" was