Conspicuous Consumption as Economic Policy

It is not hyperbolic to suggest that in America one cannot do anything or go anywhere without being subject to advertising. Obviously this is the case inside one’s house while watching television, or when strolling through a mall, or when sitting in a doctor’s waiting room reading a magazine. Beyond the obvious, however, on even the most lonesome patch of highway between two little towns east of eden and left of nowhere, a car will still pass a billboard or an inducement to a local exhibition painted in large block letters on the roof of a barn or house. Until fairly recently, even a place that had seemed fairly sacrosanct from the onslaught urging one to consume has fallen victim.

While the grandparents of today’s moviegoers could pay twenty-five cents and see two movies, a newsreel, a serial, coming attractions and a cartoon, those grandchildren today pay up to ten dollars for the privilege of watching anywhere from five to ten minutes of commercials finally settling in for their one movie. A movie that typically will contain more product placements than the average moviegoer could imagine. All this advertising is built upon one the same concept: Convincing people to buy things they may, but probably don’t really need, in order to keep the American economy chugging along. The American economy, and by association the entire global economy, is powered by the engine of consumption, by the seemingly unquenchable thirst of citizens to buy the next big thing; this overreliance on one aspect of economic growth has left the American economy, and by extension the global economy, vulnerable to the groundswelling effort known collectively for the purposes of this paper as the anti-consumer movement to gain such a foothold in the process that it could conceivably lead to catastrophic consequences that would be felt around the globe.

Although the term conspicuous consumption has been credited to Thorsten Veblen, the concept as it has worked its way into dominating contemporary economics can be traced back to Karl Marx and his theory of commodity fetishism, with both theories working together to subtly create the perfect driver of that economic engine: the unsatisfied consumer. Veblen’s conception of particularly conspicuous consumerism has its roots in the more obvious division of wealth at the turn of the last century. During the time in which Veblen wrote, the divide between the rich and the poor was much more easily ascertained than it is now, although the actual real income divide may not have narrowed as significantly since then as it seems. Veblen focuses on what he terms "pecuniary emulation."

Pecuniary emulation is just a rather fancy way of saying that what the poor were trying their best to do during was to "keep up with the Joneses." Veblen’s explanation of emulation locates it at the root of ownership; in other words once our immediate material needs are met, we buy items for their conspicuous nature, to emulate those in higher earning strata; furthermore this emulation doesn’t end at the consumer level, but wends its way into the very fabric of the economic institution and from there to every facet of the entire social structure. He goes on, however, to draw a much more complex picture of this idea of emulation, one that both refers back to Marxist theories while looking forward to twentieth-century advertising strategy. "The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction. 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."

Marx’s theories of the fetishism of the commodity informs Veblen’s ideas of possessions having the capability of conferring an abstract noun upon its owner and by the middle of the twentieth century the advertising world had perfected the ability to translate this capability to consumers; at the same time the US economy began depending ever more heavily upon consumption of non-essential goods. Veblen’s "honor" eventually transformed into something else as the economic divide between rich and poor shrank alongside the growth of the American middle class. That something is called "status" and advertising works around the clock to convince consumers that status is something they can buy.

Marx almost seems to be describing contemporary advertising tactics when he describes how a commodity can be fetishized. "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 often is a product, the ownership of which is designed to increase one’s status, advertised with a focus on its use-value? The informational purpose of advertising—letting a potential customer know what a product actually does so they can decide if they have a need for it—has long since gone the way of the dinosaur. The revolution in the purpose of advertising is directly related to the economic shift from production to consumption that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when technology allowed for the production of more and more goods despite there not being enough people who actually needed them to buy them. Industry quickly took care of that nasty little disconnect by not only using advertising to convince them to buy these new products by engendering an ideology of pleasure that made it seem vital that they own these products. 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 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 except the mall itself and whatever sites might be located on the path from airport to the mall and back.

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 science fiction to imagine a scenario in which all the potential shoppers at one mall all decided on the same day to give up conspicuous 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: Wal-Mart. Although it doubtless won’t affect the American economy overnight, nevertheless a movement has been steadily gaining force that, if successful in their aims, would severely undermine American economic growth and global development.

The anti-consumer movement actually embraces an umbrella of activist agendas, many of which reflecting the very system and agenda against which they protest. The anti-consumer movement is putting its message out in all available media: books, movies, the internet. Perhaps the most famous attack against the American culture of consumption is the PBS special and subsequent book, Affluenza. The writers attack the problem as if it were a disease, offering methods of diagnosis as well as cures. In a cross-media assault on America’s overreliance on consumerism, Kalle Lasn founded the anti-consumer web site Adbusters.org as well as wrote the bible on how activists can use the system against itself. In his book Culture Jam, Lasn takes up the issue of how intimately entwined private corporations and public economic policy really are: "Corporations, these legal fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms, and powers than we do".

The anti-consumer movement can also be felt in such movies as Fight Club, in which the dedicated followers of the film’s hero gleefully engage in anti-business terrorism. And, of course, the internet is a hotbed of activist web sites dedicated to everything from Fight Club-type activities to more sedate but nonetheless economically dangerous sites that give recommendations on such topics as how to downsize one’s lifestyle or how to live a happier life with less.

Perhaps that science fiction scenario will one day take place and a mall will open and there will be nobody there to enter it and buy things they don’t need and can’t afford. 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. Unfortunately, the anti-consumer movement may not be the driving force that bursts this precarious bubble; it may only be the final straw. In addition to those who are choosing to spend less, many consumers are finding they have no choice. The American economy took a hard hit in the second quarter of 2005 and a recent column by Brian Deese explains how it was a sharp drop in consumer spending that did the most damage. "The American consumer is the battered warrior of our anemic recovery – continuing to spend beyond anyone's expectations in the face of real wages that are lower today than when the recovery began and sharp increases in healthcare costs and oil prices". Healthcare and oil are, of course, 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 realize they can live for the long term without some of the things they may be forced to live without for short term?