Conspicuous Consumption and Leisure
In The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), Veblen presented the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Conspicuous consumption is the application of money, and other resources, to display a higher social-status, e.g. the use of silver flatware at meals, although flatware made of other materials might functionally suffice. Moreover, Veblen goods are consumer goods made greatly desirable by high manufacturing cost, sale price, and scarcity in the market, especially “socially visible” consumer goods, rather than goods that are consumed in private.
Conspicuous leisure is the extended length of time that a person devotes to pleasurable pursuits that grant him or her a higher social-status; for example, to be a gentleman, a man must study philosophy and the fine arts, which were of limited economic value towards earning a living. Therefore, such intellectual activities displayed the rich person’s freedom from economic necessity, and from having to do a job or hold an occupation that requires performing economically productive manual labor; higher social status derives from not having to perform manual labor.
Read more about this topic: The Theory Of The Leisure Class
Famous quotes containing the words conspicuous consumption, conspicuous, consumption and/or leisure:
“Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.”
—Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929)
“The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“So it is with books, for the most part: they work no redemption on us. The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares. The volume is dear at a dollar, and after to reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did without surprise of a surly bank director, that in bank parlors they estimate all stocks of this kind as rubbish.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)