In lockstep with the invoice for private preschool comes the knowledge that one should pack the lunchbox with quinoa crackers and organic fruit. Inconspicuous consumption in other words, has become a shorthand through which the new elite signal their cultural capital to one another. While much inconspicuous consumption is extremely expensive, it shows itself through less expensive but equally pronounced signalling – from reading The Economist to buying pasture-raised eggs. At the same time, we’ve seen the arrival of a middle-class consumer market that demands more material goods at cheaper price points. This deluge of accessible luxury is a function of the mass-production economy of the 20th century, the outsourcing of production to China, and the cultivation of emerging markets where labour and materials are cheap. More than 100 years later, conspicuous consumption is still part of the contemporary capitalist landscape, and yet today, luxury goods are significantly more accessible than in Veblen’s time. In Veblen’s now famous treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class, he coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to denote the way that material objects were paraded as indicators of social position and status. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen observed that silver spoons and corsets were markers of elite social position. Editor’s Note (18 December 2017): Through to the end of the year, BBC Capital is bringing back some of your favourite stories from 2017.
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