Conspicuous consumption

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. In their eyes the merit of an object which is in any degree either useful or beautiful, is greatly enhanced by its scarcity, or by the great labour which it requires to collect any considerable quantity of it, a labour which nobody can afford to pay but themselves. Such objects they are willing to purchase at a higher price than things much more beautiful and useful, but more common. Adam Smith

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Wikipedia defines conspicuous consumption as “the lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth.” In the mind of a conspicuous consumer, such display serves as a means of attaining or maintaining social status. The term was coined by Thorsten Veblen in his classic 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The name may be relatively new but the idea of trying to impress others is most definitely not. Adam Smith’s description in the quote above shows that the Scottish economist was aware of how material wealth was flaunted. Karl Marx liked to talk about commodity fetishisation.

But we must go back much further back in time and we cannot limit ourselves to humans. Ostentatious display is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, where the classic example is the peacock’s tail. This may seem like a waste of evolutionary resources but it serves an important signalling function. It is saying I am so fit that I can afford this garish display of extra strength and stamina and still manage to avoid being eaten by predators! Animals have used bright plumage loud roars flashing teeth and oversized antlers to intimidate their rivals and human culture has mimicked their practices.

Conspicuous consumption has been an inseparable part of our history especially since we began to see the stratification of society after the invention of agriculture. The anthropologist Marvin Harris argued that conspicuous exchange, display and destruction of valuables were culturally constructed strategies for winning and then protecting power and wealth. For Harris preciosities such as gold cups jade figures bejewelled crowns and diamond rings did not acquire their status because of their intrinsic beauty. They represented much more than that. They were tokens of concentrated of concentrated wealth and power – the material symbol of the ability of godlike humans to do godlike things. These items had to be scarce or extremely difficult to find. They could be buried deep underground, available only after long and dangerous journeys or be the product of the minds of great craftsmen and artists.

Conspicuous consumption has been a constant factor in human history. What has changed have been the manifestations. In the precapitalist feudal period status was shown with slaves, women and food. With the rise of capitalism a rising upper middle class wanted to get in on the act with expensive clothes and houses. Finally the last 100 years or so has seen the democratisation of luxury as both the middle classes and the masses strive to conform and be individual at the same time.

Whenever there is extravagant spending, there is always a counterreaction. The most typical manifestation was what are known as sumptuary laws, laws that attempt to curb extravagant consumption. The principal motivation behind such laws was not to control wasteful competition, but rather to enforce the existing social hierarchy. Of course the people who made the laws were exempt from them.  Those below them should dress according to your station and not have pretensions. Generally these laws failed because the desire to flaunt one’s wealth is so powerful and will generally find an outlet. Fashion proved an especially complicated area to control with legislators unable to employ the specific fashion terminology to correctly identify luxurious clothing.

Is conspicuous consumption something to be worried about? Critics argue that luxury spending does in fact generate negative spillovers. If we base our spending on keeping up with the Joneses, we are making a wasteful use of economic resources. There is a game theory problem here. If we could all agree not to engage in this wasteful behaviour, we would surely be better off? It’s like if everyone in a stadium stands up, then nobody sees any better.

It was the American Revolution that really changed the world in this sense. Before then we all had our station in life. But the American Revolution upturned this worldview. This had many positive aspects but there was one big downside. We no longer could put down our social situation to our station in life. Now if you weren’t successful it was somehow your fault. It raised people’s aspirations but now they intensely feel your inadequacies. American society had a real sense of status anxiety, which as De Tocqueville accurately foresaw, they would soon export all over the world.

Attacking the vulgarity of consumer capitalism has been a favourite sport for intellectuals for many years now – John Kenneth Galbraith, Herbert Marcuse, Jean Baudrillard and, more recently, Naomi Klein have all made stinging denunciations. This material abundance hides the spiritual poverty of capitalism. These critics really don’t like choice which they see as a subtle form of tyranny.

As I stated in my Adam Smith post, I think that the market is an excellent way of distributing goods but we have autonomy and we are not forced to worship at the altar of consumerism. I would make the case for inconspicuous consumption; we should buy what adds value to our lives. There is a problem with the concept of conspicuous consumption. How do we define it? The line between luxury and need is not always so easy to define.  We often end up with elitists whose superior education gives them the power to define which items are luxuries. I do not consider myself in thrall of consumerism but I am wary of anti-consumerists who seek to tell everyone what they should be buying. I leave the final words to HL Mencken in a satire of Veblen:

Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one – or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists – or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver because plowhands must put up with the liver – or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose? Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman – or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better and kisses better?

QI: A selection #7

Here is another selection of trivia that I have picked from the QI column in the Telegraph:

The longest and slowest piece of music in history is John Cage’s As Slow as Possible, originally written in 1985 as a 20-minute piece for piano. After Cage’s death in 1992, a conference of philosophers and musicians set themselves the task of seeing just how long the eight-page score could last. As a result, it was adapted for organ and has been playing since 2001 at the church of St Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. It is planned to last 639 years, the first organ in Halberstadt having been built 639 years earlier. After kicking off with a 17-month pause, the organ’s six pipes have managed eight chord changes since and a new chord is due on February 5 2011. To check on progress, or to order a (somewhat faster) CD, visit www.john-cage.halberstadt.de.

The highest mountain in the known universe is Olympus Mons, a giant volcano on Mars, almost three times the height of Mount Everest.  Olympus Mons is 15 miles high and 388 miles across. It is wide and flat, resembling a vast island in a sea drained of water. The crater on top is 45 miles wide and nearly two miles deep. The mountain is so wide that its base would cover Italy and the caldera at the top would engulf London, though the incline of its sides is so slight (between one and three degrees) that you wouldn’t even break sweat if you climbed it.

The universal belief that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) was tiny came about from a combination of mistranslation and propaganda.  Napoleon’s autopsy, carried out in 1821 by his personal physician, Francesco Antommarchi, recorded his height as “5/2”. It is now thought this represents the French measurement “5 pieds 2 pouces”, which converts to the English measurement of 5ft 6½in (1.69m). The average height of Frenchmen between 1800 and 1820 was only 5ft 4½in (1.64m); Napoleon was thus 2½in taller than his rival Horatio Nelson, who was only 5ft 4in (1.62m).

One of the strangest products of Indonesian agriculture involves the farming of the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). These small, cat-sized mammals are fed coffee berries and their faeces are collected and washed to make kopi luwak (civet coffee). The action of their stomach enzymes lends the resulting drink an unmatched richness of flavour that has none of coffee’s usual bitterness. As a result it is the world’s most expensive beverage, fetching up to £500 per pound. In 2008 an espresso made from kopi luwak went on sale at Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square, London, for £50 per cup. Apparently a similar coffee can be made by feeding coffee berries to muntjac deer, a south-east Asian species now naturalised in southern England. Home-grown English kopi muncak has yet to be reported.

Despite its apparent stately motion, the Earth is pretty nippy: if you stand on the Equator, the speed of its rotation around its own axis is about 1,040mph. This decreases as you approach the poles: stand on either pole and you barely move at all. But remember that as well as spinning, Earth is hurtling around the sun at 67,000mph. Were we able to fly at that speed, we could circle Earth in 20 minutes. The solar system is moving even faster, spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 492,000mph. Even so, it takes it 225 million years to complete a single orbit (so it has managed 20 in total since the birth of the Sun, and only one since humans evolved).

According to the historian Niall Ferguson, of the 125 major European wars fought since 1495, the French have participated in 50 – more than Austria (47) and England (43). Out of 168 battles fought since 387BC, they have won 109, lost 49 and drawn 10.  The British tend to be rather selective about the battles they remember. Every English schoolboy was once able to recite the roll call of our glorious wins at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415), but no one’s ever heard of the French victories at Patay (1429) and (especially) at Castillon (1453), where French cannons tore the English apart, winning the Hundred Years War and confirming France as the most powerful military nation in Europe. And what about the Duke of Enghien thrashing the Spanish at Rocroi late on in the Thirty Years War in 1643, ending a century of Spanish dominance? Or the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, when General Comte de Rochambeau and American forces prevailed? The British always prided themselves on superiority at sea, but knew they could never win a land war on the Continent. France’s achievements help to explain another French “military victory”. Whether it is ranks (general, captain, corporal, lieutenant); equipment (lance, mine, bayonet, epaulette, trench); organisation (volunteer, regiment, soldier, barracks) or strategy (army, camouflage, combat, esprit de corps, reconnaissance), the language of warfare is French.

Early motoring was very slow. Such was the fear of the damaging effects of the motor car (hugely exaggerated by the railway companies) that a series of laws were passed in the 1860s known as the Red Flag Acts. They limited the speed to 4mph in the country and 2mph in town and required each car to have a minimum crew of three, one of whom was required to walk 60 yards in front of the vehicle, waving a red flag. It wasn’t until 1896 that Bridget Driscoll of Croydon became the first pedestrian to be killed in a road accident in Britain. She was crossing the grounds of Crystal Palace when a car hit her, travelling at 4mph (the speed limit had been raised to 12mph and the red flag abolished).

Cicadas are the world’s loudest insects, with some of the 2,500 species reaching 120 decibels — the equivalent to what you hear when sitting in the front row of a loud rock concert. The longest-living insect is the termite queen: they have been known to live for at least 50 years and some scientists believe they may live to 100. The giant weta (Deinacrida heteracantha), a type of cricket endemic to New Zealand’s offshore islands, is the heaviest insect alive today. The largest specimen, a female, weighed 71g (2.5oz), three times heavier than the average house mouse, and was more than 85mm (3.4in) long.

My media week 28/11/10

ABC’s religious affairs programme Encounter has a programmed called If God is Dead…?, which asks if is morality a cultural construction and where God fits into the picture.

The Onion had a video about Obama explaining his decision his decision to pardon the turkey for Thanksgiving: Obama Outlines Moral, Philosophical Justifications For Turkey Pardon

Loyal reader Alberto sent me this link, Bras and other clues on the economy can be found at mall. I do like this off-beat stuff. I seem to remember there used to be a theory that skirt lengths were a predictor of the stock market direction. The theory is that if skirts are short, it means the markets are bullish. While if skirts are long, it means the markets are bearish. If you like this kind of stuff, here is a link to the World’s Wackiest Stock Indicators.