Friday, November 18, 2022

Veblenian Waste vs. Unprofitable Demand

Veblenian consumption is a lower-class indicator, not an upper-class indicator. It's an impoverished mimic of how real rich folk behave. The peasants can see the superficial waste and don't see the underlying purpose. "I don't do that. I couldn't afford it even had it occurred to me. Must be getting done because I can't afford it." Then monkey does what it sees, once it can. The peasant is missing an AND gate, and they wouldn't have the cognitive resources to grapple with it even if they noticed. 

In short, peasants have lawns because they are wasteful. Aristocrats have lawns because (and only if) they like lawns. I figure the first lawn was some rich idle noble who wondered if they could make an artificial meadow. Everyone else thought he was crazy. Indeed it's normal for rich idle folk to try crazy things. They weren't wrong, exactly. However, occasionally, it works out anyway. The lawn was a great status symbol since it's expensive, comfortable, and not profitable at all, so the lower orders copied it as soon as they could afford the faintest shadow of a proper lawn. 


If you're rich sometimes you overpay for something. You have anomalous demand. It's driven by aesthetics, not profit and loss. Because you're rich, you can handily eat the loss. A lot like going to a movie or eating dinner out, but idiosyncratic instead of ritualistic. 

Maybe a software boss would fly themselves out to see a bug that exactly one (1) user experiences, and have their team custom-code a patch for that one (1) user. Completely unnecessary, very wasteful, but they find it satisfying so they do it anyway. That's anomalous unprofitable demand. Technically it's only unprofitable materialistically. The aristocrat spends money but gets their money's worth. They have a high supply of money hence a low local price of money, after all.

Veblenian "consumption" is lighting money on fire to show you won't immediately starve to death if you do. 

Unprofitable demand comes from a place of confidence and abundance. Core of joy.
Veblenian consumption comes from status anxiety and scarcity. Core of fear. Phobos worship. They're afraid if they don't waste money, the neighbours will tut at them. Nobody likes Starbucks' coffee. They have to lie about what they want because they either know they can't get it and have to fake it, or it's a crime and they should be penalized for trying.
Don't worry, they are punished. Condemned to live with themselves all day every day. 


Because peasants don't even like the lawn, they can't tell when their lawn sucks without a step-by-step guide. They can't maintain a lawn, they have to carry out the lawn ritual. Problem: climate and land varies, which means lawns vary; even if there was a proper lawn ritual, it would not vary. They're not using it as a lawn, so they can't tell when it's uncomfortable and ugly, hence, unless they're very lucky, the peasant lawn is prosaically uncomfortable and/or ugly. They don't go to Starbucks because they have a taste for coffee or cafes, and thus the coffee is awful and it's not a cafe. 


If you're wealthy, you can afford to skip Veblenian consumption. Whether you're rich specifically monetarily or have other forms of wealth, if you avoid buying things nobody wants, you can buy more cool shit. Result: a world with more cool shit in it. A cooler world.

2 comments:

JBPGuy said...

Status anxiety is kind of rational, in a way.

(Consider the Dave Chapelle line - if women would fuck men in a cardboard box do you think they'd buy a house?)

The irrational part is caring what your neighbours think about your mate quality. But really, do you care? Or do you just hate that they point out that she's kind of ugly and your children are kind of dumb?

Alrenous said...

Status anxiety is important if arranged marriages aren't a thing.

Or if the men in charge of the arranged marriages are as shallow and faddish as the stereotypical tweenage girl.