People Are Confused About the Usefulness of Buying Fancy Things
Why luxury goods don't impress, but repel
In 1899, a brilliant but stubborn economist named Thorstein Veblen coined a term that proved quite useful in the following century and beyond. His theory of “conspicuous consumption”—basically, purchasing certain goods in order to show off—introduced a way of thinking about why people buy things that are expensive and unnecessary.
Veblen established the basics of the concept, but, even nearly 120 years later, researchers are still making sense of how people practice it. And what they’re finding is that people tell themselves all sorts of stories—some true and some
