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Consumerism

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The economic theory that increasing the consumption of goods and services is beneficial for individual well-being and drives national economic growth.

Ask someone why they bought something beyond its function (a car, a watch, a bigger house) and the honest answer rarely stops at utility. Thorstein Veblen named this pattern, long before advertising existed as an industry, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). He called it conspicuous consumption: spending aimed not at use but at display, a visible signal of status intended for other people to see. He paired it with “pecuniary emulation,” the drive to match or outspend one’s peers. Later popular language flattened this into “keeping up with the Joneses.” On Veblen’s account, this was not a personal failing. It was how a status hierarchy without inherited titles found a new currency: purchasing power made visible.

Six decades later, John Kenneth Galbraith pushed the diagnosis further. In The Affluent Society (1958), he argued that once a society has produced enough to meet real needs, further demand can no longer be assumed to originate with the consumer. He called this the “dependence effect”: wants that depend on, and are actively generated by, the very process meant to satisfy them, chiefly advertising and marketing. The result is a self-sustaining loop: production creates the desire that justifies more production. Galbraith summarized the outcome as “private opulence and public poverty,” ever-fuller households alongside underfunded shared goods.

Consumerism, in this grounded sense, is not simply “liking things.” It is an economic structure in which a person’s sense of worth is routed through acquisition, and in which the appetite driving that acquisition is, to a significant degree, engineered rather than discovered. Recognizing that difference (want that arises from within, versus want that is manufactured from without) is the first move in stepping off the cycle.

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