Social standing can be a means to economic opportunity. The better one's standing, the more opportunities will be available and the fewer barriers there will be to taking advantage of those opportunities. As a result, there may have been an underlying economic reason for consumers to engage in conspicuous consumption. It may not have been irrational at all. It would be interesting to see Veblen's response to such a supposition, given that it would have run counter to his underlying views about humanity and its motivations.
However, Veblen did not view consumption that way. He viewed consumption more from the framework of a desire to "imbue experience with aesthetic unity" and that humans cooperate to shape their environments for the common good (Throntveit, 2008). Veblen's argument therefore is that human
Indeed, markets do not have the power to create human behavior as humans are guided by different principles.
Veblen would have rejected the idea that the markets direct self-interest towards societal goals. In his view, society's institutions directed individual behavior. This in turn generated economic outputs. The market, if anything, would have been one such societal institution among many, with human behavior governed by all institutions, leaving the influence of the market to a relatively minimal state.
Works Cited:
JRank. (no date). Thorstein Veblen biography. JRank.org. Retrieved May 9, 2010 from http://social.jrank.org/pages/3124/Thorstein-Veblen.html
Throntviet, T. (2008). The will to behold: Thorstein Veblen's pragmatic aesthetics. Modern Intellectual History. Vol. 5 (3) 519-546.
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