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If you want to understand material culture at the beginning of the 21st century, you must understand the overwhelming importance of unnecessary material. If you are looking for the one unambiguous result of modern capitalism, of the industrial revolution, and of marketing, here it is. In the way we live now, you are not what you make. You are what you consume. And most of what you consume is totally unnecessary yet remarkably well made.
The most interesting of those superfluous objects belong in a socially constructed and ever-shifting class called luxury. Consuming those objects, objects as rich in meaning as they are low in utility, causes lots of happiness and distress. As well they should. For one can make the argument that until all necessities are had by all members of a community, no one should have luxury. More complex still is that, since the 1980s, the bulk consumers of luxury have not been the wealthy but the middle class, your next-door neighbors and their kids. And this is happening not just in the West but in many parts of the world.
When I was growing up in the middle class of the 1950s, luxury objects were lightly tainted with shame. You had to be a little cautious if you drove a Cadillac, wore a Rolex, or lived in a house with more than two columns out front. The rich could drip with diamonds, but you should stay dry. Movie stars could drive convertibles; you should keep your top up. If you've got it, don't flaunt it. Remember, the people surrounding you had lived through the Depression, a time that forever lit the bright lines between have-to-have, don't-need-to-have, and have-in-order-to-show-off.
The best definition of this old-style off-limits luxury came to me from my dad. I was just a kid, and it was my first trip to a cafeteria: Morrison's Cafeteria in Pompano Beach, Florida, February 1955. When I got to the desserts, I removed the main course from my tray and loaded up on cake and JELL-O. My dad told me to put all the desserts back but one. I said that wasn't fair. To me the whole idea of cafeteria was to have as much as you want of what you want. My dad said no, that was not the idea of cafeteria. The idea of cafeteria is that you can have just one of many choices.
Look around American culture, and you will see how wrong he was. Almost every set of consumables has a dessert at the top. And you can have as much of it as you can get on your tray or as much of it as your credit card will allow. This is true not just for expensive products like town cars and McMansions but for everyday objects. In bottled water, for instance, there is Evian, advertised as if it were a liquor. In coffee, there's Starbucks; in ice cream, Häagen-Dazs; in sneakers, Nike; in whiskey, Johnnie Walker Blue; in credit cards, American Express Centurian; in wine, Chateau Margaux; in cigars, Arturo Fuente Hemingway; and, well, you know the rest.
Name the category, no matter how mundane, and you'll find a premium or, better yet, a super-premium brand at the top. And having more than you can conceivably use of such objects is not met with opprobrium but with genial acceptance. This pattern persists regardless of class: The average number of branded sneakers for adolescent males? It's 4.8 pairs. And regardless of culture:
A favorite consumer product in China? Chanel lipstick dispensers sans lipstick.
Basil Englis and Michael Solomon, professors of marketing in the School of Business at Rutgers University, have studied the effects of brand consumption, particularly how college students cluster around top-brand knowledge. They drew guinea pigs from undergraduate business majors at their institution and presented them with 40 cards, each containing a description of a different cluster of consumers.
The professors sifted the clusters to make four groups -- lifestyles, if you will -- representative of undergraduate society. They were Young Suburbia, Money & Brains, Smalltown Downtown, and Middle America. Then Englis and Solomon gathered images of objects from four product categories (automobiles, magazines/newspapers, toiletries, and alcoholic beverages) that fit into each group. The students were asked to put the various images together into coherent groups; they were also to state their current proximity to, or desire to be part of, each group in the future.
As might be expected, the Money & Brains cluster was the most popular aspirational niche. What Englis and Solomon did not expect was how specific and knowledgeable the students were about the possessions that they did not have but knew that members of that cluster needed.
When asked what brand of automobile they would drive, here's what they said: BMWs (53.6 percent), Mercedes (50.7), Cadillacs (30.4), Volvos (23.2), Porsches (21.7), Acuras (17.4), and Jaguars (15.9). They knew what they wanted to read: travel magazines (21.7 percent), Vogue (21.7), BusinessWeek (20.3), Fortune (17.9), and GQ (15.9). Again, this is not what they did read but what they took to be the reading material of the de-sired group. What they were actually reading (or so they said) were Forbes, Barron's, The New Yorker, and Gourmet. No mention of Rolling Stone, Playboy, Spin, or Maxim for this group. They certainly knew what to drink: Heineken beer (33.3 percent), expensive wines (26.1), scotch (18.8), champagne (17.4), and Beck's beer (15). They also knew what to sprinkle on their bodies: Polo (27.5 percent), Obsession (15.9), and Drakkar (15.9).
What the professors found was not just that birds of a feather had started to flock together, but that these young birds already knew what flock to shy away from. They were not ashamed of smoking, for instance, but of smoking the wrong brand. Their prime avoidance group corresponded to the Smalltown Downtown cluster.
The Money & Brainers knew a lot about the Smalltowners. They knew about favored pickup trucks, Chevys (23.2 percent) and Fords (18.8). They knew that this group reads People (30.4), Sports Illustrated (26.1), TV Guide (24.6), Wrestling (21.7), fishing magazines (20.3), and The National Enquirer (18.8). They assumed that Smalltowners preferred Budweiser (59.4), followed by Miller (24.6) and Coors (18.8). Essentially, the Money & Brainers had learned not just what to buy but what to avoid (or at least what to say to avoid).
Such shared knowledge is the basis of culture. This insight was, after all, the rationale behind a liberal arts education. John Henry Newman and Matthew Arnold argued for state-supported education in the 19th century precisely because cultural literacy meant social cohesion. No one argued that it was important to know algebraic functions or Latin etymologies or what constitutes a sonnet because such knowledge allows us to solve important social problems. We learn such matters because it is the basis of how to speak to each other, how we develop a bond of shared history and commonality. This is the secular religion of the liberal arts and sciences, what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital.
In our postmodern world we have, it seems, exchanged knowledge of history and science (a knowledge of production) for knowledge of products and how such products interlock to form coherent social patterns (a knowledge of consumption). Buy this and don't buy that has replaced make/learn this, don't make/learn that. After all, in the way we live now, everyone is a consumer, but not everyone is a worker. As Marcel Duchamp, sly observer of the changing scene, said, "Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes." Thus a new denomination of cultural capital.
A shift in currency has clear ramifications. A producer culture focuses on the independent self of the worker: self-help, self-discipline, self-respect, self-control, self-reliance, self-interest. Responsibility is situated in the individual: Can she get work? A consumer culture, however, focuses on community: Fit in, don't stand out. Be cool. The standard of judgment becomes the ability to interact effectively with others, to win their affection and admiration -- to merge with others of the same lifestyle. Can he consume the right brands?
The powerful desire to associate with recognized objects of little intrinsic but high positional value is at the heart of Luxe Americana. It is what Martha Stewart is doing down at Kmart introducing her Silver Label goods. Of her many endorsed products, one is of special interest: her line of matelassé coverlets and shams -- really, just bedcovers. They are available in yellow, white, and multicolored stripes and come in silk, linen, crushed velvet, Egyptian cotton, cotton sateens, and even cashmere. Remember three things: This is Kmart, a bedspread is something you buy not to show off to others but to please yourself, and cashmere is supposed to be something really special.
So here is the Cashmere Company hawking something it calls pashmina. The word is a linguistic trick. Cashmere is goat hair from Kashmir, an area between India and Pakistan, whereas pashmina is simply the Persian word for the same goat in the same area. In other words, it's the same stuff. But that's not what is interesting. It is that pashmina has been introduced precisely because places like Kmart have too much cashmere. So what we have is a top-of-the-line product topped because too many people were in the checkout line.
But then again, what of Michael Graves�designed toasters for Target, Ralph Lauren house paint, and Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter brand furniture at Ethan Allen Furniture stores? This tectonic shift in consumption is why the designer Lynette Jennings, host of the Discovery Channel's Lynette Jennings Design and HouseSmart, is peddling doorknobs at Home Depot.
If you want to see how varied the consumers of the new luxuries are, just take a tour of your local Costco or Sam's Club parking lot. Observe the shiny new imported sedans and SUVs alongside aging subcompacts. Or spend an hour watching what is being sold on the Home Shopping Network, a televised flea market for impulse buyers. The system now has 23,000 incoming phone lines capable of handling up to 20,000 calls a minute. Home Shopping no longer sells just cubic zirconium rings. Not when the real money is in designer handbags.
In the older culture, my dad's culture, the limited production capacity of the economy sharply reduced aspirations to material comfort. In the modern world, my culture, much greater material satisfactions lie within the reach of even those of modest means. Thus a producer culture becomes a consumer culture, a hoarding culture becomes a surplus culture, a work culture becomes a therapeutic culture. Because what you buy becomes more important than what you make, luxury is not a goal; for many it is a necessity.
Michael J. Apter, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has studied why we do things and, by extension, why we buy things. In The Experience of Motivation: The Theory of Psychological Reversals, he divides general orientations into telic (arousal reducing) and paratelic (arousal seeking). A telic motivation starts with isolating a need and then feeling anxious about resolving it. The experience ends, if successful, with a feeling of relaxation. If the ending does not satisfy the need (postdecision dissonance), the anxiety continues, and the process is repeated until it abates. A paratelic tendency, however, begins in a state of well-being that edges over into boredom. The person seeks excitement and judges the act by the experience. Does it resolve boredom? Not to put too fine a point on it, but consuming luxury for many Americans has gone from telic to paratelic, from product to process, from problem resolution to emotion seeking, from object to experience.
The one characteristic of modern luxe is its profound oxymoronic nature: If everyone can have it, is it still luxury? If you want to see the difference that a generation makes in downshifting luxury, just look at how top-of-the-line domestic automobiles are advertised. Compare Cadillac in the early part of the 20th century with Lincoln at the end of the century, and you'll get the idea.
Cadillac's pitch in a 1915 advertisement was that luxury comes at a price and that price includes humility, even mild mortification. You buy this car and you take responsibility for sharing excellence. The true price of luxury is not cheap. In fact, you will be reviled, assailed, and envied. This car is a laurel. Be careful how you wear it. The real headline is not just "The Penalty of Leadership," it is "The Penalty of Luxury."
By contrast, Lincoln's current pitch is pure indulgence: Buy this object and let your lust for comfort run wild. Lincoln is "what a luxury object should be." And after all you've been through, you deserve it. If not to own, then to lease.
Needless to say, as the 20th century faded into oblivion, Cadillac, which had a history of "owning" the luxury category, lost its vaunted place as the best-selling domestic luxury car to Lincoln. The Lincoln division of the Ford Motor Car Company has a single-word advertising motto: "Luxury."
Perhaps the best example of what I call luxury creep, in which a down-market product comes uptown solely on the basis of advertising, is the Buick Century. Buick has had a history of being a car for strivers who have not quite made it. Just look back on Buick advertising in the '60s, and you can see the company's typical reticence. In 1965 Buick advertising carried the tag line, "Wouldn't you really rather have a Buick?," which survived through the 1980s. In 1980 the company added a second theme: "The great American road belongs to Buick." Then in 1986 the McCann-Erickson ad agency positioned Buicks as "premium American motorcars."
Now Buick does have a luxury car, the Park Avenue. But the Century is an underling, now positioned as "a luxury car for everyone." Never mind that the tag line is an oxymoron. The problem is more fundamental. This car is just a standard Buick, which is just a jazzed-up Chevy, which is just a dumbed-down Cadillac, which is just an Oldsmobile, which is just like tons of Fords and Chryslers, as well as most Japanese midrange cars. The only luxury about it is the pretension of saying this is luxurious.
In the last few years I have spent hours flipping through a new genre of magazine -- The Robb Report, Millionaire, Indulgence, Flaunt, Luxe, Icon, Self: The Best of Everything, Ornament: The Art of Personal Adornment -- as well as standard glossy pulp from Condé Nast like GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and, most recently, Lucky. I have trolled Rodeo Drive, Worth Avenue, and upper Madison Avenue and traveled to Las Vegas, where I stood agog for hours in the Bellagio and Venetian hotels.
I admit from the start that you could argue that this is not real luxury but a kind of ersatz variety, punk luxe, and maybe you would be correct. My father would have argued that real luxury is characterized not by shine but by patina, that its allure comes from inborn aesthetics, not from glitzy advertising, that it is passed from generation to generation and cannot be bought at the mall, and, most of all, that its consumption is private, not conspicuous. His words for modern luxury would have included gauche, vulgar, nouveau, tasteless, and, most interestingly, offensive.
In fact, maybe the rich have only two genuine luxury items left: time and philanthropy. The rest of us are having a go at all their stuff, albeit for a knockoff to be held only a short time. I can't afford a casita on Bermuda, but my timeshare can get it for me at least for a week. I can't own a limo, but I can rent one. If I can't fly on the Concorde, I can upgrade to first class with the miles I "earn" by using my American Express card. I can lease a Lexus.
In a sense luxury objects don't exist anymore as they used to be-cause "real" luxury used to be for the "happy few," and in the world of the jubilant Dow there is no more "happy few." The world that we live in, as John Seabrook recently argued in Nobrow: The Marketing of Culture and the Culture of Marketing, and as David Brooks explored in Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, no longer easily fits into intellectual classes. It now fits into consumption communities. So, for instance, we don't talk about high class, upper middle class, and middle class. Instead we talk about boomers, yuppies, Generation X, echo-boomers, nobrows, bobos (short for bourgeois bohemians), and the rest, who show what they are buying for themselves, not what they do for a living. And that's why each of these groups has its own luxury markers -- positional goods, in marketing jargon -- to be bought, not made.
In a way, the new luxury is the ineluctable result of a market economy and a democratic political system. As journalist Thomas Beer wrote, "Money does not rule democracy. Money is democracy." Back in the late 1940s Russell Lynes, editor of Harper's, concocted a taxonomy of taste: high-brow, upper middle-brow, lower middle-brow, and low-brow. His system, as gleefully celebrated in the April 11, 1949, issue of Life magazine, was scandalous when published, the topic of much cocktail party concern.
Lynes knew even then that Americans were no longer divided by "wealth, birth, or political eminence" but by consumption. These material distinctions were further explored in the 1980s in Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Tongue almost in cheek, Fussell even proposed a new class, what he called "category X people," to be based not on material consumption but on a shared taste for the better life. Fussell got the phenomenon of the "massification" of the upper class correct, and he certainly understood how the democratizing of luxury was a mixed blessing, but he missed the materiality of this confluence. Instead of superfluous stuff being pushed aside, it became even more central. You had to buy your way out, one Volvo, one glass of merlot, one bow tie, one Sub-Zero refrigerator, one granite countertop at a time.
From time to time in Western history there is vociferous antipathy toward high-end consumption. From Plato to the early Christians to the Renaissance, luxury was thought to effeminize and weaken. But this was hardly a pressing problem, because just getting to the necessities of life was a full-time job for most.
With increasing affluence this view shifted. Luxury became dangerous not because of de-basement but because it was a sign of overreaching, of getting out of place. An interesting transformation shows how fluid this category can be. In the Renaissance, luxury objects became those things thought worthy of being painted. Such objects were called objets d'art. Now, of course, the luxury object is the painting itself. But you can see that even before the industrial revolution there was a growing desire to show stuff off, to use the material world as marker of social dominance, to strut, to flaunt.
By the 18th century, social critics like Bernard Mandeville and economists like Adam Smith were beginning to suggest that, for improving the weal of humanity, the promise of consuming luxury might be a better carrot than the stick of shame. Yet there was still deep resentment for consuming out of your class, beyond your means.
This suspicion about consuming beyond your class continued well into the 19th century. In fact, ancient sumptuary laws, explaining exactly what objects were forbidden by church and state, were read from the Anglican pulpit until the 1860s. Reading these laws took two hours of church time to complete, and the laws kept people in their places, if only to have to listen to them.
Clerics, clearly supported by the aristocracy, were not alone in stiff-arming luxury. With the onset of industrial surpluses, secular pundits like Henry David Thoreau railed against what they took to be the excesses of mass production. "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind," he pointed out in Walden.
By the fin de siècle this view of high-end consumption had so exploded that Thorstein Veblen unloosed the first modern sustained attack on luxury in his thoroughly entertaining Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Coining all manner of nifty concepts like conspicuous consumption, invidious comparison, bandwagon effect, symbolic pantomime, vicarious leisure, and parodic display, Veblen had at the excesses of robber-baron shopping.
In fact, one might say that Veblen enjoyed it rather too much and succeeded only too well. When he formulated his theory of the leisure class at the turn of the century, ostentation in dress was at its full plumage, not least because new money was desperate to prove that it had made it to high society. Veblen's argument was so simple that it cut like Occam's razor. It has proved so powerful that it has achieved the status of unquestioned truism.
Here is Veblen's argument: As wealth spreads, what drives consumers' behavior is increasingly neither subsistence nor comfort but the attainment of "the esteem and envy of fellow men." Because male wage earners are too circumspect to indulge themselves, they deposit consumption on surrogates, on loved ones. Vicarious ostentation -- the way that plainly dressed Victorian men encouraged their wives and daughters to wear complicated trappings of wealth -- is how this unfolds. Ditto their servants, horses, and even house pets.
In retrospect, Veblen was too successful, too neat, too sharp. Veblen thought that the purpose of acquisition was public consumption of esteem, status anxiety resolved by material display. Not much more. Wealth, he argued, confers honor; it suggests prowess and achievement. But wealth would have no social meaning were it simply consumed or possessed. "In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men," he wrote, "it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence."
Thus the absolute centrality of conspicuous consumption. In what Veblen called "barbarian culture," trophies such as property or slaves were signs of successful aggression. In modern societies luxury is a sign of status and class. It's what we have for harems. But only certain sorts of goods work this magic. There is no rational system. The only constant is that consumers seek the luxurious object for two reasons: to show that they are members of the classes above and to distinguish themselves from those below. Veblen calls the first motive "pecuniary emulation"; the second, "invidious comparison."
From this comes the economic irrationality of the Veblen effect, namely, that the value of a luxury object is in direct proportion to its cost. Raise the price of certain luxe objects and you increase their value. The Veblen effect is why a T-shirt sold at Sears costs less than the same T-shirt at the Gap, which costs less than the same T-shirt at Hugo Boss, and so forth. Could you sell Evian water if it were priced below a generic? What about Ben & Jerry's ice cream? The Robb Report? A Lexus? An Ivy League education? It is not enough for me to know what I paid for opuluxe. You have to know.
Today these products, which are no more (and maybe less) useful than their functional equivalents, are sometimes called "positional goods," goods that are valued not despite their expense but because of it. Indeed, Veblen argued that since the reasons for buying such goods are "pecuniary emulation" and "invidious comparison," their utility rises as their prices go up. With insights like this, Veblen proved himself to be too strong a critic to dismiss. You don't need to have read a word he wrote to know him. He set the tone of modern criticism.
The second modern attack on luxury came in the 1950s with John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society and, to a lesser degree, the popularizing work of Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers, and The Pyramid Climbers. Veblenism is all over these books. Galbraith had read Veblen, if not wisely, then too well. In fact, he had edited Theory of the Leisure Class with all kinds of approving nods and winks. Packard and his snappy titles went along for the ride. To these critics high-end consumption is against our "better nature"; we are duped into consuming by advertisers; consumers are dolts who should be doing other things; luxury is consumption run amok.
The usual suspects for Galbraith had changed from the captains of industry to the Joneses across the street. Keeping up with them was every bit as dangerous as it had been for a Carnegie to keep up with a Vanderbilt, a Morgan with a Gould. Perhaps even more dangerous because these Joneses now are so numerous. And, as opposed to the robber barons who were outfitting family members, this new solipsistic breed of showoff was outfitting himself.
Veblen's descendants are still at it. Following in the footsteps of Galbraith have been two moralists passing as economists: Juliet Schor, a professor now at Boston College, who has published The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need, and Robert Frank, a professor at Cornell, who contributed Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. Just read the subtitles.
The modern attack usually centers around a specific object as an exemplum. While Galbraith disliked Cadillac tail fins, Schor disdains granite countertops in the kitchen, and Frank holds up expensive watches as symptomatic of bad habits. On the surface they have such good points: How do those fins help the car move, are those stone countertops better than Formica, does a Lucian Picard keep better time than a Timex?
But here's the problem. The 1958 Cadillac has been featured in the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective show celebrating industrial design as art, and if you now want to buy one in mint condition, you'll pay about 20 times the purchase price. The granite countertop really makes more sense as a cutting surface than as a slab to lay down over the dead body of Uncle Louie, and -- who knows? -- it might even be passed from generation to generation, while the sensible Formica is carted out to the dump. And had Frank invested in Lucian Picard watches at the beginning of the bull market, he would have made more on his watch investment than on the S&P 500. Drats! That this stuff could have increased in value tells us how slippery these slopes can be.
No matter. Critics of consumption love to point out that people with these things are no happier than people without them. Ergo, why buy extra stuff? But people who can't buy unnecessary opuluxe are definitely unhappier for not being let into the cycle; buying this notational stuff and having such stuff are different experiences; consumers move in definite stages, from adolescence, where consumption is central, to middle age, where it ceases to be so important, to old age, where having things is positively a hindrance. Religious fanatics invariably rank highest on happiness scales, irrespective of culture or religion. Let's give happiness a rest. Consumption of the new luxury is about far more interesting sensations.
Whereas Veblen contended that male aggression caused the crazed consumption of deluxe items at the end of his century, these modern critics are more au courant in putting forth their etiology. They medicalize consumption, in large part because the bulk consumers of luxe are now young women. The diagnosis, although they would never use this precise term, is addiction. We are addicted to luxury. That's what causes the fever. That's why we yearn for what we don't want. Diagnosis from the National Public Radio crowd: not just Sudden Wealth Syndrome but the dreaded "affluenza."
Over the Top
I must say that I found most of the luxury objects that I've looked at, from Patek Philippe watches to Porsche Turbos to the men's room of the Bellagio Hotel, to be a little over the top. But I am not so oblivious to the world around me that I can't appreciate how important the new luxury has become. And I can't overlook how high-end consumption promises to do exactly what critics of the stuff have always yearned for, namely, to bring us together, often traumatically. Yes, indeed, the transgenerational poor are excluded, as the bottom fifth of our population has not budged an inch in the luxe explosion. Yet more people than ever are entering the much-vaunted global village because of consumption, not despite it.
In fact, one could argue, as Dinesh D'Souza, Virginia Postrel, and W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm have recently done, that the aspiration of the poor to get at these unnecessary goods has done more than any social program to motivate some of the disenchanted to become enfranchised. While one may be distressed at seeing a dish antenna atop a ramshackle house or a Caddie out front, the yearning to have superfluous badges of affluence may promise a more lasting peace around the world than any religion or political system has ever delivered. I don't mean to overlook the complexities here.
This is not a universal phenomenon, as the al Qaeda have wickedly demonstrated. Some of the world's poor are most certainly not becoming better off in absolute or relative terms. I only want to say that, given a choice between being mugged for your sneakers or having your ethnic or religious heritage cleansed, the lust for sneakers may prove a more lasting way to improve the general lot of humanity.
Let's face it. In the world that I grew up in, your religion, your family name, the color of your skin, your language skills, your gender, where you went to school, your accent, and your marriage partner were doing the work that luxury consumption does now. My dad went to Exeter, Williams, and Harvard Med, and he never drove anything fancier than a Plymouth. He never had to. Today I wouldn't go to a doctor who drove a Plymouth. I would figure that if she doesn't drive a Lexus, she is having trouble with her practice.
So I admit the ugly truth. After spending the last few years trying to understand the pull of the material world, I am far more sympathetic to its blandishments and far more forgiving of its excesses. The democratization of luxury has been the single most important marketing phenomenon of modern times. And it has profound political implications. It may not be as bad as some lifestyle scolds make it out to be. In its own way it is a fair, albeit often wasteful, system, not just of objects but of meaning. Don't get me wrong: It's not that I came to mock and stayed to pray, but I do feel that getting and spending has some actual worth. Nobody checks the number of vowels in your name, or the color of your skin, or whether you know the difference between like and as when you are buying your Prada parka -- that's got to mean something.
Although luxury has become a mallet with which one pounds the taste of others, this misses some essential points. One is that humans are consumers by nature. We are tool users because we like to use what tool using can produce. In other words, tools are not the ends but the means. So too materialism does not crowd out spiritualism; spiritualism is more likely a substitute when objects are scarce. When we have few things, we make the next world luxurious. When we have plenty, we enchant the objects around us.
Second, consumers are rational. They are often fully aware that they are more interested in consuming aura than objects, sizzle than steak, meaning than material. In fact, if you ask them -- as academic critics are usually loath to do -- they are quite candid in explaining that the Nike swoosh, the Polo pony, the Guess? label, the DKNY logo are what they are after. They are not duped by advertising, packaging, branding, fashion, and merchandising. They actively seek and enjoy the status that surrounds the object, especially when they are young.
Third, we need to question the standard argument that consumption of opuluxe almost always leads to disappointment. Admittedly, the circular route from desire to purchase to disappointment to renewed de-sire is never-ending, but we may follow it because the other route -- from melancholy to angst -- is worse. In other words, in a world emptied of inherited values, consuming what looks to be overpriced fripperies may be preferable to consuming nothing.
Finally, we need to rethink the separation between production and consumption, for they are more alike than separate and occur not at different times and places but simultaneously. Instead of wanting less luxury, we might find that just the opposite -- the paradoxical luxury for all -- is a suitable goal of communal aspiration. After all, luxury before all else is a social construction, and understanding its social ramifications may pave the way for a new appreciation of what has become a characteristic contradiction of our time, the necessary consumption of the unnecessary.
]]>All our wants, beyond those which a very moderate income will supply, are purely imaginary.
--Henry St. John, 1743
Things, as such, become goods as soon as the human mind recognizes them as means suitable for the promotion of human purposes.
--Carl Menger, 1871
Sometimes it is best to test academic theory against--gasp!--personal experience. When my daughters were little they would go with me to the grocery store. We would start as friends, and before a few aisles had passed we would be at each other's throats. "Gimme this, I want that, can we have these?"--it would go on and on until, by the vegetables, I would lose control and things would degenerate into Kmart Khaos. "No, no, a thousand nos," I would yell at them. "No, you can't have that. No, I won't buy you that." This didn't work, and by the time we had reached the checkout line, they had gotten much of what they had sought.
To stop the demoralizing defeat I tried to teach them about consumption. I developed a set of shopping axioms I fancifully called The Nerminological Laws of Consumption. The Nermies were a make-believe collection of little people with big-people problems. I drilled these so-called laws into them so that I could later say, "What Nerminological law have you just broken?" whenever they asked for anything.
Here are the rules. First, isolate the need. Do you need this thing or do you just want it? Don't let needs be confused with wants. Second, shop around. Check out the competition. Do your research. Third, can you afford this? Check current and anticipated cash flow. And last, once you have decided, can you read the instructions on how to use it properly? Why buy a toy you can't assemble?
The success of such a system was not so much that it was logical but that it took so long to go through that once they had come to the instruction part, we were out the door.
I would live to regret my explanation of what goes on in the Land of the Nermies ruled by the inexorable Nerminological Laws. It happened about 10 years ago. I bought a Mazda Miata. This is a snappy little red sports car that 12-year-old boys really like, but chubby, balding 50-year-olds usually buy. My daughters like driving it, but better, they like asking me which of the Nerminological Laws I followed when I bought it. Did I need a car since I biked to work? Did I need a car that seats only two? Did I really shop around? Could I afford it on my professor salary? Did I even know how to drive it properly? If so, why did I brake during cornering instead of accelerating? Could I fix it? Did I even know where the battery was hidden? Clearly, they enjoyed seeing me hoisted by my own petard.
Although this car has given me much pleasure, I still can't figure out exactly why I bought it. I know how to buy stuff. I'm fully mature. I contribute regularly to my retirement account. When I was growing up, my parents subscribed to Consumer Reports, and I learned how to read all the little bullseye symbols telling you if this was a good deal or a so-so one. So what happened?
I bought the car because of an advertisement. The ad itself is not complex. In fact, it is the standard "product as hero" ad that we have all seen a thousand times. There, stage center, lit from behind like a haloed angel, is this thing in your garage. If you are middle-aged, the garage is clearly from your early adolescence, when you were moving out of your room and mixing your toys with the stuff of your parents. But wait! That stuff in the pictured garage is not your dad's stuff--those are not his toys, they are yours. Dad didn't grow up with a wiffle ball, a dart board, the teddy bear, the metronome (aargh!), the dollhouse, that bike.
The maudlin text below the icon makes it clear. All this is/was yours:
"It was one of those summer evenings you wished would never end, and the whole neighborhood turned out to see your new car. You answered a million questions, and everyone sat in the driver's seat. They went home long after sunset."
In an interesting kind of temporal dislocation the "you" is in the past tense. This is the you of your childhood, the you who rushed downtown each September to see what the new cars looked like, the you who dreamed about getting an MG, an Austin Healey 3000, or maybe a Triumph. It would be red, or maybe English racing green. When someone had a car like that what could you do but just stand there and look at it? There was really nothing you could say.
The last line in the copy pulls the plug. "But it was still T-shirt warm by the time the kids were in bed. So you came out for one last look." The "you" as observer has become the "you" as owner. It's yours now. This missing part of your past, this thing that always belonged to someone else, is yours. Little wonder the car is positioned and lit like a holy relic. It's coming at you. All you have to do is grasp it.
What separates this ad from the usual automotive pitch is its claim on memory. The more usual claim for sports cars is sexual: Get this car, get that girl. So the sports car is usually photographed out in the rugged countryside, the sport himself is young and virile, and the chick by his side just can't stop looking at him. In advertising lingo this is called the aspirational sell: Use the product and everyone will see what a real man you are.
What is important about the Miata ad is that there is no one at the wheel and no dreamy chick flapping her lashes at him. This driver's seat is vacant. You've always wanted to sit there. Now you can. Here, as my cultural studies colleagues might say, is nostalgic onanism.
Although I had "new-car fever" (a common enough strain of affluenza), the object was difficult to consume. Here's why. I teach school. I wear khaki pants. I had a green book bag in graduate school. I am a company man. I buy my cars from Volvo or Saab. Not because I like those cars--I don't. They are built to be ugly and are no fun. But they are part of the uniform. They are from Sweden, for goodness' sake, the Valhalla of academic liberalism. If I bought the Miata I was not just going to lose my affiliation with my usual consumption group, I was going over to a different group, to a group I abhorred. If I bought this car I was going to become ...a yuppie!
At the time I was making my decision (in the early 1990s), yuppies were the group du jour of marketers and the group de resistance for all the rest of us. The original definition was a "young urban professional," but at some point this became corrupted to mean a "young upwardly mobile professional." From there the meaning spread to define an entire generation of affluent and selfish 20-somethings who were hot on the heels of us baby boomers. Demographically, yuppies were part of the 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964. Their number was small. Indeed, the only definitive estimate of the yuppie population, published in American Demographics in 1985, found just 4 million of them, representing a mere 5 percent of late baby boomers. But their impact on the rest of us was huge--reverse magnetism.
Yuppies were disgusting. What made them disgusting was their lack of reticence in the displaying of commercial badges. More interesting still was that no one ever would admit to being one of them. In fact, in retrospect, the real sign of being a yuppie was that you tried hard to disassociate from them while all along displaying their badges.
Yuppies were unique in that they were the first consumption community that I can think of known only by their badges. No one came forward like Marlon Brando, Abbie Hoffman, John Wayne, or Elton John to personify the group. Richard Gere laying out his clothes on the bed in the 1980 movie American Gigolo might have been the yuppie archetype, but he seemed a little too moody about his stuff. Still, rather like Eagle Scouts, yuppies had no distinct personality other than their merit (or demerit, it's up to you) badges worn almost Pancho Villa style around their vacuous lifestyles.
Here are just a few of the yuppie badges: yellow ties and red suspenders, Merlot, marinated salmon steaks, green-bottle beer, Club Med vacations, stuff with ducks on it, Gaggenau stoves, Sub-Zero refrigerators, latte, clothing from Ann Taylor or Ralph Lauren, designer water, Filofax binders, Cuisinarts, kiwi fruit, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, ventless Italian suits, pasta makers, bread makers, espresso-cappuccino makers, cell phones, home fax machines, air and water cleaners, laptop computers, exercise machines, massage tables, and remote controls for the television, the VCR, the CD player, the stereo receiver, the garage door, the child. More than anything, of course, the car--especially the BMW, the infamous beemer--was the yuppie badge nonpareil.
The yuppie and his German or Japanese car were academic anathema. If a colleague were to see me in such a car he would surely think I had gone over to the other side. My cousin with the pricy condo, the Jenn-Air gas grill, Biggest Bertha Ever golf club, and the Suburban could be a yuppie. But not me. I only bought just the things I absolutely needed...like a red Miata? And that, of course, was precisely my problem. When I bought this car, I became one of them.
I dilate on my Miata decision because it shows the dynamic of pressures in the commercial world. Two generations ago maybe choosing what denomination of the Congregational church to attend would have caused me such distress. Do I dare be seen with Unitarians? At the turn of this century what musical instrument you played would have been important. "They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play!" describes a Horatio Alger experience we have trouble understanding. Maybe status would have been derived from what I read. Could I be seen reading Walt Whitman? What about what I ate? Our grandparents read etiquette books detailing the shame you should feel if you ordered the same meal too often. "Again she orders--A chicken salad, please!" is the headline of an ad for such an etiquette book. It is presumably spoken by an exasperated young man about his date. What if I coughed? Would that be a social blunder?
Perhaps what I wore. Could I be seen wearing a gold stickpin in my tie? The way we live now, I worry that I might be mistaken for a yuppie.
While I certainly went through the modern version of the "agonies of the damned" buying a Japanese internal-combustion engine advertised through nostalgia and wrapped in red plastic, I never once was duped, misled, waylaid, or reified. In fact, I loved the process. They offered me my dream and I gladly bought it. I never liked that dreary Volvo to begin with. Now I'm wondering about a Jaguar, perhaps something from the early '80s, not too ostentatious but still flashy, if you know what I mean.
]]>Sell them their dreams. Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams--dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don't buy things to have things. They buy things to work for them. They buy hope--hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won't have to worry about selling them goods.
--Helen Landon Cass
Those words were spoken some years ago by a female radio announcer to a convention of salesmen in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Retail Ledger for June 6, 1923, recorded Ms. Cass' invocations with no surrounding explanation. They were simply noted as a matter of record, not as a startling insight.
There are two ways to read her spiel. You can read it like a melancholy Marxist and see the barely veiled indictment of the selling process. What does she think consumers are--dopes to be duped? What is she selling? Snake oil?
Or you can read it like an unrepentant capitalist and see the connection between consuming goods and gathering meaning. The reason producers splash magical promise over their goods is because consumers demand it. Consumers are not sold a bill of goods; they insist on it. Snake oil to the cynic is often holy water to the eager. What looks like exploiting desire may be fulfilling desire.
How you come down in this matter depends on your estimation of the audience. Does the audience manipulate things to make meaning, or do other people use things to manipulate the audience? Clearly, this is a variation of "I persuade, you educate, they manipulate," for both points of view are supportable. Let's split the difference and be done with it.
More interesting to me, however, is to wonder why such a statement, so challenging, so revolutionary, so provocative in many respects was, in the early 1920s, so understandable, so acceptable, even so passé that it appears with no gloss. Why is it that when you read the early descriptions of capitalism, all the current bugaboos--advertising, packaging, branding, fashion, and retailing techniques--seem so much better understood?
And why has the consumer--playing an active, albeit usually secondary, part in the consumptive dyad of earlier interpretations--become almost totally listless in our current descriptions? From Thomas Hobbes in the mid-17th century ("As in other things, so in men, not the seller but the buyer determines the price") to Edwin S. Gingham in the mid-20th century ("Consumers with dollars in their pockets are not, by any stretch of the imagination, weak. To the contrary, they are the most merciless, meanest, toughest market disciplinarians I know"), the consumer was seen as participating in the meaning-making of the material world. How and why did the consumer get dumbed down and phased out so quickly? Why has the hypodermic metaphor (false needs injected into a docile populace) become the unchallenged explanation of consumerism?
I think that much of our current refusal to consider the liberating role of consumption is the result of who has been doing the describing. Since the 1960s, the primary "readers" of the commercial "text" have been the well-tended and -tenured members of the academy. For any number of reasons--the most obvious being their low levels of disposable income, average age, and gender, and the fact that these critics are selling a competing product, high-cult (which is also coated with its own dream values)--the academy has casually passed off as "hegemonic brainwashing" what seems to me, at least, a self-evident truth about human nature: We like having stuff.
In place of the obvious, they have substituted an interpretation that they themselves often call vulgar Marxism. It is supposedly vulgar in the sense that it is not as sophisticated as the real stuff, but it has enough spin on it to be more appropriately called Marxism lite. Go into almost any cultural studies course in this country and you will hear the condemnation of consumerism expounded: What we see in the marketplace is the result of the manipulation of the many for the profit of the few. Consumers are led around by the nose. We live in a squirrel cage. Left alone we would read Wordsworth, eat lots of salad, and have meetings to discuss Really Important Subjects.
In cultural studies today, everything is oppression and we are all victims. In macrocosmic form, the oppression is economic--the "free" market. In microcosmic form, oppression is media--your "free" TV. Here, in the jargon of this downmarket Marxism, is how the system works: The manipulators, a.k.a. "the culture industry," attempt to enlarge their hegemony by establishing their ideological base in the hearts and pocketbooks of a weak and demoralized populace. Left alone, we would never desire things (ugh!). They have made us materialistic. But for them, we would be spiritual.
To these critics, the masters of industry and their henchmen, the media lords, are predators, and what they do in no way reflects or resolves genuine audience concerns. Just the opposite. The masters of the media collude, striving to infantilize us so that we are docile, anxious, and filled with "reified desire." While we may think advertising is just "talking about the product," that packaging just "wraps the object," that retailing is just "trading the product," or that fashion is just "the style of the product," this is not so. That you may think so only proves their power over you. The marginalized among us--the African American, the child, the immigrant, and especially the female--are trapped into this commodifying system, this false consciousness, and this fetishism that only the enlightened can correct. Legendary ad man David Ogilvy's observation that, "The consumer is no fool, she is your wife" is just an example of the repressive tolerance of such a sexist, materialist culture.
Needless to say, in such a system the only safe place to be is tenured, underpaid, self-defined as marginalized, teaching two days a week for nine months a year, and writing really perceptive social criticism that your colleagues can pretend to read. Or rather, you would be writing such articles if only you could find the time.
The Triumph of Stuff
The idea that consumerism creates artificial desires rests on a wistful ignorance of history and human nature, on the hazy, romantic feeling that there existed some halcyon era of noble savages with purely natural needs. Once fed and sheltered, our needs have always been cultural, not natural. Until there is some other system to codify and satisfy those needs and yearnings, capitalism--and the culture it carries with it--will continue not just to thrive but to triumph.
In the way we live now, it is simply impossible to consume objects without consuming meaning. Meaning is pumped and drawn everywhere throughout the modern commercial world, into the farthest reaches of space and into the smallest divisions of time. Commercialism is the water we all swim in, the air we breathe, our sunlight and shade. Currents of desire flow around objects like smoke in a wind tunnel. The complications of my Miata purchase (see "How I Bought My Miata," page 24) are the norm.
This isn't to say that I'm simply sanguine about such a material culture. It has many problems that I have glossed over. Consumerism is wasteful, it is devoid of otherworldly concerns, it lives for today and celebrates the body. It overindulges and spoils the young with impossible promises. It encourages recklessness, living beyond one's means, gambling. Consumer culture is always new, always without a past. Like religion, which it has displaced, it afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. It is heedless of the truly poor who cannot gain access to the loop of meaningful information that is carried through its ceaseless exchanges. It is a one-dimensional world, a wafer-thin world, a world low on significance and high on glitz, a world without yesterdays.
On a personal level, I struggle daily to keep it at bay. For instance, I am offended by billboards (how do they externalize costs?); I fight to keep Chris Whittle's Channel One TV and all place-based advertising from entering the classroom; political advertising makes me sick, especially the last-minute negative ads; I contribute to PBS in hopes they will stop slipping down the slope of commercialism (although I know better); I am annoyed that Coke has bought all the "pouring rights" at my school and is now trying to do the same to the world; I think it's bad enough that the state now sponsors gambling, do they also have to support deceptive advertising about it?; I despise the way that amateur athletics has become a venue for shoe companies (why not just replace the football with the Nike swoosh and be done with it?); and I just go nuts at Christmas.
But I also realize that while you don't have to like it, it doesn't hurt to understand it and our part in it. We have not been led astray. Henry Luce was not far off when he claimed in a February 1941 editorial in Life magazine that the next era was to be the American Century: "The Greeks, the Romans, the English and the French had their eras, and now it was ours." Not only that, but we are likely to commandeer much of the 21st century as well.
Almost a decade ago, Francis Fukuyama, a State Department official, contended in his controversial essay (and later book) "The End of History?" that "the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture" presages "not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution." OK, such predictions are not new. "The End of History" (as we know it) and "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution" have been predicted before by philosophers. Hegel claimed it had already happened in 1806 when Napoleon embodied the ideals of the French Revolution, and Marx said the end was coming soon with world communism. What legitimizes this modern claim is that it is demonstrably true. For better or for worse, American commercial culture is well on its way to becoming world culture. The Soviets have fallen. Only quixotic French intellectuals and anxious Islamic fundamentalists are trying to stand up to it.
To some degree, the triumph of consumerism is the triumph of the popular will. You may not like what is manufactured, advertised, packaged, branded, and broadcast, but it is far closer to what most people want most of the time than at any other period of modern history.
Trollope and The Jerk
Two fictional characters personify to me the great divide: Augustus Melmotte, the protagonist of Anthony Trollope's 19th-century novel, The Way We Live Now, and Navin R. Johnson, the eponymous hero of Steve Martin's 1979 movie, The Jerk.
Melmotte, a Jew, comes from Paris to London with his daughter and his Bohemian wife. When the action of the novel is over and Augustus has committed suicide because he cannot fit in to proper Victorian society, wife and daughter head off to America--to San Francisco, to be exact. Trollope is always exact in letting you know that geography determines character. So too we know that Ruby Ruggles and her bumpkin brother belong at Sheep's Acres Farm and that Roger Carbury should preside over Carbury Hall. Sir Felix Carbury, fallen from grace, must go to Germany--there is no room for his kind, no club that will accept him. Mrs. Hurtle comes from San Francisco and in the end must return there.
Any Trollope lover worth his salt can tell you much about the protagonists simply by such comings and goings. These paths are the code by which our grandparents recognized, in Dominick Dunne's felicitous title, those who are "people like us": our kind/not our kind. The Victorian reading public needed such shorthand because things had no brand personalities--manners, places, sinecures--and bloodlines did. Salaries meant little, accomplishments even less. The central acts of The Way We Live Now are the attempts by Augustus Melmotte to buy a titled husband for his daughter and get a named estate for himself. He can't do it, of course--how silly to try, even if he is the "City's most powerful financier." In his world, meaning was generated through such social conventions as the abstract concept of bloodline, the value of patina, your club, owning land, acceptable in-laws, your accent, the seating chart for dinner, the proper church pew--all things Melmotte could never master. It was a stultifying system--a real old-boy network, but one that to Trollope still worked. It was a system presided over by chummy squires, comfortable gentlemen, and twinkling clerics.
Compare that to the world of The Jerk. Here, the story is held together by the running joke that when Navin R. Johnson is being the most idiotic, he is really being the most savant. After a series of misadventures, Navin amasses a fortune by inventing a way to keep eyeglasses from slipping down the nose (the "Opti-grab"). He wins the hand of his sweetheart, buys incredibly gauche gold chains, swag lamps, outrageous golf carts, and ersatz Grecian mansions. Surrounded by things, he is finally happy. But then--curses!--he loses his possessions as a google-eyed litigant wins a class-action lawsuit because the Opti-grab has made many wearers cross-eyed. Navin's wife is distraught. She bursts into tears. "I don't care about losing the money, it's losing all this stuff."
Navin, as innocent as he is honest, says he doesn't really care about these things, he knows who he is without possessions. His sense of self is certainly not tied to the material world. "I don't want stuff...I don't need anything," he says to her as he starts to leave the room in his pajamas. He sees an old ashtray. "Except this ashtray, and that's the only thing I need is this," he says, as he leans over to pick it up. Navin walks to the door. "Well, and this paddle game and the ashtray is all I need. And this, this remote control; that's all I need, just the ashtray, paddle game, and this remote control."
Navin is growing progressively more frantic in vintage Steve Martin fashion. He is in the hall now, pajamas down around his knees and his arms full of stuff. "And these matches. Just the ashtray, paddle ball, remote control, and these matches...and this lamp, and that's all I need. I don't need one other thing...except this magazine." We hear him gathering more things as he disappears down the hall. Navin, jerk enough to think he needs nothing, is sage enough not to leave home without a few of his favorite things.
Augustus Melmotte, certified world-class financier, is forever kept at bay. He never achieves his goal and finally commits suicide. Navin R. Johnson, certified consumer jerk, achieves (if only for a while) the objects of his heart's desire. He finally becomes a bum on Skid Row, true, but a bum who at least can try it all over again. In a consumerist culture, the value-making ligatures that hold our world together come from such conventions as advertising, packaging, branding, fashion, and even shopping itself. It is a system presided over by marketers who deliver the goods and all that is carried in their wake. It is a more democratic world, a more egalitarian world, and, I think, a more interesting world.
That said, commercialism can be a stultifying system too, and wasteful. It would be nice to think that this eternally encouraging market will result in the cosmopolitanism envisioned by the Enlightenment philosophers, that a "universalism of goods" will end in a crescendo of hosannas. It would be nice to think that more and more of the poor and disenfranchised will find their ways into the cycle of increased affluence without contracting "affluenza," the "disease" of buying too much. It would be nice to think that materialism could be heroic, self-abnegating, and redemptive. It would be nice to think that greater material comforts will release us from racism, sexism, and ethnocentricism, and that the apocalypse will come as it did at the end of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, leaving us "Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed...Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless...Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."
But it is more likely that the globalization of capitalism will result in the banalities of an ever-increasing, worldwide consumerist culture. Recall that Athens ceased to be a world power around 400 B.C., yet for the next three hundred years Greek culture was the culture of the world. The Age of European Exposition ended in the mid-20th century; the Age of American Markets--Yankee imperialism--is just starting to gather force. The French don't stand a chance. The Middle East is collapsing under the weight of dish antennas and Golden Arches. The untranscendent, repetitive, sensational, democratic, immediate, tribalizing, and unifying force of what Irving Kristol calls the American Imperium need not result in a Bronze Age of culture, however. In fact, who knows what this Pax Americana will result in? But it certainly will not produce what Shelley had in mind.
We have been in the global marketplace a short time, and it is an often scary and melancholy place. A butterfly flapping its wings in China may not cause storm clouds over Miami, but a few lines of computer code written by some kid in Palo Alto may indeed change the lives of all the inhabitants of Shanghai.
More important, perhaps, we have not been led into this world of material closeness against our better judgment. For many of us, especially when young, consumerism is not against our better judgment. It is our better judgment. And this is true regardless of class or culture. We have not just asked to go this way, we have demanded. Now most of the world is lining up, pushing and shoving, eager to elbow into the mall. Woe to the government or religion that says no.
Getting and spending have been the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavors of modern life. We have done more than acknowledge that the good life starts with the material life, as the ancients did. We have made stuff the dominant prerequisite of organized society. Things "R" Us. Consumption has become production. While this is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.
]]>Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. (See "Purchase Disorder," June.)
This heavenly vision, this American Dream, must be restrained, say such commentators. After all, Missy and Buck can't really want--ugh!--such vulgar things. These things are not necessities, say the descendants of Thorstein Veblen via Galbraith; they are merely unneeded "luxuries." To such well-cosseted and well-remunerated academic critics, Missy and Buck can do very well with a rusted-out Volvo, a used Kenmore, no TV, and some sensible tie-up shoes. As important, Missy and Buck should never go into debt in order to get this kind of stuff.
Indeed, puritanical economists such as Schor and Frank love to speak of the almost $2 trillion of consumer debt flowing up into the heavens (or down the drain), while neglecting to tell you that the real explosion has been precisely in the variety of things that can be bought on credit (almost everything), the new and efficient means of using credit (the card), and, especially, the vast expansion of people who are now offered credit (the young and the lower classes).
Calder focuses precisely on such developments and how they have come to shape our times. The rise of consumer credit is a fascinating story because one gets a chance to observe human desire equilibrate between difficult choices: spend/save, now/later, have/want, and especially luxury/necessity. Although from time to time people are duped into debt, more often consumer debt results from an often crafty, often intelligent, navigation between these polarities. It is, in Calder's felicitous term, "disciplined hedonism," or what used to be called "budgetism."
Of course, that's not the view from the shame-on-you wing of academia, which sees consumer debt as a great snake about to poison us all. But in point of fact, consumer debt has been with us for a long time; we just haven't seen it on monthly statements. In the early part of this century, for instance, this kind of debt was held inside families. As Calder says, America has always been awash in red ink. And, interestingly enough, well over 95 percent of consumer debt is not just repaid but promptly repaid. In fact, given the choice of holding corporate debt or consumer debt, you'd be much better off lending to consumers.
Our language carries our judgment and, as Calder notes, the language of consumer debt comes out of Victorian moral pieties--hence the "myth of lost economic virtue." Nowhere is this anxiety better seen than in the 1920s, as the syntax of individual debt was rejiggered in more positive terms.
A central figure in articulating the linguistic changes was the economist E.R.A. Seligman, whose groundbreaking The Economics of Installment Selling revolutionized how we calibrated debt in words. Seligman recast what used to be called consumptive debtors and consumptive lenders (phrases fraught with tubercular overtones) as productive debt and productive credit. Essentially, he argued, if you were going to buy a sewing machine, or a car, or especially a house, then you were going to have to get close to the demonic snake of debt. The only real question was how venomous the snake should be.
Simon Patten, who went on to found the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, showed that consumption need not be onerous and that a sense of controlled hedonism is healthy for individuals as well as markets. Veblen, it turned out, had told only half the story: Sometimes consumption is a path to satisfaction. Even more important, the inability to consume is an almost certain path to unhappiness.
What Seligman, Patten, and others did, in modern parlance, was to show that terms such as luxury, saving, thrift, necessity, and the rest were social constructs and that they could be redefined in all sorts of ways. What would happen, for instance, if you called debt consumer's credit and aligned it with the morally acceptable producer's credit? Seligman knew full well that this was "just" semantics, but he also knew that having the machine-made thing was becoming central to the creation of self.
There is, to be sure, a crucial difference between "buy now, pay later" and "pay as you use." There is wise debt and foolish debt. In fact, Seligman argued that you can actually view some debt as a kind of savings. "The ultimate aim of all economic activity," he argued, "was the `production' of satisfactions." Debt, he pointed out, was often an efficient shortcut to satisfaction. (Try buying a house in cash sometime.)
This is Puritan heresy, of course, but capitalist truth. Let's return to the cover art and ponder an irony worthy of note--and one lost on those who dislike "luxuries." These things are within reach of Missy and Buck not because of their willingness to go into debt in order to have them but because of the willingness of others to do it first.
Take any of those heavenly objects--the washer/dryer, for instance. At first, this object was obtainable only by the rich. All you have to do is look at early advertising and you will see that the machinery is positioned as something the maid can use not for herself but for her employer. Thanks to mass production and mass marketing, unit costs decrease and the retail price falls. Eventually, Missy and Buck can get in on the act. They may have to borrow to do it but, if they do, the price may go lower still. Those kids of theirs--the ones currently playing baseball and the piano and being pushed in the pram--will pay even less for even better versions. (See "Buying Time," August/September 1998.)
This is a story, of course, not told by the thrift-minded critics. There is a weird kind of welfare system at work in the heart of a market economy. Name the current "necessity"--indoor plumbing, telephone, refrigeration, automobile, and especially the single-family house itself--and you will see that not only was it introduced as a luxury item, but that it was often financed by--aargh!--that Janus-faced god, consumer debt.
Since we usually are treated to only the bad side of that deity, Lendol Calder is to be commended for showing us the other side--the side that, more often than not, has made Missy and Buck's dream possible. The myth that consumer debt is evil is as suspect as the bromide that you can't judge a book by its cover.


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subset: commoncrawl


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70 results for "john molina"
Molina added to Ward-Rodriguez
Dan RafaelFormer lightweight title challenger John Molina, super middleweight Brandon Gonzalez and former junior middleweight titlist Sergio Mora will appear in separate bouts on the undercard of super middleweight champion Andre Ward's return, promoter Dan Go...
Blog | October 25, 2013 -
Video results for "john molina"
Replay: John Molina Jr vs. Andrey Klimov (SPA)
Watch ReplayJune 07, 2013 -
Replay: John Molina Jr vs. Andrey Klimov
Watch ReplayJune 07, 2013 -
Replay: John Molina vs. Dannie Williams
Watch ReplayJanuary 11, 2013 -
Replay: John Molina vs. Dannie Williams (SPA)
Watch ReplayJanuary 11, 2013
Photo results for "john molina"
Andre Ward v Chad Dawson
September 08, 2012 -
Andre Ward v Chad Dawson
September 08, 2012 -
Andre Ward v Chad Dawson
September 08, 2012 -
Andre Ward v Chad Dawson
September 08, 2012
Boxing Round of the Year: John Molina vs. Mickey Bey
Jay Caspian KangWas it a lucky punch or the inevitable outcome of 28 minutes of pressure? With 1:22 left in the final round of a 10-round bout on Friday night, John Molina Jr. swung blindly with a left hook and caught Mickey Bey on the chin. Bey slumped over, his ar...
Blog | July 22, 2013 -
Scorecard: Dereck Chisora beats Malik Scott on controversial KO
Dan RafaelDereck Chisora stabilized his standing as a heavyweight contender with his second win in a row, but he did so on a controversial knockout of Malik Scott on Saturday in London.
Story | Conversation | July 22, 2013 -
Bey ready to put penalties in past
Dan RafaelThe poster boy for stringent drug testing in boxing and speaking out against performance-enhancing drugs is pound-for-pound king Floyd Mayweather Jr. It was his demands for random blood and urine testing for himself and opponents in recent years ...
Blog | July 18, 2013 -
Molina continues comeback against Klimov
Bernardo PilattiPerennial lightweight contender John Molina Jr. returns to the main event of ESPN's "Friday Night Fights" against Russia's Andrey Klimov at the Little Creek Casino Resort, in Shelton, Wash. (ESPN2, 10 p.m. ET). Molina (25-2, 20 KOs) is continuing ...
Blog | June 06, 2013 -
Molina hopes to keep comeback going
Dan RafaelLightweight John Molina's low point was a 44-second knockout loss in an HBO-televised world title fight against Antonio DeMarco in September. It gets no worse than that for a fighter. But Molina, of Covina, Calif., has not given up on his hopes of...
Blog | May 29, 2013 -
Scorecard: John Molina Jr. bounces back with knockout of Dannie W...
Dan RafaelJohn Molina Jr. was the last man standing in Friday's desperation match of heavy-handed punchers, as he poleaxed Dannie Williams for a fourth-round knockout.
Story | Conversation | January 14, 2013 -
Molina, Williams under pressure on FNF
Bernardo PilattiFor better or worse, Friday night will mark a new chapter in the careers of both John Molina and Dannie Williams. After each saw his rise suddenly stopped in 2012, the potential lightweight contenders are now set to face each other in this week's mai...
Blog | January 10, 2013 -
Antonio DeMarco-Adrien Broner lightweight title bout set for Nov....
Dan RafaelAntonio DeMarco-Adrien Broner lightweight title bout is set for Nov. 17.
Story | Conversation | October 01, 2012 -
Andre Ward whips Chad Dawson in statement win
Dan RafaelAndre Ward didn't merely beat a bigger man and a skilled champion in Chad Dawson on Saturday in Oakland, Calif. -- he made it look stunningly easy and showed he may be the world's best fighter this side of Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Story | Conversation | September 10, 2012 -
Antonio DeMarco finishes John Molina in 44 seconds
Dan RafaelLightweight titlist Antonio DeMarco, who needed a dramatic and bloody comeback to win his title, ended Saturday's bout in style, needing less than a round to dispatch challenger John Molina.
Story | Conversation | September 08, 2012 -
John Molina: 'I believe the fight will not go 12 rounds'
Diego MorillaIn a crowded lightweight division, big-time puncher John Molina will try to get a piece of the hardware from champion Antonio DeMarco on Saturday in Oakland, Calif.
Story | Conversation | September 06, 2012 -
Antonio DeMarco: 'I want to consolidate myself as world champion'...
Diego MorillaNow that he's a lightweight champion, Antonio DeMarco wants to stay on top for a long time. The next step begins with his first title defense, against John Molina on Saturday in Oakland, Calif.
Story | Conversation | September 06, 2012 -
Adrien Broner's Oct. 6 fight moved
Dan RafaelAdrien Broner is living up to his nickname: "The Problem." Broner, a former junior lightweight titlist who was stripped of his belt for not making weight before a July 21 fight with Vicente Escobedo (which Broner won via dominant fifth-round knock...
Blog | August 22, 2012 -
Lundy on lightweight title mission
Dan RafaelLightweight contender Hammerin' Hank Lundy is knocking on the door of a world title opportunity and is anxious to get his chance. Lundy (22-1-1, 11 KOs) hasn't been able to land a shot yet -- even though he deserves it -- but he can continue to ma...
Blog | July 26, 2012 -
John Molina Jr. still with Dan Goossen after settling dispute
Dan RafaelLightweight contender John Molina Jr. and promoter Dan Goossen, embroiled in a contract arbitration case, have settled their dispute and will continue working with each other.
Story | Conversation | April 30, 2012


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It's called the Virginia Steam Academy, a proposed residential school in Tidewater for a thousand high school students. Now, Virginia Military Institute is joining the effort to improve educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering and applied mathematics.
VMI could host summer programs in Lexington, and its faculty will help develop the curriculum for the new school. Troy Siemers is the head of the Applied Math and Computer Science Department at VMI. He says the Virginia Steam Academy could have a significant payoff for the state.
"They're projecting shortfalls in engineering, mathematics, these types of jobs, in computer programming," Siemers told us in an interview Tuesday afternoon, "so I think the benefits will be big for the state in terms of the numbers of companies, the number of positions in those fields."
VMI could also benefit if the program encourages more students to consider the Applied Mathematics program at the Lexington school.
The Virginia Steam Academy is a public residential academy for approximately 1000 high school students in grades 9 through 12. Middle school students will attend summer programs. The school is patterned after a successful program in Illinois, and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2014.


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Hey Good Buddy, Have a safe Holiday season, Merry Christmas and Happy New year. keep up the good work. It good to have long time friends
Thanks for a another great year! Have a nice week and Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and a prosperous 2014 to you and your family! Thanks Buddy! Ron
Altima, We have 39000, The only major problem were the cam and crank sensor going out with no warning notice.
Altima, Glad to have you as my newest buddy, We have an 04 Altima also.
Congratulations on posting for 900 consecutive days. That's real commitment .YB.Shep
Congratulations on posting for 800 consecutive days. YB..Shep
Congratulations on having the energy to post for 700 consecutive days. Keep up the Great Work. Your buddy, Warren {:-)
Hi, BIG congratulations on having the dedication to post for 600 consecutive days. WOW!! Keep up the great work and Good Luck in the future! Your buddy, Warren :-)
My wife and I wish you a safe and grand CHRISTmas. Hope these HOLY-days bring you lots of peace and joy!!
Have a nice weekend and Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and a prosperous 2013 to you and your family! Thanks buddy! Ron


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Vintage Virginia Apples
and the CoveGarden Ruritan Club
invite you to our 13th annual
Apple Harvest Festival!
When: November 2, 2013 - 10am to 5pm
Come for one of our many workshops! (Schedule Below)
The Ruritan Club will be making Apple Butter and Brunswick Stew over a slow fire to be ready in the early afternoon. But hurry! They sell out fast!
Local musicians performing all day
Enjoy the hayride over the ridge above the orchard
Dozens of craft and artisanal food vendors
Prepared foods from local vendors
Enter a pie into the Apple Pie Contest sponsored by Charlottesville Cooking School. (Rules below)
Entries must be made by 11:30am the day of the festival. Winner recieves a $100 gift certificate to Vintage Virginia Apples and Albemarle CiderWorks. Second place wins a $65 gift certificate to the Charlottesville Cooking School.
Fresh cider by the cup, half gallon or gallon.
Hot cider by the cup.
Hard cider available in our tasting room.
Tours of the cidery given throughout the day.
Hope to see you there!
Events for the day:
Events Tent: Visit our events tent for apple tasting sessions, lectures on horticultural topics, conversations with Leni Sorensen on heritage foods.
Cidery Tours: 11:00, 12:30, 2:00, 3:30
- 10am - 1pm: Jim Waive
- 1pm-5pm: Wild Heart
Rules for the Apple Pie Contest:
- Please email email@example.com to preregister. Put "Pie Contest" in the subject line, give your name, phone number and why you want to enter.
- All entries should be turned in by 11:30 on the day of the festival.
- Once entered into the contest, the pie will become property of the CoveGarden Ruritan club to be sold by the piece after the contest. Proceeds will go to their charitable efforts.
- Each entry should be accompanied by a card with name, phone number and recipe (including crust ingredients and what varieties of apples were used).
- All pies should be in a disposable pie tin.


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Smith's Knife Care Kit
Product #: 637154
Smith's #:
Suggested Products
Product Information
The Smith's Knife Care Kit is a "must have" kit for every knife owner. The kit is perfect for cleaning, honing, and lubricating your knife. The kit includes a 4 oz. bottle of Multi-Purpose Solution that can be used for honing oil, rust prevention and lubricating you knife. The Sharpness Tester allows you to test how sharp your knife is without cutting yourself, or damaging your blade. The kit also includes two micro-fiber polishing cloths, two foam swab sticks, and a nylon storage pouch.
Technical Information:
Kit Includes:
Technical Information:
Kit Includes:
- 4 oz. Honing Solution
- Sharpness Tester
- Two micro-fiber polishing clothes
- Two foam swab sticks
- Nylon storage pouch
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text:
Gender: Male
Years in Practice: 19 Years
Languages Spoken: English
Medical School: University of Kansas School of Medicine
Graduation Date: 1995
Hospital Affiliations: Overland Park Regional Med Ctr, Providence Medical Center, Saint John Hospital, Shawnee Mission Medical Ctr Inc
Specialties: General Surgery
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WebMD does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. See additional information.


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French Lardy Staunton Chess Set in Ebonized Boxwood with Macassar Chess Case - 3.75" King
This attractive chess set package includes our French Lardy Staunton chess set in ebonized and natural boxwood matched with our Macassar Ebony Chess Case. Our French Lardy Staunton is a close replica of one of the chess sets once made by the Lardy Chess Company in France. Truly a classic and continues to be extremely popular with chess players. The black ebonized chess match beautifully with the black and burnt umber colors of the chess case. As with most of our chess sets, 2 extra queens are included. The chess case is made from solid wood and macassary and maple veneers. It has two large drawers, one on each players side for holding the pieces when you want them stored away. The drawers will hold chess sets with a king base up to 1.625" diameter. An unbeatable value at this price!
Chess Pieces:
Ebonized Boxwood & Boxwood
Pieces individually hand polished with solid lacquer and buffing wheel
King Height: 3.75"
King Base: 1.5"
King Weight: 2.5 oz.
Chess Set Weight: 40 oz.
2 spare queens are included for pawn promotion
Green Baize Pads
Chess Case:
Solid Woods, Macassar Ebony & Maple Veneers
Elegant inlay border around perimeter of case
Finish: Satin Polyurethane (soft sheen)
Square Size: 2"
Overall Case Dimensions: 19" x 19" x 3.25"
2 Drawers (1 on each players side)
Inside Drawer Dimensions: 11" x 8" x 1.75"
Drawers lined with a soft velour material
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Monday, March 10, 2014
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BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- An organization built around assisting the Broome County community is celebrating a milestone. ACHIEVE kicked off a $3.8 million renovation project today in Binghamton at the Cutler Pond Road site. The organization serves individuals and families with developmental disabilities, providing a number of opportunities to enhance their quality of life.
Organizers say that the project's completion is a significant landmark. Lisa Lee, Board of Directors President said, "We stand here today, in a place that has been serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities for 60 years, helping people to enjoy a full measure of the life they've been given."
The Cutler Pond Road site houses the organization's "Growing Spaces, Improving Lives" Building Rehabilitation Project. Officials say they've raised about 76 percent of the $3.8 million needed to complete the renovation project.


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A candlelight vigil is held for a little boy who died after accidentally shooting himself inside an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper's house.
Investigators say the boy was visiting his aunt and uncle when he got a hold of a gun. It was a very somber night as dozens come out to light candles for the victim and his family.
A grieving community came together to light candles and comfort each other after a three-year-old boy died in a tragic accident. Investigators say the boy found a gun inside his uncle's house and accidentally shot himself in the head, leaving his family in shock.
12/15/2012 Related Story: 3-Year-Old Boy In Guthrie Dies From Accidental Gunshot Wound
The boy's aunt says his death will undoubtedly leave a void in their hearts. Neighbors say the candlelight vigil is their way of supporting each other and the victim's family as they try to make sense of what happened Saturday afternoon.
OHP tells News 9 this happened at a trooper's house, but the gun the boy got a hold of was not his uncle's service weapon. Investigators say this was an accident and they do not expect to file any criminal charges.
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Barley Almond Coconut CookiesEveryone will be surprised by how much they love these cookes. This is a wheat-free recipe but does contain gluten. Whole Grain! High Fiber, Lactose Free, Low Cal, Vegan.
DirectionsStep 1Cream together the sugar and margarine. Add the milk and vanilla and blend. Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, almonds and coconut. Blend until combined.Step 2Place balls of dough on greased baking sheet. Bake at 350°F for 15 minutes.Makes 15 cookies. |
Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes Total Time: 25 minutes Servings: 15 Rating (Not yet rated) Products Used in this Recipe
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