Thorstein Veblen, who knew something about consumption
University of Chicago Centennial Collection
A few years ago, when asked about the future of design by Azure Magazine, I suggested that we might start thinking of furniture the way we think about food: we will want to know the provenance of the wood, the treatment of the forests, did the carpenters get paid a living wage. We will want to look the cabinetmaker in the eye the way we do with our farmer at the farmers market.
Marketing guru Seth Godin thinks that a change might be coming as well, and that consumption will become a lot less conspicuous:
The new trend in spending money is to buy things that are painstakingly hand built instead of efficiently mass produced. It might not be a better price than what you could buy at Target, but the very fact that you can pay for an artisan to create it, an artist to design it, a talented worker to bring it to life--that act makes a powerful statement about what you can afford and what's important to you. Instead of a bigger house, it's a house that's built from scratch by craftsmen. Instead of a bigger steak, it's a handmade dish of local poached vegetables...
I doubt this is true for the rich; the term conspicuous consumption, developed by Thorstein Veblen, in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, "is now broadly applied to individuals and households with expendable incomes whose consumption patterns are prompted by the utility of goods to show their status rather than any intrinsic utility of such goods." A well built small house doesn't do that job, unless it is covered by photovoltaics.
But for the rest of us, it might be true. Architect and writer Steve Mouzon wrote near the beginning of this meltdown:
When people make lots of money, a perverse thing happens. You would think that with more money, people would demand better stuff. But when prosperity abounds, the necessity of thinking long-term decreases. When times are tough, however, the thought of replacing a tool, a piece of furniture, or whatever on a frequent basis is really frightening... we simply cannot afford to do that. So I believe that the Meltdown will begin to cause people to think long-term again, and to begin to value enduring things.
This past Christmas, my wife wanted a reading lamp. I checked out all of IKEA and all of the new lamps at the expensive Italian importers that I love so much but cannot afford. In the end I found a midcentury modern floor lamp that cost half of what I budgeted and will probably last for generations. Steve may be right about people thinking long term. After all, I have been looking for decent dining room chairs for only 20 years so far...
Read the whole Frugal Green Living series for more info on how going green can be frugal, too.
