Trope-a-Day: Conspicuous Consumption

Conspicuous Consumption: Hard to tell sometimes (because Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap), but by and large, what you see is not conspicuous consumption – because they’re not all that fond of consumption – but rather the side-effects of massive for post-scarcity values of massive wealth – noting that gold is a glut on the metals market and diamonds are junk stone readily manufacturable from air by the ton – that renders even tiny improvements in marginal utility worth paying for, coupled with an ideological commitment to beauty and excellence (i.e., the kind of cultural reason they call out as not this trope).  So they’re not, usually, so much status goods to be viewed by others as awesomeness goods to be pleasing to the self.

Granted, the difference can be hard to tell with the naked eye…