The Conspicuous

A coat keeps out the weather and places its wearer among other people. Its cloth may be warmer, its seams stronger, its cut more pleasing; it may also announce an income, an affiliation, a familiarity with what the right people recognize. These services can inhabit the same garment. To ask how much of what we buy is bought to be seen buying it is therefore to ask about the audience within the demand. The buyer carries other people’s judgments into the shop, and the seller can supply objects through which those judgments are sought. The preceding plate followed a rule as public allegiance shifted. Here the rule governs the signs by which allegiance and standing are read: what counts as respectable, what counts as extravagant, and what must be acquired merely to avoid appearing to have fallen behind.

Thorstein Veblen made emulation central to his account of consumption. Possessions could confer standing because they made a comparison between their owner and other members of a community possible. Once wealth became an accepted basis of esteem, acquiring the means of comfort could also become a contest over relative position. A general increase in possessions might improve everyone’s material circumstances while leaving that comparison unsettled; everyone could have more without everyone moving ahead of everyone else. Veblen gave this motive a sweeping historical genealogy, but the narrower mechanism does not require accepting his whole history. Where people value rank and goods are used to assess it, the satisfaction from a purchase depends partly on what others possess and on how they interpret the display. The social relation enters the value of the object.¹

A display has to reach the people whose opinion matters. Veblen contrasted the knowledge circulating among familiar neighbors with the signs available to transient observers who knew little of a stranger’s life. Clothing and entertainment could make pecuniary capacity legible where the person’s history could not. Yet the buyer need not consciously calculate every glance. A convention can enter taste: the accustomed standard feels decent, its abandonment humiliating, and its observance a form of ordinary self-respect. In his account, comparison with the social group just above one’s own helps move that standard. This is an account of how a demand can be socially formed, not a warrant for reading any particular purchase as a confession of vanity. The same expensive coat may supply warmth, workmanship and recognition in proportions that its price alone cannot reveal.²

A small imagined contest isolates the positional part. Two households choose between a plain article and an equally serviceable ornamented one. Ornament uses three additional units of real resources. The household displaying more receives a status benefit valued at eight; a tie divides that benefit equally. Use a common monetary-equivalent scale and leave every other consequence aside. If both remain plain, each receives four. If one ornaments while the other stays plain, the first receives five after the cost and the second receives nothing. If both ornament, each receives one. Ornament is therefore each household’s best response to either choice of the other, although both would prefer the plain outcome to the resulting display. They spend six between them to return to a tie. The model makes visible a possible divergence between a useful individual defense of position and the result when everyone takes that defense.³

The conclusion changes when the display also improves what the article does. Give the ornamented article an additional private service worth five, retaining the other assumptions. When both acquire it, each now receives six: four from the tied status award, five from the service, less three in resources. Both exceed the four available when both remain plain. This control matters because Veblen himself allowed usefulness and competitive expenditure to coexist within an object. His discussion of waste distinguished the consumer’s reason for choosing from the expenditure’s contribution to well-being considered more broadly. An object can be worth buying under the prevailing social rules even where a common change in those rules would leave its buyers better off. Establishing that possibility does not establish that every costly object is wasteful, or that an observer can separate its services by disliking its style.⁴

The standard sustaining the contest is consequently part of its explanation. If the audience assigns no status advantage to ornament, the first model leaves only an additional cost and the plain article prevails. If the audience rewards a different visible sign, expenditure may migrate to that sign. Changing a rule about dress need not end the desire for distinction; it may change the language in which distinction is expressed. Veblen’s account of habits also explains why an individual may find retreat costly even when everyone could benefit from a common retreat. The sanction is the interpretation of the departure. But neither this interpretation nor the direction of ordinary demand follows from the word conspicuous alone. A claim that a higher price increases purchases requires an account of what the price communicates, what buyers know, and what happens to their budgets and alternatives.⁵

The watching eye thus belongs inside the account of consumption. It can make a luxury feel necessary, turn a private purchase into a comparison, and leave people defending positions that their collective spending cannot improve. How much expenditure does so remains a question about circumstances and evidence; the mechanism supplies a question to ask of a market, not a percentage to attach to every receipt. The norm gives goods a social meaning, just as it gives conduct a social meaning. Some meanings rank the participants against one another. Others let them act together with less fear of betrayal. The final plate turns from the effort to be esteemed to the ability to rely on another’s word, and asks whether commerce can sustain the confidence that makes its own bargains possible.