Have been looking into private schools lately, yet remain skeptical as I have an extreme aversion to Veblen goods............... More than a century ago, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to describe the practice of buying luxury goods in order to display social status. In its purest form, conspicuous consumption involves purchasing expensive goods precisely because they are expensive, which means that the true conspicuous consumer will have what economists call an inverted demand curve. Normally, when the price of a good rises, demand for it will fall. Demand for a Veblen good, by contrast, goes up as it becomes more expensive. The purpose of buying it is to display wealth, so the fewer people that can afford to buy a good, the more valuable it becomes to conspicuous consumers.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:49:51 +0000
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