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Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Economy Economics. What Is Consumerism? Key Takeaways Consumerism is the theory that individuals who consume goods and services in large quantities will be better off. Some economists believe that consumer spending stimulates production and economic growth. However, consumerism has been widely criticized for its economic, social, environmental, and psychological consequences.

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This compensation may impact how and where listings appear. Investopedia does not include all offers available in the marketplace. Related Terms Thorstein Veblen Thorstein Veblen was an American economist best known for coining the term "conspicuous consumption," which appeared in his book "The Theory of the Leisure Class.

What Is Fiscal Policy? Fiscal policy uses government spending and tax policies to influence macroeconomic conditions, including aggregate demand, employment, and inflation. What Is Destructive Creation?

Destructive creation occurs when innovation leads to destruction. What Is Aggregate Demand? Aggregate demand is the total amount of goods and services demanded in the economy at a given overall price level at a given time. Economic Stimulus Economic stimulus refers to attempts by governments or government agencies to financially kickstart growth during a difficult economic period.

Partner Links. Related Articles. Economics Is Economics a Science? Investopedia is part of the Dotdash publishing family. Your Privacy Rights. The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterised as "progress", promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth.

Progress was about the endless replacement of old needs with new, old products with new. The non-settler European colonies were not regarded as viable venues for these new markets, since centuries of exploitation and impoverishment meant that few people there were able to pay. In the s, the target consumer market to be nourished lay at home in the industrialised world.

There, especially in the US, consumption continued to expand through the s, though truncated by the Great Depression of This was followed by a rapid proliferation of radios, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators. Motor car registration rose from eight million in to more than 28 million by The introduction of time payment arrangements facilitated the extension of such buying further and further down the economic ladder.

Electricity sparked a whole new wave of consumer product possibilities Credit: Getty Images. This first wave of consumerism was short-lived. Predicated on debt, it took place in an economy mired in speculation and risky borrowing. In both eras, borrowed money bought unprecedented quantities of material goods on time payment and these days credit cards. The s bonanza collapsed suddenly and catastrophically. In , a similar unravelling began; its implications still remain unknown.

In the case of the Great Depression of the s, a war economy followed, so it was almost 20 years before mass consumption resumed any role in economic life — or in the way the economy was conceived. Once WWII was over, consumer culture took off again throughout the developed world, partly fuelled by the deprivation of the Great Depression and the rationing of the wartime years and incited with renewed zeal by corporate advertisers using debt facilities and the new medium of television.

The stage was set for the democratisation of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined. Television and radio super-charged advertising, directly into people's homes Credit: Getty Images.

Vance Packard echoes both Bernays and the consumption economists of the s in his description of the role of the advertising men of the s. The products have been the luxuries of the upper classes. The game is to make them the necessities of all classes… By striving to buy the product — say, wall-to-wall carpeting on instalment — the consumer is made to feel he is upgrading himself socially.

In a little-known essay reflecting on the conservation implications of the conspicuously wasteful US consumer binge after WWII, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the possibility that this "gargantuan and growing appetite" might need to be curtailed. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question. To Galbraith, who had just published "The Affluent Society", the wastefulness he observed seemed foolhardy, but he was pessimistic about curtailment.

He identified the beginnings of "a massive conservative reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of economic activity", a backlash against the state taking responsibility for social direction. At the same time he was well aware of the role of advertising. Demand for them must be elaborately contrived," he wrote.

Want creation — advertising — is a 10 billion dollar industry. Or, as retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.

Thus, just as immense effort was being devoted to persuading people to buy things they did not actually need, manufacturers also began the intentional design of inferior items, which came to be known as "planned obsolescence". In his second major critique of the culture of consumption, "The Waste Makers", Packard identified both functional obsolescence, in which the product wears out quickly and psychological obsolescence, in which products are "designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail".

The consumerism of the present day has roots that go back at least a century Credit: Getty Images. The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the present day, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, "people recognise themselves in their commodities". The largest US cable provider "won" Consumerist's annual poll on the very same day it tried to convince the FCC that a proposed Time Warner Cable acquisition is in everyone's best interest.

It's the second time Comcast has been awarded the unwanted label by Consumerist voters. Video game publisher Electronic Arts earned the "worst company" designation in and but lost out early this year when it was knocked out of the running by Time Warner Cable. Comcast was pitted against Monsanto, the oft-criticized chemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation, in the final round of voting.

The company almost managed to escape the embarrassing title; SeaWorld — still unable to shake the negative press that resulted from Gabriela Cowperthwaite's powerful Blackfish documentary — nearly defeated Comcast in semi-final voting. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

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