But the substantial ground of this high requirement in
dissipation is in the last analysis no other than that same
propensity for a manifestation of dominance and pecuniary decency
which makes the French peasant-proprietor parsimonious and
frugal, and induces the American millionaire to found colleges,
hospitals and museums. If the canon of conspicuous consumption
were not offset to a considerable extent by other features of
human nature, alien to it, any saving should logically be
impossible for a population situated as the artisan and laboring
classes of the cities are at present, however high their wages or
their income might be.
But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less
imperative, canons of conduct, besides wealth and its
manifestation, and some of these come in to accentuate or to
qualify the broad, fundamental canon of conspicuous waste. Under
the simple test of effectiveness for advertising, we should
expect to find leisure and the conspicuous consumption of goods
dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty evenly between
them at the outset. Leisure might then be expected gradually to
yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic development
goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the
conspicuous consumption of goods should gradually gain in
importance, both absolutely and relatively, until it had absorbed
all the available product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare
livelihood.
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