The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

“To Get Rich Is Glorious”? The State of Consumption and Class in America

Is a family with a car in the driveway, a flatscreen television and a computer with an Internet connection poor?

—Annie Lowrey, “Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind,” New York Times, Economy sec. (April 30, 2014)

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)

That money can’t buy happiness is a truism older than Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth or Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But this axiom is oversimplified. It fails to take into account research that suggests that money can buy happiness up to $75,000 annual income. Or, as the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Angus Deaton found, if you’re divorced and make less than $1,000 a month, you are more than twice as likely to be sad than if you’re divorced and make more than $3,000 a month. Similarly, they found that if you have asthma, you are twice as likely to be sad if you are within the poorer income bracket.

Kahneman and Deaton find that those who were wealthier experienced feelings of accomplishment and being in the right place in their life journey. In other words, possessing financial resources is correlated with satisfaction but not necessarily with the true sense of contentment or joy that happiness brings.1 Why? Wealth and the consumption avenues it opens become an effective means for comparing one’s success and achievement to others but are not necessarily in and of themselves a source of happiness.

American consumers know this irony only too well. In what has been termed the “anxious middle”³ by Larry Summers, or what Juliet Schor calls the “cycle of work and spend,”⁴ America has cultivated a consumption-driven lifestyle and subsequently stretched itself to achieve it. Many Americans, aligning consumerism with the American Dream, continue penniless along this track. As countless news articles have documented, other than the top economic echelons of society, everyone is struggling and unable to achieve the American Dream—whatever that is these days—without massive amounts of debt. And yet, your average citizen still believes in the ideas of Horatio Alger (not realizing perhaps that Alger was a writer of fictional heroes).

As this book has shown, America’s consumerism—particularly conspicuous consumption—hides the vast inequality within this new America. In the twenty-first century, America’s aspirational class has rejected many of the material means by which status has been historically revealed. They have eschewed materialism, aspiring to what they believe is a higher social and cultural platform. In these efforts, the aspirational class utilizes new means to demonstrate its class position. Rather than simply conspicuous consumption, this dominant cultural elite prefers to engage in conspicuous production, conspicuous leisure, and inconspicuous consumption, all of which produce much greater class stratification effects than the acquisition of material goods.

Thorstein Veblen believed that conspicuous leisure would decline while conspicuous consumption would increase at a rapid pace among the rich and nouveau riche. He could not have anticipated the significant rise of the manufacturing economy, or that the middle class would not only become huge spenders but would also have access to material goods like cars, closets full of clothes, televisions, and easy credit, that were not even attainable by the rich at one point. By material standards, even the poor today have more than the rich did during Veblen’s time. Conspicuous consumption has become omnipresent, but—as the data on our spending patterns illuminate—not as Veblen would have predicted. Veblen’s leisure class no longer exists. Mobility is a result of knowledge, not birthright. Today’s cultural hegemony is dominated by the aspirational class who are not idly sitting around but productively acquiring physical and metaphysical benefits for themselves and their offspring. As such, their consumer behavior has shifted from material displays of status to more implicit and tacitly coded means of showing social and economic position and reproducing their position of wealth for future generations. The aspirational class has disdain for mass market material goods, or the “Walmart effect” of democratizing consumerism, and they have the luxury to do so, further distinguishing themselves from everyone else. The falling prices of manufactured consumer goods have simultaneously made them more accessible across class lines while exposing the human and environmental costs of their inexpensiveness: exploitative labor practices, dangerous chemicals, and destruction of rain forests.

In response, conspicuous production has triumphed. Where the product comes from and how it is made matter far more than what it looks like. In more recent years, members of the aspirational class have sought more subtle signs of status—made-in-LA t-shirts, organic food, woven leather bags with no label, and labor-intensive coffee makers. Using the case of the Swiss mechanical watchmaking industry, Harvard Business School professor Ryan Raffaelli calls “re-emergence in technologies” the resurgence of market demand for what was once thought to be a moribund good. Similarly, other artisanal and made-to-order items are experiencing somewhat of a renaissance.5 According to the Economist, independent bookshops are growing for the first time in decades; fountain pens, discarded in the 1950s for the Bic ballpoint and its brethren, are back in fashion; and Swiss watches are in greater demand than ever before. The heart of their revival lies in the attention to craftsmanship, tradition, and history. “People do not just buy something because it provides the most efficient solution to a problem,” writes the Economist’s Schumpeter column, “They buy it because it provides aesthetic satisfaction—a beautiful book, for example, or a perfectly made shirt—or because it makes them feel good about themselves.”6 These new consumer choices reflect abhorrence toward the standardization and accessibility of mainstream consumer goods.

The consumption practices of the new elite are not simply a response to middle-class conspicuous consumption (and a further differentiation from ordinary America). In some instances, such as college education and full-time nannies, they also cost a lot more than a nice car or Coach handbag and have broader ramifications than merely serving as material signals of status. But these consumer choices have social costs too. The aspirational class members make decisions and establish norms that have far more pernicious outcomes for society than did previous leisure-class consumerism. Rather than buying silver spoons and going on long holidays, their investments in education, health, retirement, and parenting ensure the reproduction of status (and often wealth too) for their offspring in a way that no material good can. Through this reproduction of cultural capital and its trappings we see the emergence of what Charles Murray has called the “New Upper Class” and “New Lower Class,” which is not simply an economic divide, but is also a deep cultural divide that has never existed with such distinction as it does today.⁷ Even the cultural differences around the more nebulous norms of mothering, knowledge, and environmental consciousness are underpinned by economic position, and these symbolic boundaries are far from costless.

What is most concerning about today’s elites is that behaviors that appear to be moral or value-laden choices are deeply embedded in socioeconomic position and many of these decisions are quotidian, not grand material signifiers. In fact, the media’s obsession with financial elites, oligarchs, and plutocrats’ extravagant lifestyles distracts from some of our far more pressing issues of cultural, social, and economic stratification. The lives of the superrich may be interesting, but these people have always existed and they do not make a significant impact on most of our lives. But the aspirational class, many of whom exist in the top 1%, 5%, and 10% income brackets, are a much larger force. Their decisions and investments, which are increasingly inconspicuous, reproduce wealth and upward mobility in a way that leaves out the middle class in detrimental ways. When it comes to conspicuous leisure and inconspicuous consumption—that is, education, health care, child care, and time to spend with one’s family—the freedom to engage in these investments genuinely affects the “life chances,” to use sociologist William Julius Wilson’s term, of the aspirational class as compared to the rest. Investing in a child’s secondary education, being able to afford fruits and vegetables and regular health checkups, even having the time to breast-feed, all give the next generation a leg up. Having “arrived” used to mean the minivan and the suburban house, but those don’t get the kids into a good university, and that university (and being able to write the tuition check) is increasingly what divides the rich from everyone else. The aspirational class may not be the 0.01%, but they live in an entirely different and more privileged cultural universe than almost everyone else. As one commentator observed, “Is it possible that those who have enough disposable income [are] so caught up in fitness and food trends—Zumba and kale, CrossFit and juicing—that they’ve become inured to deeper, pervasive wellness issues facing the less wealthy?”8

At this point, I would like to focus on some of the general concerns around economic inequality, which are not exclusive to the aspirational class but are in lockstep with the larger problems American society faces as different cultural, social, and economic classes become more and more estranged from one another. The inverse of the aspirational class is the current state of America’s middle class. While this book is about the dominant elite and their consumer habits, it would be remiss to not address the other side of the story. Just as the top income groups are spending significantly more on education for their children, alarmingly the middle class is spending less. As this book and other research have shown, for the middle class, the good life is not in the inconspicuous consumption so exalted by the aspirational class; they simply cannot afford it. Instead, today’s middle-class mobility has become more about stuff and less about life, which is to say, to purchase the material goods that suggest social position requires more working hours, less leisure time, and less time to spend with one’s family.⁹ Given that the middle class has suffered tremendous job loss, decline in their housing values, and wage stagnation, purchasing this material version of the good life is not as easy as it was previously.

First, the paradox of all of those cheap goods that make status goods so accessible to the middle class is that they are being created at the expense of good middle-class jobs, which are both moving to developing countries with cheaper labor forces and being replaced by computers. Globalization and standardization, the hallmarks of modern consumer goods, took those remaining middle-class factory jobs to Brazil and India.

The 2008 housing bust eroded almost all of the economic gains of the middle class, or what the Pew Research Center has called “the lost decade of the middle class.” In fact, even though many blame the financial industry and its titans for much of the global economic collapse, the middle class was the most affected by the Recession. Middle-class jobs and wages dried up, never to recover fully. The middle-class housing market has regained some of its momentum but not to its mid-2000 highs, whereas the top tier of housing has never been more expensive. Eighty-five percent of middle-class households say their lifestyle is more difficult to maintain today than in 2000.10

Simultaneously the rich have gotten substantially richer. The Great Recession, perhaps significantly brought on by the titans within the top 1%, actually hurt the bottom 90% the most.¹¹ Their home values haven’t recovered, their wages (already stagnating before the Recession) haven’t improved, and their jobs are lost. While everyone generally agrees that inequality is a problem, there are a multitude of explanations for what has caused the unwinding of the middle class and America’s upward mobility, and many of them are tied up in the general observation that we buy too much and that material goods (and the social position they are to imply) are too heavily counted on for happiness.

In a stunning and stark portrait of the new America, Financial Times reporter Edward Luce follows the lives of Americans who are experiencing the erosion of the middle class and its accompanying good life. In an essay entitled “The Crisis of Middle Class America,” Luce portrays the Freemans, a quintessential American family living in Minneapolis. They have just a small mortgage, earn $70,000 a year, and are fit with A/C, plenty of food, beer, and evenings sitting on the porch. Mark Freeman works in a warehouse, Connie is an anesthesia supply technician. Their son Andy, who is autistic, is their major expense, and they paid a huge fee to get him on their health insurance (Mark’s sleep apnea machine also packs a financial punch). Yet their house, purchased at $53,000 in 1989, once valued at $105,000 and now worth $73,000, was almost repossessed a few years ago. Materially, they seem fine on the surface, but they are not. Mark works two extra jobs—karaoke on Wednesday evenings and managing the local liquor store on Saturdays. As Mark explained, “We need all four jobs to keep our heads above water.”12

As the middle class has declined, so too have the social structures that ensured its capacity for upward mobility. George Packer argues in The Unwinding that this is the “new America.”¹³ The decline of the middle class and its implicit social contract defines life in America from the late twentieth century to the present day. Even just 30 years ago, one could become a well-paid member of the middle class, and consumer items such as TVs, cars, and home ownership aligned closely with upward mobility. Today, because consumer items are so cheap (as is credit), material goods tell us very little about the economic success of a household. As Packer himself put it in a PBS interview, the “unwinding” is that of America’s “contract that said if you work hard, if you essentially are a good citizen, there will be a place for you, not only an economic place, you will have a secure life, your kids will have a chance to have a better life, but you will sort of be recognized as part of the national fabric.”¹⁴

Despite earning seemingly good paychecks and owning their homes in pleasant suburbs, much of America is victim to “median wage stagnation”: for the past 40 years, everyone but the top 10% has experienced flat annual incomes, with paychecks no better in real dollars than they were in 1973. As Luce writes, “That means that most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation.”¹⁵ Even more alarming, Paris School economist Thomas Piketty argues in his runaway 2014 hit Capital in the Twenty-first Century that the period of relative equality between World War I and the early 1970s was an anomalous period of capitalism. Using detailed data from countries around the world across a 200-year period, Piketty makes a compelling case that for the years between 1914 and 1973, a series of government policies and global crises flattened out the gap between rich and poor and prevented the rich from getting greater returns on capital. Piketty believes that the inequality that is so profound in the current day is actually inherent to capitalism’s basic structure, and that the six-decade stretch of greater income equality observed in the middle of the twentieth century is not to occur again.16 What these statistics mean is that most Americans can no longer afford to engage in the conspicuous consumption that has underpinned their “happiness.” Normal middle-class Americans have had their homes repossessed, their credit ratings slashed, and their ability to establish their identity through consumption almost entirely eradicated. We need to find a new way to live.

These observations on America coincide with what is known by economists and policymakers as the Great Stagnation—the alarming finding that the median wage hasn’t grown since 1973, rising only by 10% in real terms over the past 37 years. In short, 90% of America hasn’t gained a penny over the past four decades.

The numbers show it: Median income for the middle class dropped from $73,000 in 2000 to $69,500 in 2011, while median net worth of this household plummeted to $93,150, from almost $130,000 in 2000 and a high of $152,000 in 2008 (all figures are in 2011 dollars).¹⁷ Goods may be cheaper, but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a paycheck to cover them (and must rely on credit cards instead). In their parallel universe, the rich have recovered and then some. In her book Plutocrats, Crystia Freeland observes that post-Recession the division between the superrich and the rest is even greater than before the financial collapse.¹⁸ Or, in what the Century Foundation calls “A Tale of Two Recoveries,” every dollar and more of gains in household wealth in the post-Recessionary period (2009–2011) went to the top 7% of households. This top group saw its net worth grow almost 30% during this time, while everyone else saw their net worth fall by 4%.¹⁹

Simultaneously, the things that really affect quality of life and upward mobility cost much more than a flat-screen TV or a minivan. Inconspicuous consumption—education, health care, child care, and college tuition—are the items that truly impact quality of life and upward mobility, and these are the items the rich spend on and through which they further stratify themselves from everyone else. As this book has shown, inconspicuous consumption becomes more and more expensive and a practice reserved to the richest members of the aspirational class.²⁰ The erosion of middle-class jobs and the expense of inconspicuous consumption bifurcate the rich from the rest in a profound way that suggests future generations may never catch up with today’s rich and their children. This divide also amplifies the alienation and inequality between the rich and poor on a social and cultural level. The problems are so much deeper than the material goods that used to be clear status markers. Today, the division between the aspirational class and the rest is defined by college degrees, health, well-being, mortality rates, and time spent with one’s children. The cultural elites (let alone the economic elite) in this country are so removed from the day-to-day hardships of the middle- and lower-income classes, that they may become unable to even imagine (let alone solve) the pervasive problems of their poorer fellow citizens.

The problem with the new American economic landscape is profound on a number of levels. There is an intense sociological impact to the erosion of the middle class and rising inequality. What Evergreen State College professor Stephanie Coontz calls “the new instability” is the increasing tenuousness of married life for those who are not highly educated or highly paid. As she points out, in 1970, marriage rates were largely indistinguishable by education levels (and for a while so were divorce rates). Today, if you’re educated and rich, you’re also more likely to get married than those who are neither, and you are much less likely to get divorced. While 60% of this upper-income group is still in their first marriage at the age of 40, almost 60% of those without a bachelor’s degree are no longer in their first marriage at the same age. At the same time that the upper classes are putting their children through private schools and university, 25% of men 30–35 years of age are barely able to support a family of four above the poverty line (in 1969, just 10% of men 30–35 years of age were in the same dilemma). In 1969, 75% of men aged 25 were able to support that same family. In 2004, the age threshold for men who were able to support a family moved up to 30 years old. Further, while marrying one’s secretary seemed the secret to a man’s blissful marriage in the Mad Men days, today the secret to stability is marrying a woman with earning power and even more education than her husband.21

The decline of America’s middle class is profound for the global economy as well. Americans have never been savers, and yet, we are worse now than we were 30 years ago—personal saving declined from 10% in the early 1980s to virtually zero in 2014.²² The money that Chinese workers put under their mattress (indeed this is literally what they do) is what Americans pump into consumer goods.23 But these days, not only do American households have less money and save less, for rich households the money they do have is being redirected into education, health care, and pensions.

THE MIDDLE CLASS GOES GLOBAL

Globalization has often been the villain in conversations around mass consumerism and the decline of America’s middle class. But something else is afoot as well. As much as the global rich are infiltrating elite Western markets (as documented in books like Plutocrats, and in the frenzy around New York, San Francisco, and London property markets), a larger group is also becoming increasingly important to the world economy. Those factory jobs that left the United States are aiding in what economists are now calling the “global middle class.”²⁴ Just as the Industrial Revolution brought the United States and UK a new class of reasonably paid workers who then returned this income to the consumer economy, there is a growing population that, as a result of developing world industrialization and globalization, has moved out of poverty and into a middle-class quality of life. But what do we mean by a global middle class? Even America’s poor are doing better materially and financially than many of the reasonably well off in developing countries. Thus, is the term global middle class absolute—we have a fixed minimum and maximum income level—or relative—the median of each individual country? There is much speculation here, and drawbacks to each approach. For example, some use a relative approach (like that of New York University economist William Easterly), defining middle class as the 20–80% income bracket in the United States. However, what is middle in America is rich in most other places: The three middle quintiles in the United States would certainly be the top brackets in India or Venezuela, for example. More accepted definitions of the global middle class revolve around an absolute criterion. The Brookings Institution, the United Nations, and OECD define a member of the global middle class as someone who earns, spends, or has the purchasing power of $10–$100 per day.²⁵ This approach has been largely accepted, as it means that an individual can consume more than basic necessities, purchasing extra apparel, perhaps going out to dinner, and buying a car. In other words, the global middle class is defined in part by its participation in the global consumer market. This purchasing power is critical to major international companies selling anything from brandname food to cars. It also means the American middle class, which long supported the world economy with its consumption habits, is less essential.

Let’s consider the numbers. According to Brookings Institution scholars Homi Kharas and Geoffrey Gertz, the impact of the global middle class on the world economy has only just begun. By 2021, the number of Asian middle-class consumers, an estimated 2 billion, will far outpace their Western counterparts. Kharas’s and Gertz’s analysis of the emerging global middle class uses the $10–$100 spending power range and studies 145 countries, capturing 98% of the world’s population. Their projections suggest that by 2020, 54% of the world’s middle class will come from Asia Pacific, while North America’s and Europe’s global share will decline to just 10% and 22%, respectively (from 18% and 36%, respectively, in 2009). Kharas and Gertz believe that from 2009 to 2030 there could be a sixfold increase in the Asian middle class, while North America and Europe decline significantly in their global share (and North America also declines in its absolute number of people). By 2022, Kharas and Gertz believe more people in the world will be middle class rather than poor.26

When it comes to share of global consumption, this new global middle class will take over the role that the North American and European consumers currently hold. In 2009, North America accounted for 26% of middle-class consumption (some $5,600 billion) and Europe accounted for 38% of middle-class consumption (roughly $8,000 billion).²⁷ Kharas and Gertz believe that by 2020, the Asian Pacific market will generate 42% of global middle-class consumption (to North America’s 17% and Europe’s 29%). While the United States is currently the biggest middle-class consumer economy (followed by Japan and Germany), by 2020, China is projected to become number one and by 2030, India and China will hold the top two slots (generating 23% and 18%, respectively) with the United States significantly farther behind in third, generating 7% of global middle-class consumption. In one generation, almost half of global middle-class consumption may shift to an entirely different part of the world, with entirely different aesthetics, culture, and social dynamics.

Already, car sales and mobile phone sales are greater in China than in the United States. In 2000, the United States market accounted for 37% of worldwide car sales, while China accounted for just 1%. Fifteen years later, China is the world’s largest car economy, accounting for almost 14 million vehicles in 2009, compared to the United States’ 10.4 million. As early as 2008, the cell phone manufacturer Nokia generated more than three times more revenue in China than in the United States.28

It’s worth noting that massive income inequality, access to education, and the great political and cultural divides between the Chinese rural and urban populations may impact these estimates. Yet, by the sheer size of their populations alone, it seems nearly inevitable that the Asian Pacific middle-class consumer will take over where Western influence and power was once held. “If this transpires, the world will see a new global middle class—an Asian middle class,” write Kharas and Gertz. “There will be a cross-over from the West to the East in the products, fashions, tastes and designs oriented to the mass middle class.”²⁹

Another, perhaps simpler way to capture the global middle class is by looking at car purchases. In Foreign Policy, Shimelse Ali and Uri Dadush argue that while there is no fully agreed upon measure for capturing the global middle class, perhaps the single greatest sign of entering the middle class is buying an automobile. For Ali and Dandush, the income range ignores the fact that someone making $2 a day can still purchase a mobile phone and that what people earn doesn’t tell you about what they’ll actually buy. Owning a car is a signal of the ability and inclination to purchase a luxury good. This approach suggests that places like China, India, and Russia are growing even faster than the income analysis would suggest. In the emerging BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), new passenger car sales were six times larger in 2010 than they were in the 1990s.³⁰ The United States experience is antithetical: In 2000, there were more than 17 million car purchases; in 2015, that figure had barely budged.³¹

There are a lot of reasons we should care about the global middle class.³² From a strictly economic perspective, the decline of present-day developed industrialized countries’ middle classes would suggest that the world economy will suffer a massive blow as a significant portion of the United States’ and Europe’s consumers begin to spend less. Both population and income have stagnated in advanced economies, and the “middle class” as a concept is misrepresentative of the current, highly constrained economic situation of this population in Western countries. Second, as Ronald Inglehart has pointed out, economic development is an important step on the way to fairer, more democratic societies. Thus, as Ali and Dadush conclude, a rising middle class may mean more equitable governments and populations that demand more from their leaders, whether environmental standards or basic services.

Companies obviously care for their own purposes. In a 2010 McKinsey Quarterly report, David Court and Laxman Narasimhan argue that finding out where the “emerging middle class” is coming from will set the stage for brand loyalty for years to come. As they observe, “early winners” remain brand leaders. They found that in 17 consumer product categories in the United States, the leaders in 1925, such as Kraft, Del Monte Foods, and Wrigley, remained the leaders for the rest of the twentieth century. Court and Narasimhan also find that emerging markets resemble developed markets—they have affection for particular brands, idiosyncrasies with regard to price points and what they will spend money on, but also great aspirations for certain products.33 The Chinese in particular tend to shop for more hours per week than the average American and include shopping as a favorite leisure activity. Global retailers, whether Chanel or Walmart, count on these cultural tendencies. Chanel is China’s number one favorite luxury brand, while Walmart already has some 270 stores in China. The future is happening now.

If the United States offers the archetype of the middle class, then there are lessons to be learned by the global middle class that may take its place. As the US experience has demonstrated, the tendency toward consumerism and material goods is good for the world’s economy, but it is hardly good for the consumers themselves. Material aspirations create great pressures on society to work excessively and to focus on external markers of achievement. Further, the cycle of material attainment only compounds itself. Each generation believes it needs more than the generation before to feel comfortable or live the good life. In reality, that belief cannot possibly be true. We confuse the pressure to keep up with our peers as the key to success—and by extension happiness. Status is a movable feast, and once the middle class catches on, as this book has shown, the dominant elites find new ways to illustrate their status.

Most of us know that material goods—consumption—buy us only a small amount of happiness if any at all. Research shows that if we are going to spend money, we actually ought to spend it on others, if we are to attain any meaningful satisfaction from it. No matter how the tide of material goods ebbs and flows, the interpersonal means of happiness remains constant—strong family life, falling in love, stability, and our close ties to friends. For America and its fellow consumer-oriented Western countries and emerging consumer economies, we need to figure out how to redirect our lives toward these goals rather than toward attaining the latest consumer good. Or as the great economist Richard Easterlin himself put it to me when I interviewed him for this book, “I hope that the progress of knowledge will be such that we can bring under control the forces of economic growth that are misdirecting our efforts of wellbeing.”

No country better exemplifies the disconnect between happiness and income than China, where, since 1990, the rise of the free market is correlated with a decline in happiness that has been equally profound. China is the world’s second largest economy, the Chinese are 400% wealthier than they were some 30 years ago, and their consumption and GDP have doubled (twice). Mao’s communism has been replaced by middle-class urban denizens with TVs and refrigerators. Easterlin describes China as “one vast extension of Orange County, California.”34 Yet, as Easterlin explains, the decline in the safety net, social welfare, and jobs, has made people less satisfied than in the pre-1990 communist economy, even if they now have more wealth and more consumer products to buy. One study coined the term “frustrated achievers” to describe those who felt that even if they are doing well, someone else is always doing even better.³⁵ Deng Xiaopin, the leader of the Communist Party of China, who led the country to a market economy, (supposedly) famously said, “To get rich is glorious!”³⁶ Not so much, it turns out.

Buying goods is never going to make us happy. Not in the late 1800s, as the Industrial Revolution gave us a middle class and the beginnings of mass consumerism, not in the early 1900s with Henry Ford’s Model T, not in the 1950s with dishwashers, fridges, and A/C for all, and not in the twenty-first century’s mass luxury business. In some respects, our constant quest for the meaning of life (which becomes more possible in a post-scarcity society where we have time to ponder and pursue more existential questions because we know we have food for dinner) has confused matters even more. For the aspirational class, post-scarcity society has allowed them to invest in practices that at first seem constructive: motherhood, exercise, acquisition of cultural capital. Ostensibly, these activities should make people happier, but they too have become status markers and signs of achievement, and in that process have created more pressure and less happiness, not so dissimilar from material signifiers of social position.

Even the seemingly worthy consumption practices of the aspirational class set up destructive ingroup/outgroup distinctions across social and economic classes. Yes, paradoxically, we want to be different from others while we simultaneously seek to fit in. Consumption is a simple and effective way to create these distinctions and identities. But our desire to fit in or show our social position is structurally flawed because it always involves leaving others out. The creation of an “us” necessarily creates an “other.” And consumption, in its various forms, becomes the conduit for showing these distinctions, or more precisely, class lines. If we are constantly finding ways to differentiate from others, to show our social and economic position, once any group catches up, we are quick to find new means to reestablish our uniqueness. Today’s status markers are particularly pernicious because they involve practices and goods far more significant than material goods. Our parenting, cultural knowledge, choices in food become moral choices when they are really about economic constraint or freedom. Society frowns upon those who make inferior decisions on such matters, willfully ignorant that many of these decisions, veiled in morality, are practical and realistic outcomes of socioeconomic position.

This book has examined American culture and consumption in the twenty-first century and in particular the norms and practices of a new cultural formation, the aspirational class. The practices and behaviors that I observe can be seen in the local section of Dublin supermarkets that offer almond butter and quinoa, in the mothering practices (and pressures) in London, and the boutiques of Paris. The limitations of my landscape are due to the data at hand, but the expanse of these phenomena is in evidence worldwide. Thorstein Veblen’s view of consumption in the nineteenth century still applies today, but society and class are far more complicated. Many of us have access to the items that were then status markers of only the rich. Acquiring those status markers does not indicate one’s financial well-being, let alone happiness or fulfillment. Status itself, always present and always changing, has since permeated many other aspects of life. The question I leave you with is this: Does being different from others, being better than others at acquiring possessions or the perfect heirloom tomatoes, or making the decision and investment to breast-feed or feed your family organic produce really advance society at all? Perhaps this seems a rhetorical question, but I do not mean it as such. In some ways, the choice to be a better, more involved parent, exercise more, read more newspapers, probably does make us healthier, happier, and more engaged members of society.

But we cannot lose sight of the extent to which these practices are not even an option for huge segments of society. They are obviously not choices for the poor, the near-poor, and even huge swathes of the middle class. But even for the aspirational class, these status markers become points of peer pressure. As the sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton observe in a recent essay, “The Joy of Cooking?,” all of this burden to perfect things on a superficial level just leaves us overwhelmed anyway. This does not mean that all of our consumption practices are off base: Caring about where things come from, supporting local farmers, making home cooked meals, investing in education rather than handbags are certainly more constructive and establish better value systems than the flashy consumer culture of the 1980s and early 2000s. But even the aspirational class consumer gestalt reflects a frenzy and status-consciousness that not only leaves many out, but also stresses us out. In all of our consuming—conspicuous and inconspicuous—we may be missing out on living our lives, entirely.

Irrespective of one’s opinion on the merits or otherwise of how society chooses to consume in the twenty-first century, one thing is clear: Consumption is more than just buying things. Consumer habits reveal who we are and who we aspire to be. Our choices around what we consume simultaneously connect us and estrange us from different groups within society. To quote the great anthropologist Dame Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, “Goods … and consumption have been artificially abstracted out of the whole social scheme.”37 As I hope this book has shown, our consumption habits reveal something much deeper and more complicated than what material objects ostensibly suggest. In its summation of things big and small, consumption is a process and positioning of conveying information and identity. As we understand what motivates how and why we consume, we also learn more about humanity, how and where it organizes itself, the implications and limitations to these decisions, and, finally, what matters to us as individuals and society as a whole.