7
Conspicuous Waste, Precision, and Reputation
COSTLY SIGNALING THEORY yields a usefully paranoid perspective on human behavior, for it leads us inevitably into doubt. It induces a vivid skepticism about other organisms’ claims of bodily, mental, and social superiority. It makes life more unnerving—less like a formulaic romantic comedy, and more like a combination of film noir, spy thriller, and science fiction. Ultimately, it provokes more than a nodding agreement with the observation by nineteenth-century American minister Elias Root Beadle, that “half the work that is done in the world is to make things appear what they are not.”
While we have instincts for ostentatious self-display, we also have instincts for optimality and frugality, qualities that guided our ancestors’ choices of how to hunt and gather efficiently, trade profitably, and make tools skillfully. Whereas Thorstein Veblen famously analyzed our self-display instincts in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he also examined our efficiency-seeking instincts in his lesser-known The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914). Those efficiency-seeking instincts can also be applied to evaluate different signaling systems. They lead us to think that we would like to be able to judge other people accurately, without their having to handicap themselves so onerously, by wasting so much matter, energy, time, and risk on signals. Is there any escape from this nightmare of costly signaling, wherein the only alternative to universal deception is colossal waste?
For a few years in the early 1990s, biologists thought there might be an answer to this dilemma in the theory of “indexes.” Indexes were, theoretically, signals that could be perfectly reliable without being costly: the quality of one organism’s underlying trait would correlate 100 percent with the apparent quality of a cue being observed by other organisms, so the cue would be a reliable index of the trait. Indexes might be reliable by tapping into some fundamental constraint of Newtonian physics or developmental biology. For example, an animal’s adult body size seemed like a possible index of its genetic quality, bodily condition, and age, because mutated, sickly, newborn animals simply can’t eat enough quickly enough to grow larger-than-average bodies. In this view, a four-centimeter-long guppy must be a pretty good guppy, if guppies average three centimeters; a twenty-five-meter-long brachiosaurus must have been a pretty good brachiosaurus, if brachiosaurs averaged twenty meters.
However, index theory was eventually overtaken by life-history theory—the study of how organisms allocate their resources, energy, and time to different patterns of growth and behavior across their life spans. Life-history theory suggested that there was always plenty of room for faking, even when it came to allegedly reliable indexes. Suppose animals evolve to pay more attention to one another’s body length as a cue of underlying quality when trying to choose the fittest mates or trying to invest resources in the fittest offspring. There will then be selection of mates and offspring to allocate more energy to growing longer body parts, to get more than their fair share of copulations or parental care. The body parts that are cheapest to grow longer, because they have the smallest cross sections (necks and tails), will lengthen most quickly over evolutionary time. Thus, there will be a gradual reduction in the correlations between apparent body size (length) and actual genetic quality, bodily condition, and age. The result will be long-tailed guppies and long-necked, long-tailed brachiosaurs. Empirical tests of life history theory suggest that such evolutionary reallocations of energy from one growth pattern to another growth pattern are rather easy to achieve. There are not, in fact, many hard “developmental constraints” on organisms that can guarantee the reliability of any particular index. Evolution is just too potent and clever at circumventing constraints, and turning reliable indexes into unreliable advertisements. This same inexorable undermining of index reliability happens at the cultural level, as illustrated by the counterfeiting of paper money, luxury watches, and Rembrandt paintings.
It would be convenient to live in a world of reliable indexes and merit badges. We could judge books by their covers, people by their faces, and products by the simplest of visible cues. Our children could prosper by learning a few key proverbs: the bigger, the better; no pain, no gain; like father, like son; might is right; practice makes perfect. They wouldn’t need to learn that all that glitters is not gold, or that actions speak louder than words. They could keep their innocence and gullibility forever, in a world of eternal, ubiquitous truth.
Costly signaling theory is basically the bad news that we do not live in that world, because the survival and reproductive incentives for deception are too high, and the adaptive processes that invent new forms of deception—genetic evolution, cultural invention, individual improvisation—are too fast and pervasive. The good news is that some signal reliability is possible, under certain conditions of signal cost.
Signal cost can certainly include costs in terms of an animal’s general energy budget (food calories eaten) or ecological resources (such as mating territories acquired by threats and fights), which are similar in some ways to money. When such moneylike costs are paramount, costly signaling theory most resembles Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argued that luxury goods and services are acquired by the rich mainly to display their wealth, not to increase their happiness. Buyers of top-of-the-range products understand that their high price is a benefit, not a cost. It prevents poorer buyers from owning the same product, thereby guaranteeing the product’s reliability as an indicator of their possessor’s wealth and taste. The rich covet the new iPod not for the sounds it can make in their heads, but for the impressions it can make in the heads of others. Veblen applied the term “conspicuous consumption” to all such costly displays, wherever the main function of acquiring, using, and displaying the product is to signal one’s individual traits, wealth, and status to observers. Costly signaling theory simply generalizes Veblen’s insight to the biological world. It observes that animals, including humans, often show off the most expensive signals they can afford, whether those signals are peacock tails or Hummer H1s. In each case, reliable signaling demands some sort of “conspicuous waste”—a highly visible expenditure of resources that brings no material benefit, but that simply signals the expender’s ability and willingness to waste those resources.
However, the term “cost” can be misleading, and is not limited to biological analogues of monetary cost. Signal costs can also include costs in terms of an animal’s time (minutes spent doing something), attention (proportion of consciousness allocated to some ongoing task), diligence (proportion of quality-control systems invested in growing or producing a well-formed signal), physical risk (probability of injury or death), or social risk (probability of embarrassment or punishment if fakery is discovered). In these cases, costly signals may not demand conspicuous waste; they may demand instead conspicuous precision (which can be achieved only through time, attention, and diligence) or conspicuous reputation (vulnerability to social sanctions).
Signals that guarantee their reliability through conspicuous waste or conspicuous precision can be called indicators. If they reveal an animal’s genetic quality or phenotypic condition, they are fitness indicators—they reveal that animal’s fitness, its statistical propensity to survive and reproduce successfully under a species’ natural ecological conditions. The peacock’s tail is a fitness indicator that relies partly on conspicuous waste (it is large and heavy), and partly on conspicuous precision (its finely grown feathers are radially symmetrical at the macro level, show evenly spaced eyespots at the meso level, and display iridescence at the micro level).
Most human-designed products show some combination of conspicuous waste and conspicuous precision. The Hummer H1 SUV is heavy on conspicuous waste (it weighs 7,850 pounds and gets about ten miles per gallon), but shows very little conspicuous precision—indeed, it shows only enough precision of design and manufacture to run for a while before it needs a repair (which happens fairly often, according to the Consumer Reports reliability ratings). The Lexus LS 460 sedan is somewhat lighter on conspicuous waste (it weighs 4,240 pounds and gets about twenty miles per gallon), but much heavier on conspicuous precision (fit, finish, features, reliability, luxury).
Apart from indicators, many animals evolve “badges” of fitness or status. These do not rely on conspicuous waste or precision, but on conspicuous reputation. Badges may be easy to grow and maintain for those who are socially recognized as deserving them. But if individuals display them without meriting them, those individuals are subject to social punishment by others, ranging from avoidance and ostracism to physical harassment and mob violence. For example, facial markings act as status badges among female paper wasps. Higher-status wasps have a larger number of dark spots above the mouth, and spot number correlates reliably with head width, body size, and fighting ability. The biologists Elizabeth Tibbetts (University of Michigan) and James Dale (Simon Fraser University) found that if they painted extra dark spots on lower-status wasps, those wasps were attacked much more aggressively by dominant wasps. Thus, the dark spots may be metabolically cheap to produce, but lead to heavy social punishment if the wasp does not have the fighting ability to back up its status badge. Analogous human badges include British school ties, military medals, and gang tattoos—in each case, unmerited display provokes sanctions, ranging from ostracism to death.
For badges to work as reliable signals, they must be checked periodically by other animals to determine if the badge wearer really merits the badge. This could be construed as a “maintenance cost” of the badge, but it is a cost borne not so much by the badge wearer as by the audience. Others must take the trouble to check for fraud, forgery, and cheating, and must impose sufficient punishment on cheaters that low-status individuals can expect to pay a prohibitive cost for trying to wear a high-status badge. This leads to another problem of reliability: detecting and punishing cheaters is inconvenient to the individual (since it costs time, energy, and risk), but good for the group (since it keeps the badge reliable), so it is technically an act of altruism. Such pro-social altruism can be maintained in populations if the badge checkers and cheater punishers gain social and reproductive benefits from policing the signaling system. But the whole system relies on a complex balance of power and interest between honest badge wearers, cheats, police, police admirers, and police groupies. If a population gets the balance right, badges can be extremely reliable, efficient, and cheap as signals of fitness, or status, or anything else. But if individuals forget to reward badge checkers and cheater punishers with extra social status, friendship, and mating opportunities, the system can easily break down.
Most human-designed products also rely to some degree on status badges, which are called brands. Brand names and logos are usually light on waste (they’re small and flat), and only moderate on precision (they use fairly simple fonts and designs), but they are ferociously protected as badges by trademark law, corporate lawyers, and cargo inspectors. Even in China most fake branders have learned to alter the imitated brand name just enough to avoid outright trademark violations, so they produce Paradi (rather than Prada) clothes, PenesemiG (rather than Panasonic) batteries, and Pmua (rather than Puma) shoes. As with the randomly patterned black dots on wasp heads, the precise form and meaning of the brand name or logo are immaterial. Even stupid brand names (Accenture, Babolat, Bong Vodka, Intellocity, Kork-Ease, and Phat Farm) can succeed if actively promoted and policed. All that matters is that the brand is recognizable to consumers, is positively correlated with some aspect of product quality, and is enforced by legal and social sanctions. Just as evolution builds badges as signaling systems by spreading the genes for growing and recognizing the badges, and enforcing their accuracy, corporations build brand equity by promoting consumer recognition of the brand, positive association with the brand, and intolerance for faking of the brand. The same recognition, association, and reliability considerations apply to corporation and conglomerate names above the brand level (Toyota Motor Corporation), and to product names within each brand (Camry).
The table below illustrates the differences between conspicuous waste, conspicuous precision, and conspicuous reputation as signaling principles.
Each example is arguable, because most real products rely on all three principles in varying proportions. In particular, most successful products must display some minimal level of precision in order to function efficiently, safely, and credibly for their nominal purpose. The Hummer must run at least as long as the test-drive lasts; Los Angeles must have streets sufficiently well-organized that commuting to work takes no more than twenty-four hours per day. However, none of this precision needs to be conspicuous precision—it does not need to go beyond the level of pragmatic necessity. Also, most products must bear some recognizable branding, or else they would not command any price premium above a generic commodity, and they would not deliver any profit to their manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. Conspicuous waste is also optional if other signaling principles are in play. Some products assert their quality through an almost pure mix of conspicuous precision and branding, without extravagance of scale or materials. For example, most Skagen brand watches use very thin, simple cases of stainless steel, precise quartz movements, and discreet branding.
Of course, conspicuous waste, precision, and reputation do not exhaust the possible forms of signal reliability. There is also conspicuous rarity: pink diamonds, Rembrandt paintings, moon dust, Princess Diana dresses. Rarity is so valued by exotic pet enthusiasts that whenever a new species is described in the scientific literature, the species’ extinction risk is increased by collectors seeking out the high-premium exotica—as happened with the turtle Chelodina mccordi from the Indonesian island of Roti, which brought up to $2,000 on the international pet market and then almost went extinct. There is also conspicuous antiquity (often correlated with rarity): Roman Double Aureus gold coins, Muromachi period samurai swords, Gutenberg Bibles. However, these more exotic forms of signal reliability apply mostly in specialist auction markets for unique luxury items, not in mainstream consumer-product design and marketing.
The Relative Efficiency and Morality of Different Signaling Systems
Each signaling principle has its distinctive pros and cons from the viewpoint of the signaler, the audience, and the population and ecology at large. These distinctions are significant but often overlooked. For example, socialist and environmentalist critiques of runaway consumerism apply most forcibly to cruder forms of conspicuous waste, which sequester matter and energy for the rich at the expense of the poor, and which impose the largest ecological footprint (resource and energy requirements). It is much harder to raise socioecological objections to an iPod nano than to an H1 Hummer. Aristocrats differ from the nouveaux riches not in their freedom from consumerism, but in their preference for conspicuous precision and reputation (“the finer things in life”) over conspicuous waste (“the crass and vulgar”). Green-minded, dreadlocked vegans differ from well-coiffed soccer moms not in their aloofness from capitalism, but in the forms of conspicuous reputation they prefer: Nature’s Path Organic Ginger Zing Granola Cereal with Silk Plus Omega 3 DHA soy milk, rather than Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes with factory-farmed milk full of growth hormones and mastitis-induced cow nipple pus. A Scientologist who spends $280,000 on the cult’s “intensives” and courses to achieve “Operating Thetan Level VIII” status may consider himself spiritually superior to a Bev erly Hills psychiatrist who spends that amount on a Girard-Perregaux Magistral Tourbillon Swiss watch, but both are chasing conspicuous reputation, just in somewhat different forms. Thus, arguments about consumerist capitalism can go far astray when we do not recognize that there are many different forms of reliable signaling—and our own favored signaling tactics are the ones we are least likely to recognize as signaling at all.
In many ways, conspicuous waste is the simplest, most popular, and (surprise!) most wasteful form of signaling. Guppies and brachiosaurs managed to evolve wasteful signals, and the senses and brains to discriminate between them; so, too, have humans. Indeed, conspicuous waste is a metabolic extension of life itself. Biologists define life as a set of processes that can sustain reproduction (self-replication) and metabolism (control over local matter-and-energy flows to preserve one’s bodily adaptations in the face of entropy). Conspicuous waste is simply a way to display the scope of one’s control over those local matter-and-energy flows, by monopolizing more resources than are necessary for short-term self-preservation. The payoff of such signaling is that it promotes success in the longer-term self-preservation of oneself (through higher social status) and one’s genes (through higher mating success). For example, an active adult male human needs about three thousand calories per day. An actively status-seeking billionaire entertaining thirty guests and twenty staff on his three-hundred-foot mega-yacht might control the flow of an additional 150,000 calories per day for feeding his dependents, plus 8,000 gallons of fuel per day if cruising at fifteen knots. A gallon of fuel contains about 30,000 calories of energy, so the megayacht’s total energy budget is about 240 million calories per day—equal to 200,000 pounds of porterhouse steak, or 80,000 times the calories needed by the billionaire’s own body. A skilled prehistoric hunter would have been very lucky to bring home 40 pounds of meat in a day, so the billionaire is demonstrating control more than five thousand times the metabolic resources that any normal human could command throughout human evolution. Thus, the yacht’s food and fuel budget is a prodigious extension of the billionaire’s metabolism.
Thomas Malthus observed that human populations usually expand to match the environment’s carrying capacity. Given a Malthusian world of limited resources, one man’s monopolization of such massive energy flows through a yacht means that other people do without. So, when poor, hungry people see megayachts and other conspicuous waste, they tend to get upset, and they either demand socialist revolution (in the nineteenth century), or better antidepressants (in the twenty-first). Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class was a satirical tirade against conspicuous waste, but it did not explore the psychology of why we find such waste so aesthetically offensive. His 1914 book, The Instinct of Workmanship, filled that gap by positing that humans evolved, over millennia of tool-making and technical innovation, a deep instinctive preference for efficient tools, projects, and lifestyles. In Veblen’s view, aesthetic revulsion against conspicuous waste reflects this instinct of workmanship, which values precision of design and efficiency of function. Veblen envisioned a technocratic utopia in which righteous engineers drove corrupt marketers and investors from power, and delivered right-size, minimal-waste products to a grateful public.
However, in signaling-theory terms, this instinct of workmanship could be construed as simply a different set of signal preferences—the preferences that we apply when judging conspicuous precision rather than conspicuous waste. To a large degree, Veblen’s technocratic utopia was achieved throughout much of the twentieth century across the developed world, through the aesthetics of international modernism, minimalism, and techno-fetishism. These abandoned the conspicuous waste of Victorian ornamentation for the conspicuous precision of design, form, and functionality—exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Knoll furniture, Movado watches, and Apple computers. The rich still bought costly furniture, but it was now costly because designers spent hours trying to develop new forms of chairs that required machinists to invent new fabrication methods for each novel design, rather than because wood-carvers spent hours chiseling Rococo Revival floral motifs into mahogany.
The twentieth century’s shift from conspicuous waste to conspicuous precision was beneficial in many ways. It empowered designers to explore more creatively the space of possible product designs. It minimized, for a while, the reputability of grotesque Gilded Era extravagance. It paved the way for the eco-aesthetics of “small is beautiful.” It shifted status from the engineers of the very large (trains, battleships, skyscrapers) to the engineers of the very small (electronics, biotech, nanotech). It increased consumer appreciation of fit, finish, reliability, functionality, and novelty. While conspicuous waste continues to be favored in a few places (the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia), conspicuous precision has become more fetishized elsewhere (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Europe).
However, conspicuous precision can lead to equally absurd forms of runaway consumerism. If the basic functions of consumer goods remain stable, and if form follows function, then modernist design should have quickly settled on optimal designs for every product category—whether it is the ideal chair, car, or house. Moreover, if consumers demand conspicuous precision, as manifest in perfect workmanship, quality, and reliability, then every product should operate efficiently for many decades, if not lifetimes, passed down the generations as capital legacies that parallel the biological legacies of our genes. Such a system would, however, have resulted in economic catastrophe, because eventually no one would have to produce or buy anything. This was the businessman’s nightmare of the 1950s, and it was solved—with a great deal of explicit strategizing among investors, marketers, and politicians—by inventing the various forms of planned obsolescence and technological pseudoprogress that journalist Vance Packard examined memorably in books such as The Hidden Persuad ers (1957), The Status Seekers (1959), and The Waste Makers (1960).
Corporations realized that if they wanted to continue selling new cars, and that if modernist aesthetics dictated that each of a car’s functions could be served by only a narrow range of optimal design forms, then the only way to “improve” each year’s new model car was to incorporate novel functions that arise through perpetual technical innovation. We are all familiar with the parade of improvements that rendered each car model “obsolete” within a few years, including: air-conditioning (1941), power windows (1948), power steering (1951), cruise control (1958), three-point seat belts (1959), and so on. More recently, anxious drivers who were once happy with the driver-side airbag (introduced in 1980) now feel obligated to upgrade successively with passenger-side airbags (1987), side airbags (1995), knee airbags (1996), windowbags (1998), and second-generation airbags (1998). My 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser has only two airbags, so I feel irrationally vulnerable compared with the driver of a 2007 BMW 750Li, which has eight airbags—although my Land Cruiser weighs more and rides higher.
Thus, consumerist signaling through conspicuous precision drives very fast proliferation in product features and functions, often through minor technical innovations and pseudo-innovations. The resulting waste is not usually obvious within any single product, but is serious when one adds up all the successively obsolete products that a consumer buys within a lifetime. If you buy a Toyota Prius (2,900 pounds curb weight) every three years rather than a Land Cruiser (5,700 pounds) every ten years, then over a fifty-year driver’s lifetime, you’ll consume a total of 48,000 pounds rather than 28,000 pounds of car mass. Continual upgrades don’t always make sense, even when the new product has lower environmental costs per mile driven. Similarly, a consumer of my generation will have consumed (so far) a couple of record players, an 8-track player, several cassette players, many CD players, and various iPods—each made with enough conspicuous precision that they would probably still work, if I could find them.
The shift from conspicuous waste to conspicuous precision reflects a gradual dematerialization of consumption, by which we signal superiority through design, not mass, and through intricacy, not size. Mobile phones are already becoming too Lilliputian for adult males to use without feeling like a palsy-pawed giant ground sloth. The twenty-third generation iPod nano of 2045 might be a cubic millimeter of literal nanotech glued to one’s earlobe. If it falls off, we’ll have to be careful not to breathe it in, or to let our pet Shih Tzu lick it off the floor. Conspicuous precision is quickly reaching the limits of our visual acuity and fine motor control.
Yet this dematerialization of products is somewhat illusory, in that we have simply centralized the allocation of capital from the products themselves to their engineering and manufacturing facilities. A 100-million-transistor PC microchip may be only one square centimeter, but it can be made only in a billion-dollar factory with a million square feet of floor space, including 100,000 square feet of “Class 1” ultraclean area. To achieve conspicuous precision in our products, we pay companies to cover the capital investments in manufacturing capacity and expertise that are implicit in a product’s quality, rather than through paying them to invest extravagant capital in each product itself. The result can be marvelous economies of scale, since the centralized manufacturing capabilities can churn out many products at very low marginal costs once they are up and running.
Conspicuous reputation represents an even more extreme dematerialization of consumption. In this realm, a product’s signaling reliability no longer depends on the capital invested in the product itself (as in conspicuous waste), or in the product’s design and manufacturing (as in conspicuous precision), but in the product’s marketing and branding. The product’s reputability and the brand’s equity exist not in the product’s material form, but in the brains of consumers and observers. Those brains are just as real as steel or silicon, but because they cannot be manipulated as directly as ordinary matter can be, they must be reached through the senses: through advertising, product placement, opinion leaders, imitation, word of mouth, and all the other armaments of modern marketing.
In 2006 Interbrand reported that Coca-Cola had $67 billion in global “brand equity”—more than any other company. To nonmarketers, the concept of brand equity (the total value of a brand’s name-recognition among consumers) usually sounds so abstract as to be meaningless. To marketers, however, it has very real empirical meaning—namely, that 94 percent of people on earth recognize “Coca-Cola,” and most “respond positively” to its products, which means that they will pay a price premium for a Coca-Cola product over a physically equivalent generic beverage. Given a global population of 6.5 billion people, Coca-Cola’s mind share is worth about $10 per person, on average; that is, the company’s $2 billion of advertising per year over many decades has generated product recognition propensities that are literally worth about $10 per human brain. The other top ten brands—Microsoft, IBM, GE, Intel, Nokia, Toyota, Disney, McDonald’s, Mercedes—each have 2006 brand equity greater than $21 billion, or more than $3 of product recognition propensity per human brain. These propensities may seem elusive, immaterial, even mystical, but they are real enough to support the careers of hundreds of thousands of marketing and advertising professionals. No doubt as the new science of neuroeconomics progresses and uses ever more sophisticated brain imaging methods to identify which parts of consumer brains respond to brands and products, concepts such as brand equity will seem ever less mystical.
Costly signaling theory highlights the fact that brand equity exists mostly in the minds of signal receivers (observers of other people’s product consumption), not in the minds of signalers themselves (actual consumers of a product). The luxury brands with the highest brand equity (Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, Rolex, Hermès, Tiffany, Cartier, Bulgari, Prada, Armani) understand this perfectly well. They advertise in Vogue and GQ not so much to inform rich potential consumers that they exist, but to reassure rich potential consumers that poorer Vogue and GQ readers will recognize and respect these brands when they see them displayed by others. This is why the typical luxury ad includes a highly attractive model dressed up as a high-status heiress, wearing an expression of contempt and disdain for the viewer. The ad does not say “Buy this!”; it says, “Be assured that if you buy and display this product, others are being well trained to feel ugly and inferior in your presence, just as you feel ugly and inferior compared with this goddess.”
Conspicuous reputation as a signaling principle provokes its own distinctive moral and aesthetic objections. Critics of branding point not so much to each product’s material wastefulness or its technofetishistic proliferation of useless features and functions, but to its invidious social-comparison effects. Branded products lead the consumer to feel higher in status, sexiness, or sophistication—feelings that are ultimately either oppressive (if observers grant higher status to the product displayer, and thereby feel inferior) or self-deluded (if observers do not actually grant the higher status). In either case, the branding seems iniquitous—a waste of human effort, attention, and vanity in the zero-sum game of social status.
However, in other respects, conspicuous reputation is wonderfully efficient as a signaling principle. It leaves a very modest ecological footprint, because it relies on lightweight information and media technologies to influence people’s minds. Advertising is just photons aimed at eyes, and sound waves aimed at ears. These can be produced through very efficient media—print, radio, television, Internet—that do not burn much fossil fuel or club harp seals to death. The principle of conspicuous reputation honestly acknowledges the core function of consumerist capitalism—the invidious display of one’s personal qualities to observers—and so allows marketers and consumers to fulfill that function with less collateral damage to other people, and environments.
It seems unlikely that people will ever relinquish their runaway quest for self-display, as the failures of communism and hippie utopianism showed all too clearly. (Note that Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones are now both appearing in ads for Louis Vuitton luggage.) Yet, people’s modes of self-display are quite flexible, as shown by the development of different display norms across different historical epochs and cultures. So, self-display may one day be shifted from our current antisocial, irresponsible, unreliable forms of conspicuous waste, precision, and reputation to more pro-social, conscientious, reliable forms that still let people make a living.