Tax Consumption Part 2

Conspicuous consumption is a primitive urge. I'll never forget this story from an anthropology class I took in college: There was a tribal culture in which the greatest honor one could get was to use a bunch of money (I think they had some sort of silver coin) to make a decorative wheel and toss it off a cliff into a river, never to be seen again. Sounds silly, of course, but it's the psycho-social equivalent of owning a BMW 3-Series. The more you show that you have resources to burn, the more attractive you or your children will be to potential mates. Subconsciously, that drives a lot of human behavior a lot of the time. Corporations and advertisers don't make would-be free thinkers into blind consumers. Rather, they take advantage of innate desires.

We're so self-aware these days that we sometimes think people ought to be behaving in ways to make themselves happy, and we're surprised at how self-destructive people can be. In reality, our minds evolved to implement certain reproductive strategies (often involving copying your parents, who were obviously successful reproducers); we are not happiness maximizers by nature.

Fortunately, we humans are smart enough to overcome many primitive urges. My last post had some specific policy prescriptions that would help, but of course our society is not in a place to support them, which is to say that we love to spend, spend, spend on bigger and bigger stuff. I often fault activist groups for focusing on trying to change the law or elect candidates based on their one issue, when in reality they need to win people's minds first so that there's enough support in the land for the law to be changed. So first things first, forget the policy proposals for now.

Let's think of some creative, inexpensive ways to make it uncool to spend. When conspicuous spenders have trouble getting laid, they'll get off it real quick.