Consumerism  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

This structure, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, symbolizes the rise of consumer culture and the start of industrial design.

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Google Wikipedia Wiktionary Wiki Commons Wikisource Wordpress YouTube Shop Featured: The Trylon and Perisphere, two modernistic structures at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 Photo: Trylon, Perisphere and Helicline (Samuel H. Gottscho)

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Consumerism is a term used to describe the effects of equating personal happiness with purchasing material possessions and consumption. It is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen.

In economics, consumerism can also refer to economic policies that place an emphasis on consumption, and, in an abstract sense, the belief that the free choice of consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society (cf. Producerism, especially in the British sense of the term).

See also

• Affluenza
• Anthropological theories of value
• Anti-consumerism
• Bourgeois personality
• Commercialism
• Commodity fetishism
• Conspicuous consumption
• Consumer activism
• Consumer Bill of Rights
• Consumer capitalism
• Consumer ethnocentrism
• Consumer protection
• Consumption (economics)
• Cost the limit of price
• Economic materialism
• Environmental impact of aviation
• Frugality
• Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychologist)
• Homo consumericus
• "Keeping up with the Joneses"
• Philosophy of futility
• Planned obsolescence
• Post-materialism (economics)
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Schwartz argues that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers
• The Century of the Self, a documentary by filmmaker Adam Curtis released in 2002
• Simple living