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The bottle service club today pitches Goffman’s “action” to the world’s new elite; it encourages the rich to flaunt their riches, to display wealth for display’s sake. Bottle service clubs are predicated on conspicuous consumption, a term coined, in 1899, by Thorstein Veblen, the quirky Norwegian American economist.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
We often attach value to things simply because they're hard to get. People will be more attracted to a painting if it costs $3 million than if it costs $3. The price becomes a feature of the product in that it allows the buyer to signal affluence to others.
gurwinder.substack.com • 40 Useful Concepts You Should Know
Such ostentatious displays of wealth as a mechanism to attain status were deemed “conspicuous consumption” in the late nineteenth century by the economist Thorstein Veblen.I
Brian Klaas • Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us
Bertrand Russell • In Praise of Idleness
Economics of hyper-consuming outliers in gaming and anime: how high-income individuals justify substantial spending on niche hobbies and entertainment
TRANSCRIPT
And so some hyper-consuming outliers in some industries realize that they are disordered or realize that they are, if not disordered, a little bit different than the average member of the population.
If you can trust the CEO at Kongregate, who definitely has an incentive to talk her book here, but I would believe it from knowing
... See more“Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability; and conversely, since application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in the community” (Veblen).