The other evening my wife and I were watching HGTV and saw part of a show about RVs -- recreational vehicles. They were showing off the latest and best motor homes. One had a price tag of over $700,000. The inside looked to me like a fancy gambling casino on the Las Vegas strip (which I’ve only seen on TV). It was, to say the least, gaudy. But even those with price tags in the $200,000 range were over the top in terms of what was inside them. One had three 42 inch LED TVs -- one on the outside (so when you’re “camping” you can enjoy your TV experience rather than God’s great outdoors).
Norwegian economist Thorsten Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in 1899 while living in Minnesota. (I’ve been to his homestead site south of the Twin Cities.) When I was a kid growing up in conservative evangelicalism in the Midwest I heard several sermons preached against the “sin of conspicuous consumption.”
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