y among the learned, are excessively high--as
measured by the prevalent degree of opulence and earning capacity of the
class, relatively to the non-scholarly classes whose social equals
they nominally are. In any modern community where there is no priestly
monopoly of these occupations, the people of scholarly pursuits are
unavoidably thrown into contact with classes that are pecuniarily their
superiors. The high standard of pecuniary decency in force among these
superior classes is transfused among the scholarly classes with but
little mitigation of its rigor; and as a consequence there is no class
of the community that spends a larger proportion of its substance in
conspicuous waste than these.

Chapter Six ~~ Pecuniary Canons of Taste

The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the
regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of
conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which
the consumer acts in any given case is this principle in its bald,
unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his motive is a wish to conform to
established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment, to live
up to the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of
goods consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and
effort. In the common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is
present in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining
force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the eyes of
observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive expensiveness is
observable also in consumption that does not in any appreciable degree
become known to outsiders--as, for instance, articles of underclothing,
some articles of food, kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus
designed for service rather than for evidence. In all such useful
articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to
the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but
do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for
the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.

Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste there
grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the effect of
which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of expensiveness and
wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in his employment of time
and effort. This growth of