The Lure of Luxury by Dan Pereira

Central Thesis

drp169 — 2025-02-17 14:12:52 UTC

Paul Bloom presents the idea that history, aesthetics, and signaling make up consumerism behavior. He suggests that human psychology is complex however and the pleasure we derive as consumers can be a very broad spectrum.

Signaling

drp169 — 2025-02-17 14:13:26 UTC

Bloom anlyzes Geoffrey Millers "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior" as another point of contention. The idea that a company like Rolex is still in business is an embarrassment to sensory theorists while creating a troubling dilemma for Signaling. An upholder of the signaling theory would point out the endowment effect in their argument. They would suggest that they would like to signal honesty and integrity to themselves above all. While Bloom believes this may be a stretch, it is recognized that the history of a brand like Rolex or Audemars Piguet plays a crucial part in the pleasure we get from consuming the product.

Aesthetic

drp169 — 2025-02-17 14:14:45 UTC

The idea that consumerism is driven by aesthetics and the five senses is one that Bloom argues is incomplete. Bloom discusses "The Substance of style", by Virginia Postrel as one of his main points of contention. Postrel argues that the five senses dictate consumerism above all and uses "Living it Up" by James Twitchell to bolster her point. She suggest that the example of Twitchell's daughter admiring the Armani brand clothes proves that consumerism is sensory driven by nature. Bloom suggests this is a narrow minded view, he states

"Would they react the same way if reaching into the discount rack at Marshalls offered the same sensory experience? Probably not. If pleasure is triggered by the physical properties of what we are looking at
or touching, then it shouldn’t matter what we think it is. But it does matter. To most, an Armani is worth more than a knockoff, even if the difference is invisible to the senses."(Bloom 4).

Bloom presents the idea of replicas and fakes as a way to prove this point as if it were really that simple, then no one would spend grandiose amounts of money for luxury watches. They could buy replicas of marginally lower quality for a fraction of the price and yet they don't. This idea leads us to believe that aesthetics cannot be the essential driving factor behind consumerism.

History

drp169 — 2025-02-17 16:13:37 UTC

The idea that Paul Bloom tries to convey through his various critiques is that history plays a central role in all consumer behavior and is often overlooked. He makes this point clear when introducing "the touch". Bloom states,

"Thus the history of an object matters to the pleasure we get from it. And one intriguing sort of history concerns who has touched the object in the past. Consumers are more
likely to buy something that has been touched or tried on by a physically attractive person. Celebrities, in particular, possess the “touch”(Bloom 6).

Bloom goes on to provide examples of auctions in which individuals payed incredulous amounts of money for president Kennedy's old golf clubs and tape measure. He goes on to develop this idea by citing a survey in which participants were asked how much they would pay for sterilized vs non-sterilized objects from their respective idols. Oddly enough, the non-sterilized objects had a much higher bid. This suggest the idea that people like owning objects which are authentic in the truest sense of the word. Pleasure is derived from knowing these items are in no way historically meddled, it presents the idea that people value owning time in a sense through a significant figure they admire.

Pleasure

drp169 — 2025-02-17 16:15:47 UTC

The Endowment Effect

drp169 — 2025-02-17 17:38:20 UTC

"You also value an object more if you purposefully chose it than if it was just
handed to you. And you value it less if you had previously rejected it. You enjoy
something to a greater degree if you had to work to get it"(Bloom 6).

Evidence 1: Child shoes & Wedding Ring

drp169 — 2025-02-17 18:00:48 UTC

"Think
about your wedding ring or your child’s baby
shoes. Such objects serve no practical purpose,
they need not be beautiful in any sensory way,
and they are useless as signals"(Bloom 7).

Evidence 2: Unused Paper from famous figured

drp169 — 2025-02-17 18:02:57 UTC

"He started it when a friend sent him the top sheet of Isaac Bashevis
Singer’s stack of unused typewriter paper, which inspired him to contact authors and
request the blank pages they were going to write on next. He got pages from Richard
Powers, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, John Updike,
Joyce Carol Oates, and others. He even persuaded the director of the Freud Museum in
London to hand over the top sheet from a stack of blank paper in Sigmund Freud’s desk.
Foer’s unusual hobby illustrates powerfully how the most mundane objects accrue value
through their histories"(Bloom 7)

Evidence

drp169 — 2025-02-17 18:10:13 UTC

In the Lure of Luxury, Paul Bloom prefaces his thesis by describing two theories that drive consumerism: signaling and aesthetics. He regards these theories as incomplete with history and time being at the center of it all. In his essay, Bloom states

"But it is seriously incomplete. There is a further explanation for our love of such goods, which draws upon one of the most interesting ideas in the cognitive sciences: that humans are not primarily sensory creatures. Rather, we respond to what we believe are objects’ deeper properties, including their histories"(Bloom 3).