In general, behavioral economics, while generating lots of experimental evidence that disrupts the assumption that homo economicus is a good model of the economic actor, is less successful at advancing plausible alternatives. The field either amounts to a list of findings that are anomalous from the perspective of standard economics, with no underlying theory, or else quickly resorts to evolutionary just-so stories, such as the one suggested by Ainslie. The theoretical limitations of behavioral economics are perhaps a result of its commitment to discovering general behavioral laws by way of experiments, in conjunction with a strong commitment to a reductive naturalistic psychologism. With this end in mind, researchers in the field tend to bracket conceivably very relevant sociohistorical factors that could account for the behavior they observe in their experiments. Moreover, because experimental subjects in behavioral economics research are typically drawn from North American or Western European capitalist societies, little is done to control for the influence of such factors. As a theoretical resource for explaining modern patterns of accumulative consumption, behavioral economics therefore has some serious shortcomings. At the same time, I will argue, in Chapter 4, that some of the experimental findings of the field, approached in a contextual fashion—that is, precisely as findings about subjects in afluent capitalist societies—support an alternative interpretation, one in line with the theory argued for in this book.
2.2.2. Social Status Explanations
Social status approaches look at consumption behavior as a means for making and challenging status distinctions (Veblen 1994; Bourdieu 1984; Sombart 1967). Increasing consumption is explained as being a result of status competition in the context of an increasingly fluid social structure. From this point of view, modern accumulative consumption is a consequence of a very long historical process in which ascribed status progressively became supplanted by achieved status (Sombart 1967). Once social identity is set less by birth and becomes more contingent on variable life outcomes, social actors become motivated to find ways to index their status by way of their consumption practices. There then ensues the kind of object-mediated symbolic competition described by Thorstein Veblen and others.
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Time for Things