Thank you for your tips on selling my house. Even though I'm in no rush to sell I will, essentially, be adopting the "painting the front door" trick you mentioned, but little else. If the buyer wants the latest fashionable bathroom or kitchen then he/she can have the inconvenience of having them done. What I'll lose by not maximising the price of the house I will more than gain (substantially so) by doing my own house-marketing and legal conveyancing.
But the main point I was making earlier is that, essentially, consumerism started with status-flaunting by individuals. Early man didn't trade for pigments for any economic reason -- he had plenty of basic resources -- but for status reasons mainly, bodily ornamentation, as all hunter-gatherer tribes have done in order for the females to help choose the most imaginative and intelligent (and thus the best likely economic providers) among the males. Status and sex-choice (both sides of the same coin) are still the most powerful of all our instincts second to basic survival.
Of course, the path to modern consumerism in the developed countries hasn't been a straight-line extension from the above. There have been massive exploitative diversions on the way. Rich land-owners and priesthoods have exploited peasants for centuries, if not millenia, rich factory owners (in the early decades of the industrial revolution particularly) have exploited ordinary workers. But now, in the developed countries, most ordinary consumers are able to satisfy their basic needs for food, clothes and shelter with a small proportion of their income, the rest (with the exception of commuting costs) going on status goods or extending their lives beyond economic usefulness. (As the costs of commuting and freight increase in the coming years, then spending on status goods will inevitably decline. Unless massive new energy technologies are developed within the next 30 or 40 years then our grandchildren will be much more impoverished than we are now.)
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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