Does the Veblen Effect Apply to Ideas?
The term has escaped me time and time again over the last few weeks – I searched and wracked my brain to figure it out (without success) until now. As will usually occur, the words spontaneously came to me de repente – without warning or explanation – but I knew I had finally remembered what I was looking for when it happened. The words I was looking for? Veblen good
Are some ideas so unfashionably wrong – indeed, are some frameworks for understanding the world so skewed and pathological – that to assume them is a luxury and even a desirable act of consumption for the thinker?
Consider the pressure exerted by marginalized fringe groups – cults – upon outsiders (who may, themselves, be marginalized by society) to assume ridiculous beliefs, or the rhetoric of political parties.