The prior post regarding the Veblen effect in the economy of ideas needed an example – and this seems like a great one.

Here is a religion (in the loosest sense of the term) which is so patently wrong as to be … well… fashionable.

Scientology: Religion as Veblen good.

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.