CONCEPT
Competitive Consumption
Schor's mechanism by which consumption is driven not by autonomous need but by upward social comparison — with reference groups several income brackets above the consumer — producing aspirational spending that cannot be satisfied.
Competitive consumption is the engine that drives the consumption stage of the work-spend cycle. Schor documented in The Overspent American (1998) that American consumption patterns had shifted decisively: consumers were no longer comparing their material standard to their neighbors (the Veblen model) but to lifestyles several income brackets above them, visible through television, advertising, and increasingly through social media. The upward comparison drives spending that cannot be sustained by the consumer's income, which requires more hours of work to close the gap, which locks the consumer into the work-spend cycle at ever-escalating levels of consumption and labor. The mechanism operates at the individual level but its scale is structural: it cannot be addressed by individual frugality because the reference points continue to rise with each season of cultural programming.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The critical shift Schor identified was a change in reference groups. In the 1950s and 1960s, household consumption was anchored by neighborhood comparison