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Philosophy Of Futility
Philosophy of futility is a phrase coined in 1928 by Columbia University marketing professor Paul Nystrom to describe an increasingly prevalent outlook which, he believed, induced a greater demand for fashionable products. The growth of industrialization had brought about a narrowing of interests, contacts, and achievements for many people in the Western world. Such conditions of life, Nystrom observed, encourage a tendency to become quickly bored and, consequently, a continual appetite for newness and change and a greater interest in goods in which fashion dominates, such as apparel, automobiles, and home furnishings. The following is a quotation from Nystrom's ''Economics of Fashion'' (1928), often cited by historians and analysts of marketing, consumerism, and commercialism: p. 85, ''Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture'', Stuart Ewen, New York: Basic Books, 1976/2001; p. 18, ''Our Media, Not Theirs'', Robert W. McChesney and Joh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan, Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence. It is a member of the Ivy League. Columbia is ranked among the top universities in the world. Columbia was established by royal charter under George II of Great Britain. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the American Revolution, and in 1787 was placed under a private board of trustees headed by former students Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In 1896, the campus was moved to its current location in Morningside Heights and renamed Columbia University. Columbia scientists and scholars have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adam Smith
Adam Smith (baptized 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as "The Father of Economics"——— or "The Father of Capitalism",———— he wrote two classic works, ''The Theory of Moral Sentiments'' (1759) and ''The Wealth of Nations, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'' (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as ''The Wealth of Nations'', is considered his ''magnum opus'' and the first modern work that treats economics as a comprehensive system and as an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of God's will, God’s will and instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic and technological factors and the interactions between them. Among other economic theories, the work introduced Smith's idea of absolute advantage. Smith studied social philos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novelty Seeking
In Cloninger's model of psychobiology, novelty seeking (NS) is an inherited, unlearned, temperamental bias toward novel signals from the environment. It can be measured along a spectrum from low to high (as with 3 other temperamental domains) and when toward the upper end of the spectrum, it is associated with higher exploratory activity, need for higher levels of baseline stimulation, impulsive decision making, extravagance in approach to reward cues, quick temperedness, low tolerance for frustration, impulsivity, and proneness to addiction. It is measured in the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire as well as the later version Temperament and Character Inventory and is considered one of the ''temperament'' dimensions of personality. Like the other temperament dimensions, it has been found to be highly heritable. High NS has been suggested to be related to low dopaminergic activity. In the revised version of the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI-R) novelty seeking c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nihilism
Nihilism (; ) is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. The term was popularized by Ivan Turgenev, and more specifically by his character Bazarov in the novel '' Fathers and Sons''. There have been different nihilist positions, including that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless. Pratt, Alan.Nihilism" ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. . Scholars of nihilism may regard it as merely a label that has been applied to various separate philosophies, or as a distinct historical concept arising out of nominalism, skepticism, and philosophical pessimism, as well as possibly out of Christianity itself. Contemporary understanding of the idea stems largely from the Nietzschean 'crisis of nihilism', from which d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anomie
In sociology, anomie () is a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow. Anomie is believed to possibly evolve from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community (both economic and primary socialization). An example is alienation in a person that can progress into a dysfunctional inability to integrate within normative situations of their social world such as finding a job, achieving success in relationships, etc. The term, commonly understood to mean ''normlessness'', is believed to have been popularized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his influential book ''Suicide'' (1897). Émile Durkheim suggested that Protestants exhibited a greater degree of anomie than Catholics. However, Durkheim first introduced the concept of anomie in his 1893 work ''The Division of Labour in Society''. Durkheim never used the term ''normlessness''; rath ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mass Society
Mass society is a concept that describes modern society as a monolithic force and yet a disaggregate collection of individuals. It is often used pejoratively to refer to a society in which bureaucracy and impersonal institutions have replaced some notion of traditional society, leading to social alienation. In a sense, all societies are mass societies, but the term typically refers to a developed countries that possess a mass culture and large-scale social, political and economic institutions which structure daily life for the majority of people. In modern times the term has taken on more importance and broader scope with the advent of mass media and the internet. History Descriptions of society as a "mass" took form in the 19th century, referring to the leveling tendencies in the period of the Industrial Revolution that undermined traditional and aristocratic values, and replaced monarchy with various forms of liberal democracy. Political theorists such as Alexis de Tocquev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929) was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, ''The Theory of the Leisure Class'' (1899), Veblen coined the concepts of ''conspicuous consumption'' and ''conspicuous leisure''. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in the US, Veblen attacked production for profit. His emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced economists who engaged in non-Marxist critiques of fascism, capitalism, and of technological determinism. Biography Early life and family background Veblen was born on July 30, 1857, in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian-American immigrant parents, Thomas V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conspicuous Consumption
In sociology and in economics, the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical. In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term ''conspicuous consumption'' to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury commodities (goods and services) specifically as a public display of economic power—the income and the accumulated wealth—of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, the public display of discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or of maintaining a given social status. The development of Veblen's sociology of conspicuous consumption also identified and described other economic behaviours such as invidious consumption, which is the ostentatious consumption of goods, an action meant to provoke the envy of other people; and conspicuous compassion, the ostentatious use of charity meant to enhance the reputation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affluenza
Affluenza is a pseudoscientific psychological malaise supposedly affecting wealthy people. It is a portmanteau of ''affluence'' and ''influenza'', and is used most commonly by critics of consumerism. It is not a medically recognized disease. The word is thought to have been first used in 1954, but was popularised in 1997 with a PBS documentary of the same name and the subsequent book '' Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic'' (2001, revised in 2005, 2014). These works define affluenza as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more". A more informal definition of the term would describe it as "a quasi-illness caused by guilt for one's own socio-economic superiority".'' Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic'', John de Graaf, David Wann & Thomas H. Naylor, 2001 The term "affluenza" has also been used to refer to an inability to understand the consequences of one's actions because of financi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 45, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes. Nietzsche's writing spans philosophical polemics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theory Of Moral Sentiments
''The Theory of Moral Sentiments'' is a 1759 book by Adam Smith. It provided the ethical, philosophical, economic, and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works, including ''The Wealth of Nations'' (1776), '' Essays on Philosophical Subjects'' (1795), and '' Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms'' (1763) (first published in 1896). Sympathy Smith departed from the "moral sense" tradition of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, as the principle of sympathy takes the place of that organ. "Sympathy" was the term Smith used for the feeling of these moral sentiments. It was the feeling with the passions of others. It operated through a logic of mirroring, in which a spectator imaginatively reconstructed the experience of the person he watches:Smith, Adam (1872). Black, Joseph; Hutton, James (eds.). The Essays of Adam Smith' (6 ed.). London: Alex. Murry & Co. p. 9. Retrieved 21 Jan 2021. As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Retail Therapy
Retail therapy is shopping with the primary purpose of improving the buyer's mood or disposition. Often seen in people during periods of depression or stress, it is normally a short-lived habit. Items purchased during periods of retail therapy are sometimes referred to as "comfort buys" (compare comfort food). The name ''retail therapy'' is ironic and semifacetious, acknowledging that shopping hardly qualifies as true therapy in the medical or psychotherapeutic sense. It was first used in the 1980s, with the first reference being this sentence in the ''Chicago Tribune'' of Christmas Eve 1986: "We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy." The fact that shopping may provide a short time of comfort (relief from dysphoria), but also imposes costs and is subject to comedown and withdrawal, make it, like opioid use, either a therapy or an addiction, depending on whether each person uses it adaptively or maladap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
