Cultural Consumption and Economic Capital

Conspicuous consumption is a term coined by the American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen which basically refers to the upper class and how they like to show off how much money they have and consume luxurious goods like cars and yachts.

Below is a photograph of the singer P.Diddy in his Rolls-Royce - and it does not take a person with a vast knowledge on cars to know what a Rolls-Royce is.

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The irony of the situation is that P.Diddy is in the singing business, and he definitely does not sing in the Opera. He is associated with popular culture, also known as “low-brow culture”. Because he makes so much money, he is able to spend it on things such as luxury cars and expensive suits and he is able to enjoy conspicuous leisure- like driving around in his car and partying all night long. He is therefore a cultural omnivore and often does something called code-switching. This is where a person is capable of negotiating with multiple cultural worlds.

Another example of this is the rapper Jay-Z. Not only is he a rapper but also a singer and a CEO. He is also culturally omnivorous and is able to switch between different cultural worlds such as rapping vs. negotiating business deals.

P.Diddy’s children will be influenced by their father’s status as a singer and by his high income. So they will inherit his cultural capital and be able to some day, possibly, turn that into more economic capital. This is because they are constantly being influenced by their surroundings, which is now part of the upper-class thanks to their father’s highly successful career. And they are being molded into cultured individuals from such a young age. This will give them an advantage over other people when looking for job opportunities or potentially starting their own business because of the fact that they have been exposed to different types of culture and have been taught things that other children of lesser classes might not have been taught.

However, this is not always true because if someone wanted to go into, for example, the computer business, they would not necessarily need cultural capital. They would need the technical abilities and expertise to work in that field. So, there are exceptions to every rule but one can see that cultural capital can be converted into economic capital in most cases.