Consumption, Social settings and Personality in Economics.

Select some of the thinkers we’ve read and explain the connections they saw among consumption, social settings, and individual personality. (For example: Jevons took an individualistic view of consumption – personal preferences, wherever they come from, drive consumer choice – and a one-dimensional view of the outcome of consumption – utility – and then he centered his whole theory of value on consumer utility. Marshall had an interest in consumption, and on poverty-induced constraints on consumption, as an influence on character formation – the experience of being poor vs. being a middle-class urban consumer would result not just in lesser or greater pleasures, but in becoming a different person. The cooperators saw consumer cooperatives as a means of moral uplift, not just a way to get groceries. Veblen saw the social drive to invidious distinction as the primary force behind consumer behavior. You are not limited to those mentioned here.) How did the thinkers you chose explain the sequence of cause and effect? For example, does social setting affect personality, including consumption preferences, which then affects consumer choices? Or is individual personality the starting point, which then affects choice, which then produces social outcomes? Or is there a back-and-forth cause-and-effect among two or all three variables? How, if at all, does the content of what people consume matter? How, if at all, does the means people use to get consumption goods – as an individual buyer in a competitive market, as a member of a consumer cooperative, as a recipient of charity or government welfare programs, etc. – matter?