Economic materialism
Excessive desire to acquire and consume material goods
Economic materialism, known colloquially simply as materialism, is a personal attitude that attaches importance to acquiring material goods. The use of the term "materialistic" to describe an individual's personality or a society tends to have a negative or critical connotation. Rarely also called acquisitiveness, it is often associated with a value system that regards social status as being determined by affluence, as well as the belief that possessions can provide happiness, which has been critiqued as a lie brought about by capitalism. Environmentalism can be considered a competing orientation to materialism.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Economic materialism” is excessive desire to acquire and consume material goods. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Economic, materialism and Excessive, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Economic materialism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.