Source: Noahpinion
Noah Smith traces how aspirational consumption—buying organic cheese or premium groceries as visible markers of cultural sophistication—hollowed out the middle class by making lifestyle signaling a financial necessity rather than a luxury. The shift from "I buy what I need" to "I buy what I am" created a consumption treadmill where maintaining social status requires constant spending on premium versions of ordinary goods. This collapsed the economic buffer that once protected middle-income earners. Consumer capitalism repurposed identity construction into a mechanism that transferred wealth upward while forcing middle-class households to spend themselves into financial precarity.