eisure class, as Professor Veblen has so well pointed out, is
devoted to wasting time and spending money conspicuously
as outward indications that the individual is living up to
established and approved standards.[1]

[Footnote 1: Veblen: _Theory of the Leisure Class._]

The more significant folkways, standards of importance and
unimportance, of the admirable and the despicable, the noble
and the base, are determined by approvals and disapprovals
that have become socially habitual. When we speak of a
country being imperialistic or materialistic, we mean that
most individuals in it, or at least those who are articulate or
influential, perform or approve of actions leading to national
or individual aggrandizement. The amount of money, time,
and energy that is spent on amusement, public works, education,
the army and navy is a fairly accurate gauge of the relative
group approvals they have respectively secured. In the
same way the professions and occupations in which men engage
are determined by the social prestige attaching to them
no less than by economic considerations. The pay of stenographers
is no less than that of primary-school teachers; it is
often much more; yet many a girl remains a teacher for the
gentility which is traditionally associated with the profession.
In the same way many girls, in spite of the fact that they are
economically and physically better off in domestic service
than in factory work, still prefer the latter because of the
social inferiority which is associated with the servant's position.

Approvals and disapprovals become fixed to acts, in the
first place, because of some supposed danger or utility they
possess. But whether the acts are really socially useful or not,
approvals and censures once fixed tend to remain habitual,
even though the conditions which first called them forth are
utterly changed. We are to-day still more shocked by errors
in etiquette than in logic; we are still horrified by the infringement
of a law which, if we stopped to consider it, is not now,
if it ever was, of any genuine service to mankind.

In advanced societies approvals are not always reserved for
the habitual. Certainly in science original research and
discovery are generally welcomed. In art originality is
cherished, at least by the discriminating.[1] Variation in action is
for reasons discussed in other connections less generally welcomed.
But in advanced societies, criticism and reflection
upon so