ABSTRACT
In the social structures of less developed countries, it is not difficult to recognize different consumption styles. They usually correspond to very different levels of income, and to a very obvious stratification of society; the big landlords and government classes, then the peasants, and lastly the landless laborers, each circle or layer using its appropriate set of goods. If economists are to succeed in aggregating large numbers of goods into composite commodities, independent of their physical properties, it seems fairly obvious that they would need to look for similar big cleavages in the social structure of developed economies. But here the sociological perception of differences is more ambiguous. Clear-cut patterns of interdining and intermarrying, if they could be discerned, would produce discontinuities in demand. But the sociological analysis fails to reveal such clear-cut patterns, and a fuzzier state of affairs prevails.
