This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of cultural evolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how the biased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influences agents’ consumption behavior. Thereby, the model’s learning dynamics are capable of generating typical Veblenian...

Bourdieu's (1987 [1979]) theorization of cultural capital treats attitudes, preferences, and behavior as forms of embodied cultural capital. As such, these are often considered parallel forms of embodied cultural capital that receive different empirical manifestations in various works (Lamont and Lareau 1988), without attention to the implications of choosing one operationalization of cultural ...

In chapter 1 of this volume, we have outlined three widely discussed arguments concerning the social stratification of cultural consumption: that is, what we have labelled as the ‘homology’, the ‘individualisation’ and the ‘omnivore–univore’ arguments. In our own previous work (Chan and Goldthorpe, 2005, 2007b,c) we have examined the validity of these arguments in the light of analyses of cultu...

Export base theory, which posits that overall regional growth is a function of external sales of locally produced goods and services, dominates economic development practice. But the consumption base can also serve as a growth driver, especially in small towns and rural areas. Local investments may induce residents to divert expenditures into local purchases, attract new and footloose residents...