Affluenza

Affluenza describes the psychological and social effects of affluence. It is a portmanteau of affluence and influenza, and is used most commonly by critics of consumerism. Some psychologists consider it to be a pseudo-scientific term; however, the word continues to be used in scientific literature.

The word is thought to have been first used in 1908, and to have been adopted for its most common current usage in California in 1973. It was also used by John Levy, executive director of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco in 1984 to describe the lack of motivation that could dog wealthy people. It was popularized in 1997 with a PBS documentary of the same name and the subsequent book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (2001, revised in 2005, 2014). These works define affluenza as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more". A more informal definition of the term describes it as "a quasi-illness caused by guilt for one's own socio-economic superiority". The term "affluenza" has also been used to refer to an inability to understand the consequences of one's actions because of financial privilege, as described in discussions of the psychological effects of inherited wealth.