Walk around a shopping center or your workplace, looking for and recording as many examples as you can find of conspicuous consumption. These can include clothes, jewelry, cars, cell phones, music players and any other "fancy" items or gadgets that people use to show off their wealth or, often, pretensions of wealth.
Looking for the examples, how many of these products are "truly necessary" and how many are superfluous? How dependent is the American economy on getting American consumers to buy products that they don't need? Finally, how are American consumers ideologically conditioned into buying things that they don't need, and who or what conditions them to do so?