The Asteroid Effect in Luxury Desire

Charlotte Wren’s essay in Psyche on how luxury brands engineer desire is not just about fashion. It’s a glimpse into a deeper paradox I call Asteroid Economics.

Wren highlights how scarcity and nudges manipulate consumer choice. But the real question is why these signals land so powerfully in moments of wider instability. It isn’t only that luxury houses know how to play on status anxiety. It’s that in conditions of risk, we become more responsive to signals of scarcity, not less. Scarcity cues, in other words, don’t simply shape style—they reveal how humans process threat.

Desire Under Pressure

Consider this: when shelves emptied during COVID, demand for luxury goods climbed. When political crises intensify, prestige markets often heat up. Wren describes the mechanics of luxury desire; I see in those mechanics the same acceleration dynamic that plays out across history whenever survival feels at stake. Luxury consumption becomes a kind of stress test. It tells us when people no longer think in terms of saving for tomorrow.

The point isn’t that handbags or watches drive collapse. It’s that they serve as early indicators of a larger civilizational reflex. If risk communication triggers surges in conspicuous consumption, then luxury desire is the leading edge of a pattern that extends to panic buying, speculative markets, and prestige projects.

Wren’s piece shows how behavioral economics operates in fashion. Asteroid Economics extends that logic: existential risk doesn’t just change what we buy, it alters how societies allocate time, resources, and meaning.

Where Wren sees manipulation, I see diagnosis. Luxury desire, intensified under crisis, is not an anomaly but a signal of how survival logic misfires. That’s the core of the Asteroid Effect: what feels protective in the moment often undermines resilience in the long run.