If I have an influence on my society it
will be the elevation of the word “whim” to iconic status.
Someday, I would hope that “whim” has the attachment to Michael Phillips
that Protestant ethic has to Max Weber, conspicuous consumption has
to Thorstein Veblen and workers of the world has to Karl Marx.
Well, maybe I need some humility here. (Irony doesn't get through blogs very well.)
Whim is ultimately an important driving force in commerce, today. A few millenia ago hunger, shelter and safety were driving forces in commerce. (The word “needs” is often applied to these driving forces but “needs” is an arbitrary and undifferentiated term.) With the rise of the state, commerce was also driven by state mediated goals.
That period is not gone, but today a
large driving force in commerce is whim. Commerce is a coin with two
sides. One side of the coin is what gets people to work (an image
of a new home, a bigger car, a home media system) the other side of the coin is
the output of work that feeds the desire to work (cost/price
reductions or the creation of tangible examples of the new desires.) 
Thinking about this coin, it should be apparent that the words new and bigger are referring to whims. The desire for a new home or a bigger car or an old 33 rpm record in a garage sale is whim. A whim drives commerce so long as it induces the person with the whim to do what society calls work.
Money is a universal solvent, a medium
of infinite whims. Someone can say they work for money ... which
means they can't list all of the whims that are driving their work efforts.
There should be no opprobrium attached to whim. A whim or a set of whims is a driving force in getting billions of people to work hard every day for long hours. The stronger the whims the stronger the economy.
Americans are working many more hours in 2005 than in 1985. There has been no legal force driving this industriousness, no threat of prison and no fear of hunger. We work harder, longer and somewhat more efficiently because we have dreams, hopes, desires ... in other words new whims. We have new whims and we produce new goods and services that create more new whims.
The fifty nearly-identical but slightly-different-products on a retail shelf should not be viewed as a sign of mental
overload or childish fetish. The fifty products reflect commerce
creating and satisfying the wild variety of whims found in the myriad wonderful differences
among our fellow workers.