Postmaterialism
In sociology, postmaterialism is the transformation of individual values from materalist, physical, and economic to new individual values of autonomy and self-expression. The term was popularized by the political scientist Ronald Inglehart in his 1977 book The Silent Revolution, in which he discovered that the formative affluence experienced by the post-war generations was leading some of them to take their material security for granted and instead place greater importance on non-material goals such as self-expression, autonomy, freedom of speech, gender equality, and environmentalism.