Tragic reign of consumerism and the birth of a happy alternative
by Richard Heinberg
You and I consume; we are consumers. The global economy is set up to
enable us to do what we innately want to do - buy, use, discard, and buy
some more. If we do our job well, the economy thrives; if for some
reason we fail at our task, the economy falters. The model of economic
existence just described is reinforced in the business pages of every
newspaper, and in the daily reportage of nearly every broadcast and
web-based financial news service, and it has a familiar name:
consumerism.
Consumerism also has a history, but not a long one. True, humans -
like all other animals - are consumers in the most basic sense, in that
we must eat to live. Further, we have been making weapons, ornaments,
clothing, utensils, toys, and musical instruments for thousands of
years, and commerce has likewise been with us for untold millennia.
What’s new is the project of organising an entire society around the
necessity for ever-increasing rates of personal consumption.
Historic milieu
Consumerism arose from a unique historic milieu. In the early 20th
century, a temporary abundance of cheap, concentrated, storable, and
portable energy in the form of fossil fuels enabled a dramatic increase
in the rate and scope of resource extraction (via powered mining
equipment, chain saws, tractors, powered fishing boats, and more).
Coupled with powered assembly lines and the use of petrochemicals, cheap
fossil energy also permitted the vastly expanded manufacture of a
widening array of commercial products.
This resulted in a serious economic problem known as overproduction
(too many goods chasing too few buyers), which would eventually
contribute to the Great Depression.
Industrialists found a solution. How they did so is detailed in a
book that deserves renewed attention, Captains of Consciousness by
social historian Stuart Ewen (1976). Ewen traced the rapid, massive
expansion of the advertising industry during the 20th century, as well
as its extraordinary social and political impacts (if you really want to
understand Mad Men, start here). Ewen argued that “Consumerism, the mass
participation in the values of the mass-industrial market . . . emerged
in the 1920s not as a smooth progression from earlier and less
‘developed’ patterns of consumption, but rather as an aggressive device
of corporate survival.”
In a later book, PR! (1996), Ewen recounts how, during the 1930s, the
US-based National Association of Manufacturers enlisted a team of
advertisers, marketers, and psychologists to formulate a strategy to
counter government efforts to plan and manage the economy in the wake of
the Depression.
They proposed a massive, ongoing ad campaign to equate consumerism
with “The American Way.” Progress would henceforth be framed entirely in
economic terms, as the fruit of manufacturers’ ingenuity.
Americans were to be referred to in public discourse (newspapers,
magazines, radio) as consumers, and were to be reminded at every
opportunity of their duty to contribute to the economy by purchasing
factory-made products, as directed by increasingly sophisticated and
ubiquitous advertising cues.
While advertising was an essential prop to consumerism, by itself it
was incapable of stoking sufficient demand to soak up all the goods
rolling off assembly lines. In the early years of the last century
Americans were accustomed to paying cash for their purchases; but then
along came automobiles: not many people could afford to pay for one
outright, yet nearly everybody wanted one.
In addition to being talked into desiring more products, consumers
had to be enabled to purchase more of them than they could immediately
pay for; hence the widespread deployment of time payments and other
forms of consumer credit.
With credit, households could consume now and pay later. Consumers
took on more debt, the financial industry mushroomed, and manufacturers
sold more products.
Though consumerism began as a project organised by corporate America,
government at all levels swiftly lent its support. When citizens spent
more on consumer goods, sales tax and income tax revenues tended to
swell.
After World War II, government advocacy of increased consumer
spending was formalised with the adoption of Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) as the nation’s primary measure of economic success, and with the
increasing use of the term consumer by government agencies.
By the 1950s, consumerism was thoroughly interwoven in the fabric of
American society. In 1955, economist Victor Lebow would epitomise the
new status quo, writing in the Journal of Retailing: “Our enormously
productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,
that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek
our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption.
“We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded
at an ever-increasing rate.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Critics had identified a couple of serious problems with consumerism.
First problem: Consumerism, according to the critics, warps human
values. Way back in 1899, when consumerism was barely a glimmer in
advertisers’ neurons, economist Thorstein Veblen asserted in his widely
cited book The Theory of the Leisure Class that there exists a
fundamental split in society between those who work and those who
exploit the work of others; as societies evolve, the latter come to
constitute a “leisure class” that engages in “conspicuous consumption.”
Veblen saw mass production as a way to universalise the trappings of
leisure so the owning class could engage workers in an endless pursuit
of status symbols, thus deflecting their attention from society’s
increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and from their own political
impotence.
Later critics of consumerism included German historian Oswald
Spengler, who wrote that Life in America is exclusively economic in
structure and lacks depth; Mohandas Gandhi, who regarded a simple life
free from possessions as morally ennobling; and Scott and Helen Nearing,
authors of Living the Good Life and pioneers of the back-to-the-land
movement. Social critics of consumerism such as Duane Elgin, Juliet
Schor, and Vicki Robin have argued that relationships with a product or
brand name are dysfunctional substitutes for healthy human relationships
and that consumer choice is a soporific stand-in for genuine democracy.
A second and more crucial problem with consumerism, say the critics,
has to do with resource limits. Environmental scientists assert that,
regardless of whether consumerism is socially desirable, in the long run
it is physically impossible to maintain. The math is simple: even at a
fraction of one percent per year growth in consumption, all of Earth’s
resources would eventually be used up.
The consumer economy also produces an unending variety of wastes, of
which water, air, and soil can absorb only so much before planetary
life-support systems begin unravelling.
In his 1954 book The Challenge of Man’s Future, physicist Harrison
Brown envisioned devastating social and environmental consequences from
the relentless growth of human population and resource consumption;
Brown even managed to foresee the current climate crisis.
A few years later a team of researchers at MIT began using a computer
to model likely future scenarios ensuing from population expansion,
consumption growth, and environmental decline.
In the computer’s “standard run” scenario, continued growth led to a
global economic collapse in the mid 21st century. That project’s
findings were documented in the pivotal 1972 book, Limits to Growth,
which received blistering reviews from mainstream economists but has
since been vindicated by independent retrospective analysis.
More recently, E. F. Schumacher, Herman Daly, William Rees, and other
advocates of ecological economics have pointed out that the consumer
economy treats Earth’s irreplaceable capital (natural resources) as if
it were income - an obvious theoretical error with potentially
catastrophic real-world results.
A self-reinforcing system
Often these critiques have led to a simple personal prescription: If
buying ever more stuff is bad for the environment and turns us into
vapid mall drones, then it’s up to each of us to rein in our consumptive
habits. Buy nothing! Reuse! Recycle! Share!
Yet treating consumerism as though it were merely an individual
proclivity rather than a complex, interdependent system with financial
and governmental as well as commercial components is both wrong and
mostly ineffectual. Consider this simple thought experiment: What would
happen if everyone were to suddenly embrace a Gandhian ethic of
voluntary simplicity? Commerce would contract; jobs would vanish;
pension funds would lose value; tax revenues would shrivel, and so would
government services. Absent sweeping structural changes to government
and the economy, the result would be a deep, long-lasting economic
depression.
This is not to say that personal efforts toward voluntary simplicity
have no benefit - they do, for the individual and her circle of
associates; however, the system of consumerism can only be altered or
replaced through systemic action. Yet systemic action is hampered by the
fact that consumerism has become self-reinforcing: those with
significant roles in the system who try to rein it in get whacked, while
those who help it expand get stroked. Nearly everybody wants an economy
with more jobs and higher returns on investments, so for a majority the
incentive to shut up and get with the programme is overwhelming.
Arguments against consumerism may be rationally irrefutable, but few
people stop to think about them.
If mere persuasion could dismantle consumerism or replace it with
something better, it would have done so by now.
Still, as the critics have insisted all along, consumerism as a
system cannot continue indefinitely; it contains the seeds of its own
demise. And the natural constraints to consumerism - fossil fuel limits,
environmental sink limits (leading to climate change, ocean
acidification, and other pollution dilemmas), and debt limits - appear
to be well within sight.
While there may be short-term ways of pushing back against these
limits (unconventional oil and gas, geo-engineering, and quantitative
easing), there is no way around them. Consumerism is doomed. But since
consumerism now effectively is the economy (70 percent of US GDP comes
from consumer spending), when it goes down the economy goes too.
The happy alternative
A train wreck is foreseeable. No one knows exactly when the impact
will occur or precisely how bad it will be. But it is possible to say
with some confidence that this wreck will manifest itself as an economic
depression accompanied by a series of worsening environmental disasters
and possibly wars and revolutions. This should be news to nobody by now,
as recent government and UN reports spin out the scenarios in ever
grimmer detail: rising sea levels, waves of environmental refugees,
droughts, floods, famines, and collapsing economies.
Indeed, in view of the events since 2007, it’s likely the impact has
already commenced, though it is happening in agonizingly slow motion as
the system fights to maintain itself.
It is not too soon to wonder what comes after consumerism. If there
is good news to be gleaned from the story just told, it is that this
mode of economic existence is not biologically determined.
Consumerism arose from a certain set of circumstances; as
circumstances change, other economic arrangements will become adaptive.
If we have some idea of the circumstances that are likely to emerge
in the decades ahead, we may get some clue as to what those alternative
arrangements might look like.
As we’ve already seen, the consumerist economy of the 20th century
was driven by cheap energy and overproduction.
All signs suggest the new century will be shaped by energy limits,
environmental sink limits, and debt limits - and therefore by declining
production per capita. Under these circumstances, policy makers will
surely strive to provide a sufficiency economy. But how do we get from a
consumerist economy to a sufficiency economy? Perhaps the most promising
clue comes from the emerging happiness movement.
Since the 1970s, the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has
experimented with Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a measure of
economic success, and recently convened a meeting at the United Nations
to advocate widespread international adoption of GNH. Concurrently, the
New Economics Foundation of Britain has begun publishing an annually
updated Happy Planet Index (HPI), which ranks nations by the
self-reported levels of happiness of citizens and by the size of
countries’ ecological footprints.
The point of GNH and HPI is to count economic success more by how
people feel about their lives and circumstances, and less by measuring
consumption (which is what GDP does, in effect).
Happiness metrics are kryptonite to consumerism, which has been shown
time and again to make people less satisfied with the circumstances of
their lives. A wholesale official adoption of GNH or HPI by the world’s
nations would ultimately lead to a profound shuffling of priorities.
Governments would have to promote policies that lead to more sharing,
more equity, more transparency, and more citizen participation in
governance, since it is these sorts of things that tend to push
happiness scores higher.
The guardians of the consumer economy are not stupid. They will not
permit the wholesale introduction of happiness metrics absent necessity.
But, as we’ve seen, necessity is coming. As the current consumer economy
frays and sputters, policy makers will need increasingly to find ways to
pacify the multitudes and give them some sense of direction.
Beyond a certain point, promises of a return to the days of carefree
shopping will ring hollow. Moreover, upon first consideration, happiness
indices appear relatively innocuous: they merely propose an alternative
to GDP, which many economists acknowledge is deeply flawed anyway.
– Third World Network Features.
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