Rethinking Consumerism: Balancing Perspectives in a Modern World
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Critiques of consumerism […] usually come in four types: moral, aesthetic, financial, or environmental. The moral critique of consumerism is that the acquisition of things displaces more worthwhile activities or priorities. Instead of shopping, we should be spending time with friends and family, in places of worship, or in nature. Even as consumer societies meet our immediate, shallow desires, they are said to corrode our deeper selves... In reality, it is a question of balance. Things can be really useful, really cool or really fun. They can also enhance social life rather than diminish it.
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The psychologist Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi once interviewed all the members of 82 Chicago families about their favourite things. Happier families listed objects that reminded them of other people; a family memento, or a couch that had been in the family for years. Less happy ones listed more expensive items, citing their features rather than their history… Some things might prove to be worthless, others merely useful, but some acquire more meaning over time. It is not whether we consume things that matters, but how we do.
The second criticism of consumerism is aesthetic. The problem is the showiness of material consumption. The aesthetic critic highlights not how much we consume, but what we consume. This criticism veers dangerously close to snobbery… In Britain during the 1970s, when cheaper air travel brought travel to warmer summer vacation destinations within reach of millions of workers, there was considerable elite disdain. The Labour politician Tony Crosland fired back: “My working-class constituents … want washing machines and refrigerators to relieve domestic drudgery ... and they want package tour holidays to Majorca. Why should they, too, not enjoy the sun?” Why indeed?
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The third is financial – specifically, the impact on personal finances of buying too much, often using debt, and saving too little. … As a rule, people find it hard to put high value on the distant future. Economists call this tendency “hyperbolic discounting”. People “often reach for the nearer good, even though they know it to be less valuable”. The problem is not information – we know it to be less valuable. The problem is short termism.
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This is hardly a new problem, it is just that mature economies offer such a cornucopia of goods and services and life expectancy has risen so dramatically, that the challenges may now be greater. This, in turn, has justified collective interventions: most obviously, forced savings plans to fund government-provided pensions. It is a delicate balance, however…
The fourth, and deepest, criticism of consumerism is environmental. Things take energy to make, transport, and use… Energy is scarce, and currently produced in ways that are heating up the planet. Consumerism is killing the planet. The only way to save the planet is to reduce energy use. And the only way to do that is to reduce consumption. But it is not clear that these statements are true. There are clean energy alternatives available, it’s just a question of collectively moving towards them.
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The best of all worlds is probably to combine a carbon tax with a consumption tax, thereby pricing in externalities, and broadening the tax base to boot. Then we might be able to tax work a little less, which would help hard-pressed families.
