From lawn to lattes:
The cult(ure) of consumption
Consumerism can mean the exact opposite of materialism. Where consumerism usually refers to the love of consuming, the love of purchasing, and the love of acquiring the new, materialism refers to the love of the material objects themselves. And if you love something, then the thought of throwing it away to replace it with a new model would be a source of pain, not joy.
If people learned to love their stuff, really love it, then rather than spend their time and money on ‘retail therapy’ they would willingly spend their time and money caring for their things, maintaining them, repairing them, restoring them and, when they had no further use for them, finding those once-cherished objects a new home.
But ‘consumer culture’ means that it is now considered normal to believe that waste creates wealth. The idea that people would spend $10 per litre to
buy bottled water and then throw the bottle away is not seen as ‘inefficient’ in the world of economic rationalism, rather, such unnecessary consumption of resources is usually seen as ‘good for the economy’.
Just as the ancient Egyptians used their spare economic capacity to build pyramids and the ancient Chinese built walls, modern consumer capitalism builds mountains of unused appliances, unworn clothes and uneaten food.
Life before lattes
Culture is a significant, but often overlooked, driver of the shape and measured size of economic activity. All cultures are free to decide which resources to waste and which monuments to build. Take lawn for example.
Lawn is the largest irrigated crop in the United States with three times more land dedicated to the growing of grass than corn. This cultural preference for a manicured lawn has enormous economic consequences and drives the demand for lawn mowers, lawn seed, lawn fertiliser, edge trimmers, sprinklers and even water consumption. If the same effort was put into growing fruit and vegetables the US economy would look radically different.
Similarly, in countries like Australia, the current cultural preference for buying coffee and breakfast has made the cafe industry one of the nation’s largest employers.
20 years ago most Australians were content to choose between Nescafé or Moccona when they felt like a coffee;
‘Consumer culture’ means that it is now considered normal to believe that waste creates wealth.
today millions of Australians queue to pay $4 for a flat white, a product that didn’t even exist 30 years ago. What has become known as ‘cafe culture’ is now a major determinant of the shape of the Australian economy.
While economics students are typically taught that it is the price of lawnmowers, water or coffee that determines demand for lawnmowers, water or coffee, that claim is only true when used in conjunction with the statement ‘all other things remaining equal’. And all else is rarely equal.
Just as technological change has transformed the camera industry, the movie rental industry and the entire retail sector, cultural change rapidly and regularly transforms large section of national economies.
TODAY MILLIONS OF AUSTRALIANS QUEUE TO PAY $4 FOR A FLAT WHITE, A PRODUCT THAT DIDN’T EVEN EXIST 30 YEARS AGO.
Again, while economics students are taught that demand curves shift in response to ‘changing tastes and preferences’, little effort is usually put into understanding what changes those tastes and preferences. Or, to put it another way, determining how culture is shaped and reshaped.
A mythology of collapse
Those who want to transform capitalism can learn much from the history of how cultural change has driven economic change. The abolition of slavery, the banning of asbestos and the end to commercial whaling were all cultural shifts that drove significant economic shifts. But despite the importance of cultural change on the shape of the economy, economics lectures and public debate usually ignore, or downplay, the role of culture as a driver of economic growth and change.
It is easy to see how individual consumer trends such as our appetite for lawn, coffee or bottled water have influenced the shape of the economy. But it can be more difficult to see how consumer culture itself has significantly reshaped Western economies.
In consumer capitalism it is now widely accepted that the disposal of perfectly functional food, clothes or appliances and replacing them with
It is now widely accepted that the disposal of perfectly functional food, clothes or appliances and replacing them with newly imported ones is ‘good for the economy’…it is a new and important cultural phenomenon.
newly imported ones is ‘good for the economy’. Such a belief is far more significant than a personal preference for a specific kind of coffee or delivery mechanism for water. It is a new and important cultural phenomenon.
Indeed, only a few decades ago neoclassical economists were urging people to reduce their demand for imported goods in order to reduce the Current Account Deficit.
Therefore, the idea that a strong economy depends on the speed at which a country imports things, throws them away, buries, and replaces them, is as new as it is absurd.
And just because an idea makes no sense does not mean that it has no power. On the contrary, the role of myths in a society has always had more to do with the usefulness of a story to powerful groups than with the strength of the evidence on which the story was based.
Take the modern myth that ‘the economic system’ or ‘the economy’ will ‘collapse’ if people stopped wasting money buying things they didn’t need. Would it? Let’s return to the bottled water example.
Australians consumed over 700 million litres of bottled water in 2015. Like the preference for espresso coffee, the consumption of bottled water is a new habit and, given that bottled water sells for around $10 per litre and similar products are freely available from taps, it is safe to assume that culture rather than relative prices has driven this trend.
But imagine if councils and commercial property owners were required to install drinking fountains in all buildings and the sale of bottled water was banned. What would the macroeconomic impact be?
The most plausible answer from orthodox economics would be approximately zero, as any reduction in spending on bottled water would be linked to an immediate increase in spending on other products or a delayed increase in spending on other products.
Banning bottled water would not shrink the economy, it would shape it. The result would be a much smaller bottled water industry and slightly bigger other parts of the economy.
Now imagine that it was an entire product class – rather than a single product – for which demand collapsed in a short period of time. Would ‘the economy’ collapse if millions of people decided that they had enough clothes in their wardrobes for the moment? Would the economy collapse if millions of people decided to buy any clothes they needed from second hand clothes stores? Or if they paid people to modify or repair existing ones?
While the consequences for the owners of the clothes stores would be devastating, the macroeconomic consequences would only be trivial, no
more economically ‘problematic’ than the shift from street directories to GPS or the shift from steam trains to diesel.
It’s not the size that counts…
For those interested in the creation of jobs, the distribution of income or the impact of economic activity on the natural environment, it is the shape of economic activity, not its size that should be of utmost concern.
The rapid creation of a publiclyfunded domestic renewable energy manufacturing industry to support the rapid rollout of wind and solar power capacity across Australia would, for example, likely lead to an increase in the size of the economy. Yet, given the impact on the shape of the economy, and the level of greenhouse gas emissions, such economic growth would likely cause little or no concern to many who often oppose the pursuit of economic growth.
Similarly, a significant shift away from consumer spending on imported clothes and new appliances and towards increased consumer spending in cafes and on appliance repair would have a significant shift on the shape of the economy and, most likely, lead to a significant increase in employment.
Yet this would have little impact on the size of the economy due to the fact that some activities (like selling imported stuff ) create far fewer jobs per $1000 spent than activities such as food preparation and repairs.
Just as the people who make the most money in a gold rush are usually those that sell the shovels, in the consumer’s endless search for happiness in the world’s shopping centres, it is those people selling the useless stuff that wear the biggest smiles.
But while cultural critiques of consumer capitalism are common, economic analysis of the consequences of shifting economic activity away from consumer culture is far less common.
It is important to imagine better systems, and useful to discuss alternative economic frameworks. Yet for those people interested in actually changing the system rather than simply understanding it, it is essential to debunk the idea that the economic prospects for low and middle income earners are inextricably linked to the degree of wasteful consumption among the wealthy.
There is nothing inevitable about consumer culture, and in turn, there is nothing inevitable about the link between the measured size of Gross Domestic Product and the extent of harm to the natural environment.
Encouraging people to reject consumer culture and to stop giving enormous amounts of money to the producers of unnecessary things, is not enough to solve all of the problems associated with modern capitalism.
Even so, making the distinction between materialism and consumerism – and driving a culture change that treasures, rather than tosses, their stuff – would deliver significant social and environmental improvements.
And for those of us who want to pursue more radical change, it is hard to see how it could be problematic to encouraging billions of people to have greater faith in more distributed forms of production and to question the cult(ure) of consumption.