Maybe we all are just born to consume, but I don’t buy it
A rising tide lifts all boats, or so the saying goes. Yet despite the world as a whole getting richer, in recent years a growing number of people have found themselves left behind.
This is something that even a bastion of economic orthodoxy such as the International Monetary Fund readily admits, voicing concerns in its latest Fiscal Monitor survey that excessive inequality “can impede social mobility, erode social cohesion and hurt growth”.
Its solution is to urge greater economic inclusion, which can apparently be achieved through measures such as more progressive taxation and better access to education and healthcare.
But are such sticking plasters enough to fix a globespanning system that’s already shown signs of coming apart at the seams?
According to one of the more recent estimates, half the world’s wealth now lies in the hands of the globe’s richest 1 percent, while the 3.5 billion poorest adults on Earth have just 2.7 percent of world wealth to share among them.
These figures come from a report published in November by one of the capitalism’s big winners, the financial services company Credit Suisse, which recorded revenues of some $22 billion last year.
It’s strange to have a multinational investment bank highlighting rising inequality. These are the kinds of entities that have stood to benefit the most from the concentration of vast sums of wealth, after all.
Though it’s not as if the superrich stand alone in their propensity for wasteful overindulgence.
Anyone who counts himself among the ranks of the growing global middle class likely contributes to the problem as well.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that roughly onethird of all the food produced in the world for human consumption each year gets lost or wasted.
That’s partly the consumers’ fault, partly due to problems with supply chains and partly because of business practices that prioritize profit over everything else. All of which amounts to a squandering of Earth’s already overstretched resources.
In some places, what were once luxuries have now become staples, while exorbitant sums of money change hands for the most frivolous of fripperies.
Just look at my homeland of Britain, where so many avocados are now being consumed on an annual basis that villagers in the region of Chile where many are grown claim rivers have dried up and groundwater levels have fallen, causing a regional drought.
Witness, too, the zeal with which consumers in the United States snapped up Elon Musk’s latest product. Not an electric car or ticket to the stars this time, but a $500 “flamethrower” (pictured).
The tech billionaire sold 20,000 of these glorified blowtorches, which he joked would be renamed “Not A Flamethrower” to skirt customs laws.
And as if such pointless profligacy wasn’t a sad enough indictment of the end days of late capitalism, then I invite you to consider The Ainsworth, a US-based sports bar and lounge that this year began selling chicken wings coated in 24-karat gold.
Prices range from $30 for 10 wings, to $1,000 for 50 served with a bottle of “Ace of Spades” champagne, the brand owned by rap mogul Jay-Z.
The gold itself does little to enhance the wings’ taste, with their creator Jonathan Cheban even admitting that “it’s just for show because it’s very decadent,” adding “gold just makes it that much more fun”.
Which for me, perfectly encapsulates everything that’s wrong with postmodern consumerism.
Because while 70 percent of the world’s working-age population eke out an existence on less than $10,000 in assets, someone in New York is paying a tenth of that for some hot wings, just so they can defecate gold.
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