idea of owning one television is as odd as having, say, just one pair of shoes. In 2004, both America and the UK crossed a telling threshold: the average home had more televisions in it than people (there are on average three sets in the typical home and 2.55 people).42 As a person is unlikely to watch two televisions at once, how did we end up being convinced that we need more than one television per person in our homes?
In the late 1950s, industrialists were worried. The Smiths had caught up with the Joneses. A degree of mass affluence meant that the average American family (and much of Europe) was satisfied with what it had, owning a home, new appliances and a car. Markets for goods were getting saturated while consumer demand was slowing. Social commentator Vance Packard summed up this phenomenon when he noted, ‘The way to end glut was to produce gluttons.’43 Manufacturers needed people not simply to want to keep up with the Joneses, but as Gregg Easterbrook wrote in The Progress Paradox, to have a desire to ‘call and raise the Joneses’.44 Given that most people had one of everything, consumers needed a plausible excuse to buy ‘just one more’ of a product they already owned, and so the surplus doctrine of choice was born.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt conducted a simple experiment that we can re-create here. Pick a word from the following list most appealing to you: constraint, limit, barrier, choice. Odds are that, like the participants in the research, you picked ‘choice’, as the first three have negative associations.45 We often believe as consumers that the more choice the better, even if it is more of the same. And this feeling relates not just to the hundreds of thousands of brands we have to choose from every day, but also to which car to drive, television to watch and phone to call on, and even which bathroom to use. As psychologists such as Barry Schwartz have shown in books such as the The Paradox of Choice, choice confuses us not only about how to satisfy our wants, but about what those wants are. This uncertain disorienting effect is what manufacturers wanted to create. If we don’t feel satisfied, satisfaction may be just one more purchase away. By 2005, according to Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and half days.46
The more our houses and lives bloat with stuff, the heavier and more trapped we feel. As Neal Lawson wrote in All Consuming, ‘The more we consume the less space we have to be anything other than consumers.’47 Similarly, the more space and time we spend dedicated to accumulating stuff in our lives, the less room we have for other people. Our drive for material wealth entailed the exclusion of our most basic social needs, such as family and community bonds, personal passions and social responsibility. We thought we could fill these needs through shopping and buying and accumulating more and more stuff. Some critics describe our era of hyper-consumerism as ‘autistic capitalism’. Regardless of nomenclature, we know two things about this disorder of hyper-consumption. First, it was driven by a belief that money – and the almost instinctual accumulation of what money can buy – equalled happiness. The second thing we know is that this disorder is fixable. The system of consumerism may seem like an immovable fact of modern life. But it is not. That the system was manufactured suggests that we can reshape those forces to create a healthier, more sustainable system with a more fulfilling goal than ‘more stuff’.
Chapter Three
From Generation Me to Generation We
Anyone who has travelled in rural Africa knows that one adjective describes its economy: ‘more.’ The people there need more. They need more water, food, infrastructure, education, health and governance. This lack of the most basic resources and the consequent poverty also confronted Adam Smith more than two hundred years ago. Smith, the great Scottish economist, sought a way out of the agrarian squalor of the eighteenth century. He believed a more productive society would lead to a wealthier society. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that humans are motivated by self-interest and ‘self-love’, and that the exploitation of this trait leads to greater wealth for all and a more effective distribution of labour.1
Looking back, one can understand why Adam Smith wanted to work out how to get the economy to produce more. Britain in the 1700s was not a nice place to live. The average life expectancy was just thirty-five years. Dead dogs, cats, rats and even horses decayed on the cobblestone streets, and raw waste spilled everywhere, creating a breeding ground for diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and smallpox. Medicine was still so primitive that in 1775 more than eight hundred deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality were attributed simply to ‘Teeth’.2 Most people lived in just one room in buildings made of crumbling bricks. It was not unusual for such buildings to collapse.
But today, in a rampant consumer economy, ‘more’ has lost its meaning. Smith would probably be mystified by how his simple goals of increasing productivity and achieving market efficiency have become an ideological threat to our economy, society and planet. In When Corporations Rule the World, David C. Korten writes, ‘Smith did not advocate a market system based on unrestrained greed. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest – but it is not greed.’3
Adam Smith and later Milton Friedman both believed that an individual pursuing his own self-interest promotes the good of society as a whole. In Chapter Two, we saw how in just a few generations, this concept was transformed from a relatively healthy narrative of technological ingenuity to a frenetic quest for personal identity through brands, products and services, before finally becoming an extreme system of insatiable consumerism. So much so that by the 1950s, the dawn of hyper-consumerism, we started to perceive ourselves first and foremost as a society of individual consumers, and as a group of citizens second. We ended up believing that we were better off relying on corporations rather than cooperating with each other. Collective- and community-based values were shunned in favour of consumer independence and a mind-set of ‘me, me, me’.
The promises of individuality and independence were wrapped up in the falsehood that ‘what’s mine is mine’ and that complete self-reliance was the ultimate goal. Douglas Rushkoff writes in his book Life Inc., ‘Each home was to be its own fiefdom. Self-sufficiency was part of the myth of the self-made man with his private estate, so community property, carpools, or sharing of almost any kind became anathema to the suburban aesthetic.’4 And that neighbour on the other side of the fence, do we even know him well enough to borrow his ladder? Sadly, neighbours being ‘total strangers’ is more the norm these days than the exception. A recent survey shows that three-quarters of Americans confess that they don’t know their next-door neighbours.5 In the UK, six out of ten people don’t know their neighbours’ names.6 It would seem that the consumer culture of ‘more’ helped businesses get bigger while prizing us further and further apart.
Through the fifties and sixties, manufacturers and marketers encouraged American workers to give up their hobbies and free time for the choice of bigger cars, better homes and more technology. The result was a dramatic decline in ‘social capital’. Robert Putnam, a political science professor at Harvard University, was responsible for popularizing the concept of social capital, defining it as ‘the trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’.7 In his book Bowling Alone, he traced the decline in social capital through a study of American membership in bowling leagues. Putnam found that between 1980 and 1993, while the total number of people who bowled in America increased by 10 percent, the number of bowling leagues decreased by 40 percent. And as Putnam notes, ‘Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once during 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections.’8 In short, the more people who bowl alone, the fewer conversations over beer and pizza, and the greater the overall decline in human interaction. The less time people spent socializing, the more time they spent in the office or shopping. The irony is that while Americans tripled their capacity to consume between 1980 and 2000, they found themselves with far less time to enjoy the fruits of
