The Guardian tells us of a new book insisting that we should all consume less. Because, well, because the author hasn’t understood the economy actually. Still, there’s one interesting part:
The US population is 60% larger than it was in 1970, but consumer spending is up 400% (adjusted for inflation) – and other rich nations, including the UK, aren’t much better.
There are any number of people who try to tell us that incomes, wages, haven’t risen in these decades of neoliberalism. But there’s the opposite statement. Real wages are what it is possible to consume. So, if consumption has risen then real incomes and wages have.
The solution, apparently, is that this was all a bad idea:
He wants us to act on that discomfort. But he’s not suggesting we live entirely off the land. In his hypothetical model he applies a 25% reduction in consumption – a figure “modest enough to be possible, dramatic enough to be earth-shattering” – and while he won’t specify a figure when discussing what our real-world efforts should be in the coming years, something in this ballpark might well be the goal.
That doesn’t just mean fewer physical things; it’s also less electricity, travel and eating out. “Basically $1 spent is a consumption dollar; I’m not fussed whether it’s spent on a canoe or a powerboat,” he says. “If you want a rule of thumb for how much impact you’re having as a consumer, the best one is: how much money are you spending? If it’s increasing, you’re probably increasing your impact; if it’s lowering, you’re probably lowering your impact.”
That is, we must all be poorer because something or other. It’s not an entirely convincing suggestion to be honest. It’s all also based on an entire misunderstanding of the economy. Instead of this consumerism thing we’re apparently expected to:
We participate in communal activities, such as tending public gardens, engage in social movements and take care of children and elders.
The thing being that that’s all economic activity.
He points to an uplifting case study from London. In Barking and Dagenham, one of the city’s poorest boroughs, the “Every One. Every Day” initiative brings together locals to cook, partake in poetry, craft and hair-braiding sessions, and spruce up common areas, all of it free. “For many of the people participating, it’s deeply engaging and profoundly affecting,” he says. “In a lot of places, if you don’t have the cash to consume, there’s nothing to do; the closest I came to tears in researching this book was watching people who were feeling isolated and excluded from consumer culture have an alternative put in front of them. That points towards the potential.”
That’s also all economic activity.
It’s true that economic activity that isn’t mediated by money isn’t counted as part of GDP but that’s to do with the method of counting rather than whether it’s activity or not. Growing a vegetable in a communal garden to give away is growing a vegetable which will be consumed just as much as a farmer doing it and our gaining it from a supermarket. It’s still the economic activity of transforming soil and water into dinner.
The advantage of the money intermediation is that we can do this with strangers. This, given that the gains from trade increase with the number of people we can divide and specialise labour over, means that the money economy, that GDP, gives us a higher standard of living for the same resource use. As long as we’re being sensible and counting human labour as an economic resource of course.
The insistence thus boils down to we must reduce our efficient, money intermediated, economic activity and increase our inefficient, non-money intermediated, activity in order to be poorer while still undertaking the same amount of economic activity.
Well, yes. By Jove, even By Toutatis, that is a manifesto to really mobilise the masses, isn’t it?