A History of Consumerism & Our Fashion Consumption (environmental frame)
For the majority of history people have owned very little, aside from some basic essentials like the clothes on their backs and something to cook dinner in. However, in the early eighteenth century there was a shift. Countries in north-western Europe began to expand their empires and colonise countries to the east. Colonisation led to a growth in western economies and wages began to rise. This is considered to be the first wave of consumerism. In places like the UK, families began to be able to afford small luxuries such as a comb or a spare pair of trousers. The more people spent, the more business grew and wages rose. This was the beginning of consumerism and began to change the fabric of our society. This was underpinned by the new flow of goods from overseas and the growth in industries supporting the new demand....
Consumerism in Europe has some questionable foundations, particularly when you consider that it was built on colonisation. The issues with consumerism have changed but they have not ceased to exist. The scale of consumerism in our society now compared to the eighteenth century is significant; according to National Geographic there are approximately 1.7 billion people worldwide that belong to the “consumer class”. The scale and pace of growth of this consumer class also created a demand for fast, mass production of cheap goods.
https://www.curobe.com/blog/2022/06/a-history-of-consumerism-and-our-fashion-consumption/
Advertising in the Industrial Age: Credit Luxury & Advent of “New & Improved”
Before the industrial revolution, most household goods were either made at home or purchased locally, with limited choices. By the end of the nineteenth century, factors such as the population’s move towards urban centers and the expansion of the railroad changed how Americans shopped for, and perceived, consumer goods. As mentioned above, advertising took off, as businesses competed for customers.
Many of the elements used widely in nineteenth-century advertisements are familiar. Companies sought to sell luxury, safety, and, as the ad for the typewriter below shows, the allure of the new-and-improved model. One advertising tactic that truly took off in this era was the option to purchase on credit. For the first time, mail order and mass production meant that the aspiring middle class could purchase items that could only be owned previously by the wealthy. While there was a societal stigma for buying everyday goods on credit, certain items, such as fine furniture or pianos, were considered an investment in the move toward entry into the middle class.
Additionally, farmers and housewives purchased farm equipment and sewing machines on credit, considering these items investments rather than luxuries. For women, the purchase of a sewing machine meant that a shirt could be made in one hour, instead of fourteen. The Singer Sewing Machine Company was one of the most aggressive at pushing purchase on credit. They advertised widely, and their “Dollar Down, Dollar a Week” campaign made them one of the fastest-growing companies in the country.
For workers earning lower wages, these easy credit terms meant that the middle-class lifestyle was within their reach. Of course, it also meant they were in debt, and changes in wages, illness, or other unexpected expenses could wreak havoc on a household’s tenuous finances. Still, the opportunity to own new and luxurious products was one that many Americans, aspiring to improve their place in society, could not resist.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/chapter/a-new-american-consumer-culture/
How the World Embraced Consumerism
Electrification was crucial for the consumption of the new types of durable items, and the fraction of US households with electricity connected nearly doubled between 1921 and 1929, from 35 to 68%. This was followed by a rapid proliferation of radios, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators. Motor car registration rose from eight million in 1920 to more than 28 million by 1929. The introduction of time payment arrangements facilitated the extension of such buying further and further down the economic ladder.
This first wave of consumerism was short-lived. Predicated on debt, it took place in an economy mired in speculation and risky borrowing. US consumer credit rose to $7 billion in the 1920s, with banks engaged in reckless lending of all kinds. While it was a lot less in gross terms than the burden of debt in the US in late 2008, the debt of the 1920s was very large, over 200% of the GDP of the time. In both eras, borrowed money bought unprecedented quantities of material goods on time payment and (these days) credit cards. The 1920s bonanza collapsed suddenly and catastrophically. In 2008, a similar unravelling began; its implications still remain unknown. In the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a war economy followed, so it was almost 20 years before mass consumption resumed any role in economic life – or in the way the economy was conceived.
The Effect of Media
Once WWII was over, consumer culture took off again throughout the developed world, partly fuelled by the deprivation of the Great Depression and the rationing of the wartime years and incited with renewed zeal by corporate advertisers using debt facilities and the new medium of television. Stuart Ewen, in his history of the public relations industry, saw the birth of commercial radio in 1921 as a vital tool in the great wave of debt-financed consumption in the 1920s – "a privately owned utility, pumping information and entertainment into people’s homes".
"Requiring no significant degree of literacy on the part of its audience, radio gave interested corporations … unprecedented access to the inner sanctums of the public mind," Ewen writes. The advent of television greatly magnified the potential impact of advertisers’ messages, exploiting image and symbol far more adeptly than print and radio had been able to do. The stage was set for the democratisation of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined.
Though the television sets that carried the advertising into people’s homes after WWII were new, and were far more powerful vehicles of persuasion than radio had been, the theory and methods were the same – perfected in the 1920s by PR experts like Bernays.
Vance Packard echoes both Bernays and the consumption economists of the 1920s in his description of the role of the advertising men of the 1950s. "They want to put some sizzle into their messages by stirring up our status consciousness," he wrote. "Many of the products they are trying to sell have, in the past, been confined to a 'quality market'. The products have been the luxuries of the upper classes. The game is to make them the necessities of all classes… By striving to buy the product – say, wall-to-wall carpeting on instalment – the consumer is made to feel he is upgrading himself socially."
Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210120-how-the-world-became-consumerist
Consumerism: a Historical Perspective
SHARON BEDER explores the history of consumer societies from the 1920s when over-production of goods exceeded demand. Instead of stabilising the economy, reducing working hours, and sharing work around, which would have brought more leisure time for all, industrialists decided to expand markets by promoting consumerism to the working classes. The social decision to produce unlimited quantities of goods rather than leisure, nurtured wastefulness, obsolescence, and inefficiency and created the foundation for our modern consumer culture. People were trained to be both workers and consumers in a culture of work and spend. Consumption was promoted through advertising as a "democracy of goods" and used to pacify political unrest among workers. With the help of marketers and advertisers exploiting the idea of consumer goods as status symbols, workers were manipulated into being avaricious consumers who could be trusted "to spend more rather than work less." But if we admired wisdom above wealth, and compassion and cooperation above competition, we could undermine the motivation to consume.
https://pacificecologist.org/archive/consumerhistory.html
1950s Consumer Shift to the Service Sector
During World War II, Americans had saved billions of dollars. Flush with cash, they were ready to go on a spending spree as soon as factories could convert from war production to consumer goods. This surge in consumer demand encouraged businesses to expand production. By 1955, the United States, with only 6 percent of the world’s population, was producing almost half of the world’s goods.
As the economy grew, incomes rose. Real income is income measured by the amount of goods and services it will buy, regardless of inflation. By the mid-1950s, the average American family had twice as much real income to spend as the average family of the 1920s had. And spend it they did.
Not only were Americans spending more money than ever before, they were also spending it in different places. In the past, most people had bought their goods in stores lining the main street of town. By the mid-1950s, however, suburban shopping centers were luring consumers away from downtown shopping districts. Shopping centers offered customers easy parking and a wide array of shops to browse, often in air-conditioned comfort. By 1964, there were more than 7,600 shopping centers across the United States.
Businesses used methods pioneered during the 1920s to encourage consumers to keep on spending. One method was slick advertising campaigns. By 1955, businesses were spending $8 billion a year on ads that encouraged consumption.
Another method was to offer consumers easier ways to buy now and pay later. Large stores issued charge cards that allowed their customers to charge goods to an account rather than pay cash. By 1960, Sears Roebuck had more than 10 million accounts, or one for every five families. In 1958, American Express launched the first all-purpose credit card that could be used in stores, hotels, restaurants, and gas stations.
A third method used to encourage consumption was called planned obsolescence. Brooks Stevens, the industrial designer who popularized this term, defined it as a way to create “the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” Businesses using this method looked for ways to make what a consumer bought today seem obsolete, or out-of-date, after a fixed period of time. Clothing companies did this by introducing new fashions every season. As they did so, last season’s garments, although still usable, looked dated. Automobile companies did the same thing by changing the styling of their cars every year.
https://ageofaffluence.weebly.com/consumerism.html
A Brief History of Consumer Culture
Once World War II was over, consumer culture took off again throughout the developed world, partly fueled by the deprivation of the Great Depression and the rationing of the wartime years and incited with renewed zeal by corporate advertisers using debt facilities and the new medium of television. Stuart Ewen, in his history of the public relations industry, saw the birth of commercial radio in 1921 as a vital tool in the great wave of debt-financed consumption in the 1920s — “a privately owned utility, pumping information and entertainment into people’s homes.”
“Requiring no significant degree of literacy on the part of its audience,” Ewen writes, “radio gave interested corporations … unprecedented access to the inner sanctums of the public mind.” The advent of television greatly magnified the potential impact of advertisers’ messages, exploiting image and symbol far more adeptly than print and radio had been able to do. The stage was set for the democratization of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined.
Though the television sets that carried the advertising into people’s homes after World War II were new, and were far more powerful vehicles of persuasion than radio had been, the theory and methods were the same — perfected in the 1920s by PR experts like Bernays. Vance Packard echoes both Bernays and the consumption economists of the 1920s in his description of the role of the advertising men of the 1950s:
They want to put some sizzle into their messages by stirring up our status consciousness.… Many of the products they are trying to sell have, in the past, been confined to a “quality market.” The products have been the luxuries of the upper classes. The game is to make them the necessities of all classes. This is done by dangling the products before non-upper-class people as status symbols of a higher class. By striving to buy the product—say, wall-to-wall carpeting on instalment—the consumer is made to feel he is upgrading himself socially.
Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed...
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world." --Bernays
...The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, “people recognize themselves in their commodities.” Marcuse’s critique of needs, made more than 50 years ago, was not directed at the issues of scarce resources or ecological waste, although he was aware even at that time that Marx was insufficiently critical of the continuum of progress and that there needed to be “a restoration of nature after the horrors of capitalist industrialisation have been done away with.”
Marcuse directed his critique at the way people, in the act of satisfying our aspirations, reproduce dependence on the very exploitive apparatus that perpetuates our servitude. Hours of work in the United States have been growing since 1950, along with a doubling of consumption per capita between 1950 and 1990. Marcuse suggested that this “voluntary servitude (voluntary inasmuch as it is introjected into the individual) … can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infrastructure of man [sic], a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values.”...
Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by
molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst
for more stuff.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/
Why do we buy what we buy? A sociologist on why people buy too many things.
What’s at the root of modern American consumerism? It might not just be competition among the brands trying to sell us things, but also competition among ourselves.
An easy story to tell is that marketers and advertisers have perfected tactics to convince us to purchase things, some we need, some we don’t. And it’s an important part of the country’s capitalistic, growth-centered economy: The more people spend, the logic goes, the better it is for everybody. (Never mind that they’re sometimes spending money they don’t have, or the implications of all this production and trash for the planet.) People, naturally, want things.
But American consumerism is also built on societal factors that are often overlooked. We have a social impetus to “keep up with the Joneses,” whoever our own version of the Joneses is. And in an increasingly unequal society, the Joneses at the very top are doing a lot of the consuming, while the people at the bottom struggle to keep up or, ultimately, are left fighting for scraps.
I recently spoke with Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College, about the history of modern American consumerism — what it’s rooted in, how it’s evolved, and how different groups of people have experienced it. Schor, who is the author of books on consumerism, wealth, and spending, has a bit of a unique view on the matter. She tends to focus on the roles of work, inequality, and social pressures in determining what people buy and when. In her view, marketers have less to do with what we want than, say, our neighbors, coworkers, or the people we follow on social media...
Why do we buy things, often more than we need?
Scholars have different answers to this question. Economists just assume that goods and services provide well-being, and people want to maximize their well-being. Psychologists root it in universal dimensions of human nature, which some of them tie back to evolutionary dynamics. I don’t think either of those are particularly convincing.
The key impetus for contemporary consumer society has been the growth of inequality, the existence of unequal social structures, and the role that consumption came to play in establishing people’s position in that unequal hierarchy. For many people, it’s about consuming to their social position, and trying to keep up with their social position.
It’s not necessarily experienced by people in that way — it’s experienced more as identity or natural desire. But I think our social and cultural context naturalizes that desire for us.
If you think about the particular things people want, it mostly has to do with being the kind of person that they think they are because there’s a consumption style connected with that. The role of what are called reference groups — the people we compare ourselves to, the people we identify with — is really key in that. It’s why, for example, I’ve found that people who have reference groups that are wealthier than they are tend to save less and spend more, and people who keep more modest reference groups, even as they gain in income and wealth, tend to save more.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22547185/consumerism-competition-history-interview
Wikipedia - Consumerism & The Roaring 20s
Consumerism
The Industrial Revolution dramatically increased the availability of consumer goods, although it was still primarily focused on the capital goods sector and industrial infrastructure (i.e., mining, steel, oil, transportation networks, communications networks, industrial cities, financial centers, etc.). The advent of the department store represented a paradigm shift in the experience of shopping. Customers could now buy an astonishing variety of goods, all in one place, and shopping became a popular leisure activity. While previously the norm had been the scarcity of resources, the industrial era created an unprecedented economic situation. For the first time in history, products were available in outstanding quantities, at outstandingly low prices, being thus available to virtually everyone in the industrialized West.
By the turn of the 20th century, the average worker in Western Europe or the United States still spent approximately 80–90% of their income on food and other necessities. What was needed to propel consumerism, was a system of mass production and consumption, exemplified by Henry Ford, an American car manufacturer. After observing the assembly lines in the meat-packing industry, Frederick Winslow Taylor brought his theory of scientific management to the organization of the assembly line in other industries; this unleashed incredible productivity and reduced the costs of commodities produced on assembly lines around the world.
Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings, rather than just developing out of capitalism. As an example, Earnest Elmo Calkins noted to fellow advertising executives in 1932 that "consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use", while the domestic theorist Christine Frederick observed in 1929 that "the way to break the vicious deadlock of a low standard of living is to spend freely, and even waste creatively".
The older term and concept of "conspicuous consumption" originated at the turn of the 20th century in the writings of sociologist and economist, Thorstein Veblen. The term describes an apparently irrational and confounding form of economic behaviour. Veblen's scathing proposal that this unnecessary consumption is a form of status display is made in darkly humorous observations like the following:
It is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items of consumption, that people will undergo a very considerable degree of privation in the comforts or the necessaries of life to afford what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption; so that it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate, for people to go ill clad to appear well dressed.
The term "conspicuous consumption" spread to describe consumerism in the United States in the 1960s, but was soon linked to debates about media theory, culture jamming, and its corollary productivism. By 1920 most Americans had experimented with occasional installment buying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumerism
1920s Consumption
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/rise-to-world-power/1920s-america/a/1920s-consumption
The Roaring Twenties: Consumerism, Decadence and All That Jazz - Known as the Jazz Age, the 1920s in the West heralded new ideas of liberation, consumerism, and a culture of excess. What makes the Roaring Twenties such a defining era?
https://www.thecollector.com/the-roaring-twenties-jazz-age/
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Politics & Anti-Consumerism
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The American Tradition of Consumer Politics
Consumer activism has been employed for a wide variety of causes from abolition to labor battles to Civil Rights, and these efforts have fundamentally shaped political culture and altered our notions of agency and culpability, linking individuals to far-away causes...
With its assumption of consumer power, the “free produce” movement offered a radically new conception of causality and morality, one which posited purchasers as the first cause of economic activity and therefore made them the moral guardians of the polity. In this view, buyers should be understood as employers who were responsible for the condition of those who made the goods they, in effect, commissioned. Free produce advocates also promoted a new conception of consumers as a potentially powerful force. As late as 1843, a Baltimore newspaper stated the conventional wisdom: “The world is divided into two classes, producer and consumers; the first being the many, the second the few, the first the ruled, the second the rulers.” By attempting to coordinate aggregate consumer power—and to use that power to supplement a grassroots social movement—advocates of free produce sought to invert the “ruled” into “rulers.” They built on Adam Smith’s notion that “consumption is the sole end of all production” and took seriously the moral claims at the root of this view. Consumers, then, hired the labor that made the products that they bought and therefore were responsible for that labor.
We should note the differences between consumer activist movements like
“free produce” from the contemporary movement for “effective altruism,”
advocated by the philosopher, Peter Singer. That movement emphasized
maximizing earning potential and charitable giving as the way to
effectively and efficiently improve the world. It placed no moral
constraints on how money is earned or spent, and prioritized the benefits
of maximizing earnings and charitable giving. Consumer activists
emphasized the good or harm done by purchasing decisions and argued that
these had effects on a long chain of people and environments. They posited
that our economic activity always had implications on the wider world. The
good intentions of philanthropists—and even the positive impact of their
donations—was often a case of what the Progressive era women’s
organization, the National Consumers League, called “mistaken
pity.”...
https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2017/may/the-american-tradition-of-consumer-politics/
Wikipedia - Anti-Consumerism
Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology that is opposed to consumerism, the continual buying and consuming of material possessions. Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society. In politics, anti-consumerism overlaps with environmental activism, anti-globalization, and animal-rights activism; moreover, a conceptual variation of anti-consumerism is post-consumerism, living in a material way that transcends consumerism.
Anti-consumerism arose in response to the problems caused by the long-term mistreatment of human consumers and of the animals consumed, and from the incorporation of consumer education to school curricula; examples of anti-consumerism are the book No Logo (2000) by Naomi Klein, and documentary films such as The Corporation (2003), by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers (2003), by Erik Gandini; each made anti-corporate activism popular as an ideologically accessible form of civil and political action.
The criticism of economic materialism as a dehumanizing behaviour that is destructive to Earth, as human habitat, comes from religion and social activism.
The religious criticism asserts that materialist consumerism interferes with the connection between the individual and God, and so is an inherently immoral style of life; thus the German historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) said that, "Life in America is exclusively economic in structure, and lacks depth." From the Roman Catholic perspective, Thomas Aquinas said that, "Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things"; in that vein, Francis of Assisi, Ammon Hennacy, and Mohandas Gandhi said that spiritual inspiration guided them towards simple living.
From the secular perspective, social activism indicates that from consumerist materialism derive crime (which originates from the poverty of economic inequality), industrial pollution and the consequent environmental degradation, and war as a business...
Many anti-corporate activists believe the rise of large-business corporations poses a threat to the legitimate authority of nation states and the public sphere. They feel corporations are invading people's privacy, manipulating politics and governments, and creating false needs in consumers. They state evidence such as invasive advertising adware, spam, telemarketing, child-targeted advertising, aggressive guerrilla marketing, massive corporate campaign contributions in political elections, interference in the policies of sovereign nation states (Ken Saro-Wiwa), and news stories about corporate corruption (Enron, for example).
Anti-consumerism protesters point out that the main responsibility of a corporation is to answer only to shareholders, giving human rights and other issues almost no consideration. The management does have a primary responsibility to their shareholders, since any philanthropic activities that do not directly serve the business could be deemed to be a breach of trust. This sort of financial responsibility means that multi-national corporations will pursue strategies to intensify labor and reduce costs. For example, they will attempt to find low wage economies with laws which are conveniently lenient on human rights, the natural environment, trade union organization and so on (see, for example, Nike).
Bernard Stiegler argues that modern capitalism is governed by consumption rather than production, and the advertising techniques used to create consumer behaviour amount to the destruction of psychic and collective individuation. The diversion of libidinal energy toward the consumption of consumer products, he argues, results in an addictive cycle of consumption, leading to hyper-consumption, the exhaustion of desire, and the reign of symbolic misery...
Banksy the secretive street artist challenges social ideas and goads viewers into rethinking their surroundings, to acknowledge the absurdities of closely held preconceptions;
<bq> "You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-consumerism
Wikipedia - Conspicuous Consumption
In many critical contexts, "conspicuous consumption" describes the tendency of people to identify strongly with products or services they consume, especially with commercial brand names and obvious status-enhancing appeal, such as a brand of expensive automobiles or jewelry. It is a pejorative term which most people deny, having some more specific excuse or rationalization for consumption other than the idea that they are "compelled to consume". A culture that has a high amount of consumerism is referred to as a consumer culture.
To those who embrace the idea of consumerism, these products are not seen as valuable in themselves, but rather as social signals that allow them to identify like-minded people through consumption and display of similar products. Few would yet go so far, though, as to admit that their relationships with a product or brand name could be substitutes for healthy human relationships that sometimes lack in a dysfunctional modern society.
"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our
way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals,
that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in
consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and
discarded at an ever-increasing rate."
--Victor Lebow 1955
According to archaeologists, evidence of conspicuous consumption up to
several millennia ago has been found, suggesting that such behavior is
inherent to humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
ESDAW - Anti-Consumerism
Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology opposed to consumerism, which discourages ever-growing purchasing and consumption of material possessions.
Anti-consumerist activists express concern over modern corporations or organizations that pursue solely economic goals at the expense of environmental, social, or ethical concerns; these concerns overlap with those of environmental activism, anti-globalization, and animal-rights activism. One variation on this is the concept of postconsumers, who emphasize moving beyond addictive consumerism.
Anti-consumerism is often associated with criticism of consumption, starting with Thorstein Veblen, but according to Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class consumerism can be traced back to the first human civilizations.
Consumerism can also denote economic policies associated with Keynesian economics, and, in an abstract sense, refer to the belief that the free choice of consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society (cf. producerism).
Many anti-corporate activists believe the rise of large-business corporations poses a threat to the legitimate authority of nation states and the public sphere.
https://www.esdaw.eu/anti-consumerism.html
The Rise of Anti-Consumerism
Conclusion - The U.S. and other nations have operated on the proposition that they should pursue unlimited economic growth. This has worked well and has built several prosperous nations. Now we are increasingly aware that growth comes at a very high cost. Growth leads to using up our resources and to environmental degradation, climate turbulence, global warming, and continued poverty. We need businesses to take strong steps favoring sustainability economics.
They need to move from maximizing profits to creating a good balance of profits, people welfare and the planet, known as the triple bottom line. Businesses must move from seeing their markets as consisting of consumers to seeing their markets as consisting of producers. More citizens are adopting prosumer roles. They are increasingly playing the role of thought producers, broadcasters, activists and reformers. They are engaged in value creation and co-creation. Society and government need to use demarketing and social marketing to encourage the 3Rs of the environmentalists.
Ultimately the public has to face the question of how big should the population grow. If the world’s population grows without limit, most people on earth will barely manage to live on a subsistence level. If the world population could stay fairly constant, a better balance could be struck between economic development and environmental stewardship.
https://sarasotainstitute.global/the-rise-of-anti-consumerism/
Teens against consumerism – the anti-excess movement
https://www.voicesofyouth.org/blog/teens-against-consumerism-anti-excess-movement
Logos vs Rebel Sell - 2 Books Compared
No Logo - This book agues that persuasion and influence are the main
drivers of consumption; It focuses on branding and often makes
connections with the anti-globalization movement.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Logo-Space-Choice-Jobs/dp/0312421435
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Logo
Potter and Heath argue against the notion that consumerism is driven by conformity; instead, they state we are largely motivated by competitive consumption, which is an attempt to attain status distinction through the products we buy. The main influence driving consumption is status competition or keeping up with the Joneses.
Some believe consumerism comes from psychological manipulation and
deception while others believe that consumerism comes largely from
competitive consumption in an effort for distinction, and since most goods
depend on exclusivity for their value, especially goods which are said to
decry mainstream life, a purchasing 'arms race' is created whenever others
begin to follow the same tendencies: if you lag, you become mainstream.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell
http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Rebels-Counterculture-Consumer-Culture/dp/006074586X
Logos vs Rebel Sell
|||| - thesis: that supply side persuasion creates (constructs) the consumer class with a lot a junk vs status competition and keeping up with the jones. - mixed version; supply side manipulation created the class but ape status competition made it float. - ||||
...In the 20th century, the significant improvement of the material
standard of living of a society, and the consequent emergence of the
middle class, broadly applied the term “conspicuous consumption” to the
men, women, and households who possessed the discretionary income that
allowed them to practice the patterns of economic consumption—of goods and
services—which were motivated by the desire for prestige, the public
display of social status, rather than by the intrinsic, practical utility
of the goods and the services proper. In the 1920s, economists, such as
Paul Nystrom (1878–1969), proposed that changes in the style of life, made
feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced to the mass
of society a “philosophy of futility” that would increase the consumption
of goods and services as a social fashion; an activity done for its own
sake. In that context, “conspicuous consumption” is discussed either as a
behavioural addiction or as a narcissistic behaviour, or both, which are
psychologic conditions induced by consumerism — the desire for the
immediate gratification of hedonic expectations...
Conspicuous Consumption: The spending of money on and the acquiring of
luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power — either the
buyer’s income or the buyer’s accumulated wealth. The conspicuous consumer
believes that such a public display of discretionary economic power is a
means either of attaining or of maintaining a given social status.
Positional Good: A product or service whose value is at least in part a
function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to
substitutes. The measure of satisfaction derived from a positional good
depends on how much one has in relation to everyone else.
Invidious Consumption: The deliberate conspicuous consumption of goods and
services intended to provoke the envy of other people, as a means of
displaying the buyer’s superior socio-economic status.
Snob Effect: Demand for a certain good by individuals of a higher income
level which is inversely related to the demand by individuals of a lower
income level. The desire to own unusual, expensive or unique goods which
have a high economic value, but low practical value. The less available,
the higher its snob value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Logo
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller
https://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238
Geoffrey Miller’s main thesis in Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior is that the conspicuous consumption we use to signal traits such as intelligence, agreeableness or conscientiousness is unnecessarily indirect. Instead, we should use our evolved abilities to show these characteristics through humour, communication and interaction with others. Miller summarises his position as follows:
Consumerist capitalism is largely an exercise in gilding the lily. We take wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display - language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty - and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates, and gaining prestige. Instead we rely on goods and services acquired through education, work, and consumption to advertise our personal traits to others. These costly signals are mostly redundant or misleading, so others usually ignore them. They prefer to judge us through natural face-to-face interaction. We think our gilding dazzles them, though we ignore their own gilding when choosing our own friends and mates.
https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/millers-spent-sex-evolution-and-consumer-behavior
...our minds are hardwired by millennia of evolution to find certain things and certain people attractive. Facial symmetry, waist to hip ratios of 0.7, height, salt, sugar, fat and the colour blue. Look into consumer preferences and you’re looking into our hunter-gatherer past, with the promise that evolutionary consumer psychology is more insightful than any focus group or survey.
Miller’s trademark focus is Darwin’s second evolutionary process – evolution by sexual selection as opposed to natural selection. The peacock tail does not confer any adaptive ‘survival of the fittest’ advantage on its owner, it has nothing to do with natural selection. Rather, it has everything to do with sexual selection – it became a selected trait because it signals good genes (like facial symmetry) to potential mates.
For Miller, consumer psychology is a vast excursus into peacock tail psychology, we buy what we buy to signal our good genes to potential mates, or to those that can help us get good mates. We do this instinctively, below the level of consciousness, signaling our own unique peacock tail through conspicuous consumption. All the world’s a stage, it’s all about sex, and the Apple iPad is the 2010 peacock tail.
The new news in Miller’s work is that conspicuous consumption is not just about signaling the 3 evolutionary S’s – Sex (reproductive fitness), Status (power), and Survival (health); it’s more subtle than that.
Specifically, it’s about signaling our personality, made up of the six universal human personality traits that we all share...
Spent Speed Summary: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior
https://brandgenetics.com/human-thinking/spent-speed-summary-sex-evolution-and-consumer-behavior/
Book review: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
https://jukkaniittymaa.com/2017/06/24/book-review-spent-sex-evolution-and-consumer-behavior/
Consumerism Versus Producerism
Producerism is a notion proposed by ecological philosopher Rupert Read to describe the core operational principle of capitalism: its fixation of producing more and more stuff for monetary profit (i.e. growth), its need to sell this stuff to consumers (see consumerism), and its foundational lie that consumers—not producers (marketers and distributors)—are the driving force and beneficiaries of the entire process. According to mainstream economics, capitalism is a consumerist system: it merely supplies stuff to satisfy existing demand. In this view, exploitation of people and the devastation of the planet wreaked by capitalism is really driven by consumers’ demands. According to Read, however, capitalism is a producerist system: it produces stuff and manufactures the need for that stuff. The ultimate product of capitalism, says Read, is to produce individuals who identify as consumers and are willing participants in a system that exploits them and the planet. While consumerism is a real phenomenon, in Read’s account we live in a producerist, not a consumerist society. Producerism is ruining the planet but the burden of guilt and blame is projected on consumerism, especially individual consumers. As Read says in This Civilization is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire—and What Lies Beyond, co-authored with Samuel Alexander, (Melbourne: Simplicity Institute, 2019), “So long as we think of ourselves as ‘consumers’ we are blaming the victim” (67).
https://www.climatelit.org/topic/industry/producerism/
Producerism is an ideology which holds that those members of society
engaged in the production of tangible wealth are of greater benefit to
society than, for example, aristocrats who inherit their wealth and
status.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producerism
As we enter this age of producerism, it seems clear that we need to
strike a happy consumer-producer balance. Consuming was our only choice
before. Now that we have options, we must be more intentional about what
we choose.
https://medium.com/@ckliu95/producerism-a701f789ab10
Are we a consumerist society – or a 'producerist' society?
https://rupertread.net/writings/2011/are-we-a-consumerist-society-or-a-producerist-society
Situationism (psychology)
Under the controversy of person–situation debate, situationism is the theory that changes in human behavior are factors of the situation rather than the traits a person possesses. Behavior is believed to be influenced by external, situational factors rather than internal traits or motivations. Situationism therefore challenges the positions of trait theorists, such as Hans Eysenck or Raymond B. Cattell. This is an ongoing debate that has truth to both sides; psychologists are able to prove each of the view points through human experimentation.
Situationists believe that thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and past experiences and behaviors do not determine what someone will do in a given situation, rather, the situation itself does. Situationists tend to assume that character traits are distinctive, meaning that they do not completely disregard the idea of traits, but suggest that situations have a greater impact on behavior than those traits. Situationism is also influenced by culture, in that the extent to which people believe that situations impact behaviors varies between cultures. Situationism has been perceived as arising in response to trait theories, and correcting the notion that everything we do is because of our traits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationism_(psychology)
Situationist International
Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. Another important concept of situationist theory was the primary means of counteracting the spectacle; the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.
The situationists recognized that capitalism had changed since Karl Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several classical Marxist concepts, such as his theory of alienation. In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture. They rejected the idea that advanced capitalism's apparent successes—such as technological advancement, increased productive capacity, and a raised general quality of life when compared to previous systems, such as feudalism—could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International
From older versions of existing wikipedia entries
Conspicuous Consumption is a function of social-class consumerism, which
proposes that the social strata and the division of labor of the feudal
period continued into the modern era. The lords of the manor employed
themselves in the economically useless practices of conspicuous
consumption and conspicuous leisure, whilst the middle and lower classes
were employed in the industrial occupations that support the whole of
society; economically wasteful activities are those activities that do not
contribute to the economy or to the material productivity required for the
fruitful functioning of society.
The demand for status goods, fueled by conspicuous consumption, has
diverted many resources away from investment in the manufacture of more
material goods and services in order to satisfy consumer preoccupations
with their relative social standing and prestige.
Social status once depended on one's family name; however, the rise of
consumerism in the United States gave rise to social mobility. With the
increasing availability of goods, people became more inclined to define
themselves by what they possessed and the subtle quest for higher status
accelerated. The desire to increase one's position in the social hierarchy
is responsible for much of the social mobility in America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class
More Consumerism Links
How Humans Became 'Consumers': A History - Until the 19th century, hardly anyone recognized the vital role everyday buyers play in the world economy. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/how-humans-became-consumers/508700/
46f. A Consumer Economy
https://www.ushistory.org/us/46f.asp
Not surprisingly, then, the image of rebelliousness or non-conformity has long been a selling point for many products, especially those that begin as 'alternative' products.
Critical Theory of Consumerism - Frankfurt School
https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/ijllt/article/view/2252/1974
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/united-states-and-canada/us-history/consumerism
