Juliet Schor, New Economic Critique of Consumer Society
- Economists (and society at large) tend to assume that consumption
equals welfare; higher consumption = higher quality of life
- Why would it occur if it people didn't think it contributed to their
welfare??
- Economists hesitant to critique values/preferences
- Assume people's consumer choices best for them and for
society as a whole
- These assumptions need to be questioned
- Early 1900 fear of stagnation
- Not enough consumer demand to insure economic growth and
prosperity; depression would be the result
- Assumed hard distinction between necessities/luxuries
- And that luxuries had limited appeal to consumers
- Thought that as wages and productivity rose, consumers needs
for goods would be satisfied, workers would reduce labor supply
and choose leisure
- Next came the idea of unlimited consumer wants; that consumer desire
insatiable
- Desires fed and created by ads/marketing
- Perpetually dissatisfied consumer always wants something new
- Continual quest for new products
- Tie identity to the new products
- Want them to keep ahead of the crowd
- Some critiques of consumption (e.g., J.K. Galbraith's) are based on
elitist aesthetic tastes
- Higher & lower pleasures in consumption
- Some truth to this charge
- Is the criticism of sport utility vehicles based on aes preferences?
- Why assume criticisms based on aesthetic preferences
necessarily bad?
- Schor's critique of consumerism
- Not based on making aesthetic judgments about specific
consumer goods
- Raising questions about alternative ways of living to the
consumer society
- Consumer society has real costs and precludes other desirable
possibilities
- For example, an alternative to the work & spend life is the life
of shorter working hours and more leisure time/public culture
- MARKET AND OTHER FAILURES OF CONSUMER ECONOMY
- Market failures concerning natural environment
- Failure to price and incorporate true costs of environmental &
natural capital (e.g., forests, clean air/water)
- Pollution externalities (externality=cost of doing business
that is externalized onto others so it is not reflected in the
price of the good)
- Unsustainable resource extraction
- Overfishing externalities
- GNP rise when county cuts down all forests
- Prices of goods and services underpriced (e.g., oil/gas price)
- Excess consumption (as compared to when externalities
internalized)
- Intergenerational (and interspecies) justice
- Market failures in constitution of community
- If have strong community ties have efficient government, law
abiding citizens and quality of life
- Consumerism weakens community ties
- Market exchanges instead of reciprocity reduces bonds
between people
- Reduced free time outside of work in modern consumer
society means community association suffers
- Community depends on free time to associate
- Market failure to meet worker and consumer sovereignty
- Assumptions of worker and consumer sovereignty need questioning
- Worker sovereignty
- Choose how much to work and to earn
- If people work long hours it is because they want to; they
prefer more $ to more free time
- Consumer sovereignty
- Choose goods and services that maximize satisfaction
- If not satisfied, consumers will change consumption
- Critique of worker sovereignty
- Workers don't have option to take productivity gains as
leisure time; forced to take higher income and spend it
- Get into the work and spend cycle ("instead of workers
getting what they want, they want what they get")
- If employees don't have free choice of hours (large
penalties for shorter hours), built in pro consumerist bias
in economy
- People might be better off with shorter hours and less
money
- Collective action failures of market
- Relativity dimension of welfare
- To the extent that relative income is what matters to us, then rising
material living standards don't necessarily lead to rising welfare/quality
of life
- If what matters to us is not our absolute level of income but
income relative to those around us
- E.g., "Keeping up with Jones" is what matters
- Then working more, consuming more, not really making us any
better off
- Need collective action, restraint on competition, to get out of this cycle
- Examples
- School uniforms
- Limits on holiday gift exchanges
- Zoning restrictions to, for example, regulate size of houses
- Regulations on SUVs
"Toward a new critique of consumerism" (read, p. 21)