The Brief, Tragic Reign of Consumerism—and the Birth of a Happy Alternative

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/27-0



You and I consume; we are consumers. The global economy is set up to enable us to do what we innately want to do—buy, use, discard, and buy some more. If we do our job well, the economy thrives; if for some reason we fail at our task, the economy falters. The model of economic existence just described is reinforced in the business pages of every newspaper, and in the daily reportage of nearly every broadcast and web-based financial news service, and it has a familiar name: consumerism.

Consumerism also has a history, but not a long one. True, humans—like all other animals—are consumers in the most basic sense, in that we must eat to live. Further, we have been making weapons, ornaments, clothing, utensils, toys, and musical instruments for thousands of years, and commerce has likewise been with us for untold millennia.

What’s new is the project of organizing an entire society around the necessity for ever-increasing rates of personal consumption.

This is how it happened

Consumerism arose from a unique historic milieu. In the early 20th century, a temporary abundance of cheap, concentrated, storable, and portable energy in the form of fossil fuels enabled a dramatic increase in the rate and scope of resource extraction (via powered mining equipment, chain saws, tractors, powered fishing boats, and more). Coupled with powered assembly lines and the use of petrochemicals, cheap fossil energy also permitted the vastly expanded manufacture of a widening array of commercial products. This resulted in a serious economic problem known as overproduction (too many goods chasing too few buyers), which would eventually contribute to the Great Depression.

[marmar]

1. k/r

We've got to base our economy on something other than ever-increasing consumption. It cannot be sustained.

[frazzled]

2. Consumerism has a much longer history than that

Already by 1714, Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees dealt with issues of consumption in the economic well-being of a nation (Keynes would later cite him). The eighteenth century saw the rise of a consumer class, mirroring the rise of the bourgeoisie, when the desire for luxury goods and a global system to provide coffee, tea, and sugar from plantations abroad developed.

The real consumer culture arose in the mid-19th century with the rise of the department store in Second Empire France. The Industrial Revolution propelled the rise of consumption as more cheaply made goods became available.

Criticism of consumption was already being argued at the end of the 19th century in the works of Thorsten Veblen.

Since when does "consumerism" relate solely to the story of fossil fuels?

I've been reading the Rougon-Macquart series of novels by Emile Zola lately: believe me, they reveal a highly developed consumer class (and not a pretty one) by the 1850s and 60s.

[LWolf]

3. if I've counted correctly,

the U.S. is ranked 105th on the "Happy Planet Index."

I like the idea of using happiness as an index of economic and social health of a nation.

[7wo7rees]

4. Great post