Richard Easterlin. Happiness depends on relative wealth. Easterlin Paradox: wealth doesn’t ensure satisfaction. In general, populace is no happier after overall GNP grows. My bet is some consumption goes to status seeking zero-sum game consumption. I’ll bet some of happiness relates to feeling of growth, purpose and therefore meaning. People are happy when their prospects are improving. The movement itself brings happiness.
Lasch, p. 153: “… advanced society no longer rests on a population primed for achievement. It requires instead a stupefied population, resigned to work that is trivial and shoddily performed, predisposed to seek its satisfaction in the time set aside for leisure.” It’s a wasted of human talent.
Lasch, p. 215: “…modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt.”
David Riesman “The Lonely Crowd”, (1950). Wikipedia: “After the Industrial Revolution in America had succeeded in developing a middle-class state, institutions that had flourished within the tradition-directed and the inner-directed social framework became more secondary to daily life. The middle class gradually moved away from living according to traditions, or conforming to the values of organized religion of the family or societal codes, and the new middle class gradually adopted a malleability in the way people lived with each other. The increasing ability to consume goods and afford material abundance was accompanied by a shift away from tradition to inner-directedness and then to “other-direction”.[4] “
The Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle”, 1967. Wikipedia: “the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.”[3] This condition, according to Debord, is the “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.” “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.”[5] Concerns class alienation, cultural homogenization, and mass media. “all that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” Images have supplanted genuine human interaction. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” “In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have. Consequently, social life moves further, leaving a state of “having” and proceeding into a state of “appearing”; namely the appearance of the image.[12]” Seminal text of the Situationist movement, a marxist movement. Advertising created consumer demand that didn’t exist previously. People used to work hard a moral obligation; now they do it to consume. The worker became seen as consumer and ripe for manipulation, preying on insecurities. Advertising announces consumption as a way of life, playing to malaise of industrial civilization. Alienation is a commodity; consumption addresses alienation as a cure. Politics becomes spectacle and elections sporting events.
Christopher Lasch: The Culture of Narcissism. Narcissistic society worships celebrities and invents heroes.
Other-direction meant responding to the social forces deriving from how others were living—what they consumed, what they did with their time, what their views were toward politics, work, play, and so on. Riesman and his researchers found that other-directed people were flexible and willing to accommodate others to gain approval. Large organizations tended to prefer this type of personality. As Riesman writes, “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed”, not necessarily to control others but to relate to them. Those who are other-directed need assurance that they are emotionally in tune with others. By the 1940s, the other-directed character was beginning to dominate society, and that tendency grew over time.
Beyond Consumerism:
Obsessive consumerism will and must wane in significance as central to human life on earth. Sure, we all want and need food, shelter, comfort and convenience, the things that sustain us physically. But much of consumerism has become status oriented, establishing our social standing, our relational connection to each other and the broader societal structure. To this extent, consumerism has evolved in stride with society’s adolescent reorientation of growth and development.
Collectively we are exploiting and running down the planets store of natural and mineral resources, its ordered entropy. As we come to appreciate and better manage this inheritance we will come to realize that humanity will be better served by minimizing rather than maximizing how fast it gets used up. As Kenneth Boulding once remarked, Gross National Product will come to be renamed to be Gross National Waste, the amount of production needed to get humanity through the year. Georgescu-Roegen explored this idea scientifically in “Entropy and the Economic Process” in 1974?.
At an individual level, philosophers and mystics have always been touting the benefits of living simply, unburdened by material responsibilities. In the 1960’s Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful” widely popularized the idea for a lay secular swath of society. More recently, “The Year of Less” by Cait Flanders and “Scroogenomics” by Joel Waldfogel have presented evidence that living with less actually increases life satisfactions and happiness. When the futility and vacuity of striving for social status through consumerist accumulation of material goods more widely penetrates the cloud of advertising hype and propaganda, we can expect more and more people to abandon obsession with consumerism, and relegate it to its proper instrumental place in service of material rather than status needs.
To the extent society turns from maximizing economic production toward minimizing environmental entropy loss, there will be a diametric reorientation in the developmental direction of societal growth. As an adolescent human reaches full stature, it turns it’s development attention elsewhere than merely growing in size. To the extent that consumerism turns from owning things to purchasing experiences, the values guiding human motivation will have changed from the material to the relational. To the extent that people evolve in their consciousness beyond valuing themselves and evaluating status in terms of material possessions and in terms of innate qualities, to that extent society will have emerged out of is childhood. Will status at some point switch to a reverse snobbery appreciating those who leave a minimum instead of maximum carbon footprint? The heavy carbon footprint of air travel is already discouraging the aspirational values of some.
According to popular wisdom, emerging generations are already rejecting consumerism insofar as this means accumulation of material possessions, in favor of collecting life experiences and cultivating relationships, seeking a work/life balance, as opposed to a single-minded pursuit of financial success. Indeed if the hypothesis proves valid, minimization of consumption will come to confer status, and a “Small is Beautiful” mentality will become a predominant value. Or as Kenneth Boulding noted, GNP needs to be reconceived as “Gross National Waste”, the material and entropic throughput that society uses up to make it through from January 1st to December 31st, something to be minimized instead of maximized.
Emerging generations are embracing environmentalism almost as a religion. Rebalancing humanity’s relationship with its surroundings is one of the signature tasks for society in its adolescence, taking responsibility for its impact on the natural environment and addressing climate change.
Snippets:
hips in a hierarchical picture of human society. . Economist favor a carbon tax, because that disincentivizes the problem at its source, the carbon footprint. If environmental impact and carbon footprint are measturable, they will be measured, and we will track them like we track our miles walked steps taken on our phones. We’ll track our footprints. New consciousness of carbon footprint and growing responsibility for environmental externalities of consumption.
Reversal of ever rising material living standards, and square footage housing per person.
ESG and Gross National Wellbeing movement, looks beyond GNP and values more than material well being. Young careerists no longer willing to give up everything for material abundance by striving for partnership in law firm or investment banking. Looking for work/life balance, newly valued.
Elevated value of time vs things. Things require maintenance. GNP is gross national waste. Service rather than ownership satisfies demand, including status.
Replace rather than repair — Ikea furniture. Consumer goods. Technology and appliances. Repair requires labor, vs replace which does not.
052023: French movement of Decroissance, as per small is beautiful:
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/05/18/meet-the-lefty-europeans-who-want-to-deliberately-shrink-the-economy?utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_campaign=espresso.US&utm_content=the-world-in-brief-may-20th-2023&utm_term=05/20/23