Why consumerism is good

Historian Elaine Tyler May noted, "The values associated with domestic spending upheld traditional American concerns with pragmatism and morality, rather than opulence and luxury. Purchasing for the home helped alleviate traditional American uneasiness with consumption: the fear that spending would lead to decadence.

With the massive growth in suburban populations, automobiles were needed more than ever, and were within reach for many first-time buyers.

Families of all income brackets were buying televisions at a rate of five million a year. Some TV shows, like The Goldbergs and The Honeymooners , catered to working- and middle-class viewers with storylines about ethnic families.

In addition, television provided a potent medium for advertisers to reach inside American homes, creating desires for other products. With the things that defined "the good life" within economic reach, working-class people could achieve the upward mobility they craved. Selling in Order to Buy In many ways, Tupperware reinforced the ideal of the efficient home and kitchen.

After all, Tupperware was meant to help housewives maintain freshness and cleanliness in food storage and preparation. Tupperware also helped fulfill the postwar desire for consumer goods.

When asked how she recruited new dealers to her Tupperware distributorship, Jean Conlogue noted, "We tried to fill a need for something that they wanted, like new carpet, or a new refrigerator, and then we would map out for them how many parties they would have to hold.

It allows for the expression of identity, it can hold sellers to public account, and it drives new thinking and development. But this is only the case when consumers are being served fairly in the market. Before worrying about whether the market is serving consumers, we need to agree that it should. Critiques of consumerism have to be taken seriously before examining whether contemporary capitalism is friendly to consumers. These critiques usually come in four types: moral, aesthetic, financial, or environmental.

The moral critique of consumerism is that the acquisition of things displaces more worthwhile activities or priorities. Instead of shopping, we should be spending time with friends and family, in places of worship, or in nature. Even as consumer societies meet our immediate, shallow desires, they are said to corrode our deeper selves. Their soul is eaten away with cares as they compete in the struggle for success.

But although materialism can be demoralizing and dispiriting, it is so probably only for a small minority of people. In reality, it is a question of balance. Things can be really useful, really cool or really fun. They can also enhance social life rather than diminish it. Back in the s, the psychologist Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed all the members of 82 Chicago families about their favorite things.

He discovered that happier families listed objects that reminded them of other people; a family memento, or a couch that had been in the family for years. Less happy ones listed more expensive items, citing their features rather than their history.

Some things might prove to be worthless, others merely useful, but some acquire more meaning over time. It is not whether we consume things that matters, but how we do. The second criticism of consumerism is aesthetic. Here the problem is the brashness, the showiness of material consumption, whether of goods or services. The aesthetic critic highlights not how much we consume, but what we consume.

This criticism veers dangerously close, or even into, outright snobbery, as James Twitchell points out in his pro-consumption polemic Lead Us Into Temptation. In Britain during the s, when cheaper air travel brought travel to warmer summer vacation destinations within reach of millions of workers, there was considerable elite disdain. Why should they, too, not enjoy the sun?

Third on the list of criticisms of consumerism is financial — specifically, the impact on personal finances of buying lots of stuff now, often using debt to do so, and putting too little aside for the future.

We are induced, through sophisticated advertising efforts, to consume even more than we would in the absence of ministrations of marketeers.

The knock against consumerism is that it displaces wiser spending or saving. As a rule, people find it hard to put high value on the distant future. The problem is short termism. This is hardly a new problem, it is just that mature economies offer such a cornucopia of goods and services — available, now, at the click of a mouse — and life expectancy has risen so dramatically, that the challenges may now be greater.

This, in turn, has justified collective interventions: most obviously, forced savings plans to fund government-provided pensions. It is a delicate balance, however.

The same economists who worry about people saving enough for their retirement or for a negative life event worry on a different day about insufficient consumer demand. The solutions are less likely to lie in the direction of reduced consumer choice, however, than in the greater provision of public goods that act to protect us from ourselves.

The fourth, and deepest, criticism of consumerism is environmental. Things take energy to make, transport, and use. Many services are energy-intensive too, with air travel just the most obvious example. Energy is scarce, and currently produced in ways that are heating up the planet.

Consumerism, on this reading, is killing the planet. Psychologists root it in universal dimensions of human nature, which some of them tie back to evolutionary dynamics. But I think our social and cultural context naturalizes that desire for us. The role of what are called reference groups — the people we compare ourselves to, the people we identify with — is really key in that.

I want to dig into this idea of competitive consumption. How are we competing with each other to consume? We have a society which is structured so that social esteem or value is connected to what we can consume. And so the inability to consume affects the kind of social value that we have. The argument that I made in [my book] The Overspent American was that in the postwar period, we had residentially-based reference groups.

So it was really your neighborhood. People moved to the suburbs, and they interacted with people in the suburbs. Those were reference groups of people of similar economic standing because housing is the biggest thing that people buy, and houses tend to cost the same amount roughly within a neighborhood.

Family and friends and social networks have always been really important. Then the next big thing that happens is that you get more and more married women going into the workforce. People interact with people above and below them in the hierarchy. So people were exposed to the lifestyles of the people above them in the informal socialization that goes on in the workplace. Then there is the impact of media, and increasingly now, social media.

Why do they keep falling for the advertisements? My approach is rooted in really deep social logic. How has the role of women evolved in consumerism? Women are often driving what to buy, right? Men still dominate in certain kinds of purchases, and particularly the big ones. Women were responsible for everyday purchasing: food and apparel and things like that. But if you are looking at data from marketers, you see a disproportionate amount of spending done by women. What about Black Americans?

If you look at it as a whole, you get a couple of things. The biggest takeaway is that Black consumers are not that different from white consumers. You have differences that are occasioned by some of the dynamics of structural racism — for example, the lower rates of Black homeownership.

Urban dwellers spend more on shoes because they walk a lot more. You have dynamics among Black consumers that are driven in part by racism. Some of the consumption choices are driven by the attempts to manage racism and stigma in the workplace and outside of it.

Another important phenomenon around the racial discourse in consumption goes back to the period of enslavement of Black Americans in which consumption was a prohibited activity. A lot of this is in the context of poverty and poor Black people, and the illegitimacy of their consumption choices. What about anti-consumerism? How has that evolved, the people who try to reject consumerism?

You have it in the 19th century as well, and often these were religious groups or sects of people who went into intentional communities, like the Shakers.

Sign up here. My work is focused on the connections between work choices and consumer choices. So with downshifters, these are people who made decisions to work less and consume less, and it was often the decisions around work that were driving them.