The Current Politics of Consumption

I found Juliet Schors article on The New Politics of Consumption to be very noteworthy. I believe many of the reasons stated in this article can support the causes of the United States current financial situation. Its almost as if the article was predicting the future and foresaw that our society’s spending habits would increase. I consider people who have excessive spending habits with no money to back them up can fall under the category of the recession contributors. Something that I found to be true was the conventional view of the production and consumption having no “external” effects. Which states there are no consequences for the welfare of others that are unreflected in product prices. An example being pollution, which imposes cost on others that are not reflected in the price of the good that produces the pollution. Another point that Schor defended that I also agree with was “it is difficult to make an ethical argument that people in the worlds richest country need more when the global income gap is so wide, the disparity in world resource use is so enormous, and the possibility that we are already consuming beyond the Earth’s ecological carrying capacity so likely. (184) Americans need to realize the repressions of there consuming habits.

The Consummate Consumer

Juliet Schor’s article The New Politics of Consumption: Why Americans Want So Much More Than They Need, discusses contemporary American consumerism and its afflictions or immoralities. New consumerism is defined as the upscale version of a normal lifestyle, caused by the widespread desire to obtain luxury products and the struggle to attain them, and the large (and growing) gap between consumer wants versus adequate incomes to obtain such wants (185). This is the idea that spending is used as a tool in the competition to “keep up” with what is popular and desirable at the time, this aspiration having long been a part of American culture. “This new consumerism with its growing aspirational gap, has begun to jeopardize the quality of American life” (186). Thanks to the extreme pressures of “keeping up”, families move into neighborhoods with high housing costs (so their children can go to “good” schools) in their pursuit of the American dream. The tradeoff requires that two adults work to earn dual income so they maintain their middle class status, not to mention all sorts of other expenses (car payments, wardrobe costs). In addition, this busy lifestyle requires timesaving expensive commodities (take-out food, cleaning services).

Schor’s example of new consumerism relates to the movie No Impact Man. Colin Beavan is a New Yorker who decides to change his personal impact on the Earth, leaving no carbon footprint for one year. In order to do this he pursues a number of different approaches. Beavan purchases only local foods, becomes a vegetarian, turns off his electricity, uses only green methods of transportation (walking or biking), resists all material consumption (either uses what he already has or buys second hand) and creates little to no garbage. While this film is meant to portray an ecologically friendly experiment, it in turn depicts just how consumed we as Americans are. The strong message reflected is that we are defined through our consumption. We work hard to the earn money to consume these unnecessary products, which are not well made therefore unsustainable and thus will keep us coming back to purchase more. The need to be the consummate consumer slowly undermines our very ability to thrive, much like the competitiveness of new consumerism.