Consumption is foremost a factor of production, of course. But the word “consumption” has an air of opulence about it. As in, “They consumed all the champagne and caviar.” Champagne and caviar are imported trade goods—unless you somehow contrive to live in France and Iran at the same time. Which the Ayatollah Khomeini did. Though I don’t think he drank. (Caviar is halal, however …)
Anyway, consumption, especially conspicuous consumption, has a strongly implied connection to imported trade goods. For that reason, before addressing consumption itself, maybe I should say something about trade. Our modern history of trade with China, for example, from where so many of our conspicuously consumed goods come.
Some may view the China trade with alarm …
“OMG! The U.S. trade deficit with China is $344 billion!”
Others with glee …
“Ha-ha-ha! We got China to take $344 billion of our worthless fiat money! Suckers!”
But no one regards China trade as unimportant.
Trade is never unimportant. Trade is how—for good or for ill—the modern world was formed. Everyone on earth is now linked to everyone else. What links us is not society or ideology. And, God knows, it’s not religion. There are only two forces powerful enough to cause 7.6 billion people to hook up with each other.
One, of course, is the power of sex. But to have sex people have to be in reasonable proximity to each other (or in the same Internet chat room).
The other is the power of trade. (And that Internet chat room wouldn’t exist without it.)
Trade is different from barter or exchange. Trade takes brains and guts. Barter and exchange and most other forms of buying and selling can be conducted in familiar settings.
Chimps in their trees exchange picking nits out of each other’s fur.
Trade means taking your goods on the road. The root of “trade” is the Old Saxon trada, meaning “trail.”
In order to trade you have to have some idea of why that trail is there and where it leads. Hence trade invents history and geography.
You need a notion of what kind of people are at the other end of the trail and what they want to trade for and what they have to trade with. Hence trade invents sociology and economics.
You’ll require a means of communicating with those people. Hence the study of languages.
You’ll want to do careful calculations about what bulk of goods can be carried on the trade route, how the goods and the necessary supplies for the trip will be transported, and the methods by which you can protect your goods and yourself. Hence math, physics, and ROTC.
Before you’ve even left on your trading venture, you’ve invented the entire college curriculum and gotten your degree.
You’ve also invented business. A trade expedition requires more resources than one man can provide. You’d have to be really rich to accumulate a worthwhile amount of trade goods. You’d have to be really big and strong to carry them and your gear. You’d have to be the size of an elephant. And you’d have to be more skillful than elephants are with sword, dagger, spear, and bow for fighting off robbers and brigands.
Maybe Conan the Barbarian could do it. But Conan, at least as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, never struck me as a college man.
It’s surprising that anyone ever set out to trade at all. And, at first, they probably didn’t.
At first, people set out to be those robbers and brigands. They didn’t trade, they just took stuff from other people and killed them all.
Then it dawned on the robbers and brigands … “We can’t go back and take more stuff from those other people. We killed them all.”
Trade has the advantage of being repeatable. Alas, as the history of the world proves, war turns out to be repeatable too. But it takes a lot longer to recover from bleeding than it does from banking your profits.
However, there’s an aspect to trade that’s more surprising than its existence.
Trade, while never unimportant, is often—even usually—frivolous.
The earliest archeological evidence of long-distance trade is found in the Middle East and dates back as far as the end of the Ice Age in 14,000 to 12,000 B.C.
The trade involved obsidian, a volcanic glass which is found in what would become modern Turkey and which wound up in Mesopotamia.
Obsidian is useful. It can be chipped to form an extremely sharp edge and provided the best cutting tool available until the Bronze Age circa 3,300 B.C.
Yet I have my suspicions about how utilitarian this obsidian trade was. Flint, readily available in Mesopotamia, can also be chipped to a sharp edge—sharp enough for practical purposes.
But maybe not sharp enough for impractical purposes such as circumcision.
The ancient Egyptians are known to have used obsidian knives for this “rite of passage” boys had to endure when they reached puberty.
Rites of passage—however painful—are social luxuries. X-rays of Egyptian mummies indicate that circumcision was common among the upper classes and uncommon among the poor.
Obsidian was also made into decorative objects. The poor don’t decorate. Obsidian was polished into mirrors. The poor stare into a puddle when—and if—they want to know what they look like.
Plus obsidian is pretty. Flint is not.
Obsidian shows evidence of being a frivolous luxury good.
Long-distance trade was difficult, dangerous, and shallow, superficial, and inane.
Another well-documented ancient trade route, with beginnings in the sixteenth-century B.C., was devoted to traffic in amber.
Precious fossilized tree sap was brought from the Baltic region of Europe to second-millennium B.C. Mycenae and to Anatolia, the Levant, the Near East, and beyond. Examples of Baltic amber have been found in Han Dynasty tombs.
Amber is useless. The only practical application for amber is if you want to extract fossil DNA from bloodsucking mosquitoes preserved in the substance in order to clone dinosaurs and get a plot for the movie Jurassic Park. (Spoiler alert: This doesn’t turn out well.)
It’s the same with other ancient trade routes. The export of silk to Western civilizations is almost as old as the export of amber. Silk’s value in the ancient Mediterranean was equal to its weight in gold. Silk was fashion-forward in the Roman Empire and has remained so ever since. You think Hermès neckties are expensive now? They cost $150 and weigh about three ounces. They’d set you back $4,000 apiece in Imperial Rome. The Silk Road wasn’t called the “Burlap Bag Byway.”
And the spice trade wasn’t initiated because the peasants of 3,000 B.C. needed pepper in their gruel.
When Columbus bumped into the New World while trying to shortcut the spice trade, the resulting commerce was in gold, silver, and tobacco. None of which forms the basis of a healthy diet.
The truly needful and necessary products of the Americas—potatoes, corn, beans, and squash—were, at best, ballast.
The origin of trade is silly.
Jonathan Swift pointed this out in 1726 in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver voyages to a country where the horses—the “Houyhnhnms”—are civilized, highly intelligent, philosophical, and wise, while the people—the “Yahoos”—are bestial, naked, semi-tamed beasts of burden.
(Off-topic aside: It is a sure sign of Silicon Valley’s cultural illiteracy that a personal website provider would name itself “Yahoo.”)
The Yahoos behave like typical international trade customers. Swift writes:
“ … in some fields of [this] country there are certain shining stones of several colors, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond … they will dig for whole days to get them out, then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in their kennels … [My Houyhnhnm host] said he could never discover the reason for this unnatural appetite, or see how these stones could be of any use to a Yahoo … He assured me, which I also observed myself, that in the fields where these shining stones abound, the fiercest and most frequent battles [among Yahoos] are fought, occasioned by perpetual inroads of the neighboring Yahoos.”
Trade war!
But we owe the entire modern world and all its connections, comforts, and opportunities to “certain shining stones [and fabrics, and ornaments, and geew-gaws] of several colors, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond.”
Trade starts out silly, but then gets down to the serious business of consumption.
Or reasonably serious … I say as I stare into the shining screen of several colors on my Apple iPhone X, made in China.