16

Consumerism gone mad

‘The love of buying things can, by definition, provide only a transient sense of satisfaction.’

—Richard Denniss, from Curing Affluenza

‘You of course must realise that if more people did what you are currently doing, the economy would take such a nosedive that there would be no recovery. American shopping is probably the most significant prop-up to our economy and during a recession, the last thing we need is a bunch of morons trying to stop want-based shopping.’

—Comment on The Clean Bin Project blog

But it’s so cheap

On Boxing Day, while the city slept, shoppers queued outside a store waiting for a sale that wasn’t on. When they discovered their mistake, did they turn home to do something less boring instead, pride bruised perhaps, but wallets full? No. Did they kick off a riot in protest? No. They kept on queuing. So brainwashed were they by the mad idea that the most fun you can have the day after Christmas is to bargain-hunt with strangers that even in full knowledge of the total absence of said bargains, they did it anyway. ‘Bleary-eyed and clutching coffees, the people queueing outside one upmarket fashion store on Sydney’s Pitt Street began arriving before dawn and formed a line stretching 200 metres,’ reported the ABC. ‘But when the doors finally opened at 8 am, the eager shoppers rushed in only to find there were no discounts. Not that it seems to have driven the crowds away, as people kept lining up just for the tradition of it.’1 Since you’re here, and up for changing the world, might I suggest we come up with some new traditions?

Having in my close circle precisely no one who needs anything money can buy, I decide not to shop for Christmas presents this year unless they can be eaten or drunk, but heading home to Yorkshire to see my stepdad who’s been poorly, I succumb to the pressure. I don’t want to be thought a Scrooge, and the window displays look so inviting. I choose a pair of garish socks, hoping that along with a decent bottle of plonk, they will cheer him up. ‘Would you like three pairs?’ says the sales assistant.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Three pairs? Would you like three?’ he repeats.

‘I don’t think … ’ I falter. ‘I mean, why?’

It is Black Friday, he explains, referring to the American sale-shopping frenzy that occurs the day after Thanksgiving, extending over the weekend. This year it will see 137 million Americans hit the shops. Competition for bargains is fierce; skirmishes, tramplings and even shootings have become the norm. In 2011, sale shoppers at a Target store in West Virginia stepped over the body of 61-year-old Walter Vance as he lay dying of heart failure. But never mind about all that; shopping is good for us, and good for the economy. As CBS News puts it, ‘The biggest gift that the United States could get during the holiday season is robust shopping by the American consumer, who is now the primary engine powering economic performance.’2

Black Friday begins the holiday shopping period that accounts for 30 per cent of American retail sales annually. It is designed to shift stock, using the promise of deep discounts to coax customers into buying more than they came for. Like dressing up for Hallowe’en and shopping for Valentine’s gifts, the trend has taken off across the pond as well as in Australia. Hence the special offer on the socks; three pairs cost just a couple of quid more than one. It would be rude not to.

My gift won’t break the bank, but its purchase—unplanned, unnecessary—forms part of a broader trend that might. I am one of the millions who never pay off their credit card debts, although the interest is daylight robbery and accrued without good reason. The items I buy on tick are luxuries: velvet boots that make me feel like Anita Pallenberg in 1971, new beach towels, fashion books, a fancy juicing machine. No one I know calls me out on this or thinks it’s bizarre. Pointless overspending is socially sanctioned behaviour.

Our culture has normalised debt so that we can justify living like kings and queens beyond our means. We are encouraged to put the accoutrements of an A-list life we’ve been told to aspire to on the tab, in order to feed ‘the economy’. What’s to stop us? Buy now, pay later! Or, pay never! Two out of three Americans in debt either expect to live that way for the rest of their lives, or have no idea when, or if, they’ll pay it off.3 In Australia, one-quarter of all home owner-occupiers with mortgages are only paying off the interest.4 Banks are falling over themselves to give us personal loans for flash holidays and cars we cannot afford. We’ve been trained to live in the moment, to throw caution to the winds, like our governments do with climate change. To leave fretting about the future to someone else, while we get on with the important business of spoiling ourselves.

As observed by the 2017 Global Online Consumer Report, we ‘no longer “go shopping”; but literally “are shopping”—at every moment and everywhere.’5 Technology has seen to that, while the illusion of ‘free’ or ‘cheap’ credit is aspiration’s great enabler. Everyone wants to keep up with someone.

As George Monbiot points out in one of his brilliant, system-knocking columns for The Guardian, ‘If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment.’6 This problem is not confined to the wealthy. The poor, he writes, ‘can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.’ I love George Monbiot. He’s unafraid to examine a thing in the bright light. Most of us don’t care to. Or dare to, because we can’t afford to bite the hand that feeds us, can we? Not with the credit card bill for the velvet boots.

Peak stuff

The most obvious solution is: if we cannot afford them, don’t buy the boots in the first place. It shouldn’t be so hard. We are creatures of free will, are we not? With the ability to act logically, given the facts, which are: that we have too much already, and that in privileged, post-industrial countries we have reached ‘peak stuff’. As we run out of space in our wardrobes, cupboards, garages and car boots, the storage market booms. On the rare occasions when I visit the facility that charges me $150 a month to store our excess bedding, Christmas decorations and mystery boxes, I notice others like me, disconsolately pushing around metal trollies piled with junk. We avoid eye contact; we are ashamed.

When I speak at sustainable fashion events, I often mention the supposedly shocking truth that the average woman wears less than 40 per cent of what’s in her wardrobe and, depending on which stat you prefer, wears an item of clothing just four, seven or ten times before giving it the heave-ho. That we are essentially buying clothes to throw away. But are we really shocked, or just pretending to be? Because after four years of campaigning on this issue, scores of eBay sales and multiple trips to Vinnie’s, my own wardrobe still harbours Narnia-like secrets. There could be a goat living in the back of it for all I know.

For me, reducing and reusing is an endless seesaw—I sell and donate things but justify acquiring more party frocks or picture frames or table-cloths because they’re vintage (no virgin resources, guilt free!) or beautifully made by an ethical designer I’m keen to support. Old habits linger. Culture is slow to change. When you’ve spent your whole life in acquisition mode, doing the opposite takes effort, and sometimes you can’t summon the energy. Sometimes you buy three pairs of socks.

In 2017 I worked on a project for National Op Shop Week in Australia with the Salvos charity stores. Our mission was to prove that ‘second-hand is not second best’ by curating a pop-up shop in an art gallery in a hip ’hood. It was easy to find wonderful preloved things in Salvos’ suburban branches: a genuine Prada handbag, a pair of Christian Louboutin platforms with lipstick-red soles, a 1950s paste jewellery set in its original box. I combed these places with their in-house stylist Faye de Lanty, who came up with the concept of in-store ‘boutiques’ so that less confident op-shoppers might be delivered from rummaging. She told me donations include loads of designer fashion in perfectly good nick. One woman read about our event and offered to donate some loot; de Lanty went to investigate and returned with a whole rail of top-end designer fashion, either barely worn or brand new with the tags still on. I don’t know this woman’s story, why she’d bought all this stuff and was passing it on (and it was very kind of her—she could have sold it for a tidy profit) but it seemed to me to illustrate a glaring truth: we are full to burst, like Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Any more will destroy us, not to mention the planet.

Between 2000 and 2015, global clothing production approximately doubled,7 driven by fast fashion in mature economies and rising middle-class affluence in growing ones. In Australia, Europe and North America, we’re buying more clothes than ever before, and discarding them more quickly. The systems are not yet in place to capture most of this waste and turn it into a resource. Mechanical processes can shred pure cotton or wool fabrics and use that damaged fibre to make new yarn, but textiles woven from it tend to be of lower quality than the original. We’re only at the beginning of refining processes that can chemically recycle mixed-fibre textiles. And of course all of this costs extra. According to the Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M, which began introducing in-store recycling bins in 2013, only 0.1 per cent of all clothing collected by charities and take-back schemes around the world is recycled into new textiles.8 Charity stores can and do feed used garments back into the system, but too much still goes to waste. Just 15 per cent of what’s donated to Salvos is suitable for resale in their stores. Some of what’s left ends up as industrial rags. Some gets baled and sent to Africa, where most second-hand shoppers haven’t the means to be picky (and the flood of drossy used-clothing imports from the global north is decimating local textiles industries). In the United States, 84 per cent of discarded clothing ends up in landfill or the incinerator.

Fashion provides an interesting case study, but the problem of producing goods designed to be bought, used fleetingly then discarded goes way beyond a clothing. As part of the Anthropocene Working Group, scientists are trying to quantify the entirety of the ‘stuff’ produced by humankind, ever: all the plastic, all the broken Ikea furniture, dead computers and car parts that accumulate in rubbish tips; consumer goods great and small, right through to infrastructure like railroads and buildings. They call this system the ‘technosphere’ (as opposed to the biosphere), and estimate that the man-made stuff within it amounts to around thirty trillion tonnes. Sometimes it feels like most of it’s in my office.

The lie that growth is always good

Conventional wisdom has it that a successful economy, and therefore society, is one that sees perpetual growth of GDP, but voices of dissent are beginning to be heard in the corridors of power. According to Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, it has long been recognised that GDP, which is supposed to measure the value of output of goods and services, ‘may be a poor measure of well-being, or even market activity.’9 Its metrics are too narrow and easily distorted. ‘If a few bankers get much richer,’ he explains, ‘average income can go up, even as most individuals’ income is declining.’

Until recently, anyone suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be aiming for continuous growth, let alone that the current incarnation of the capitalist system might have run its useful course, was dismissed as a dangerous communist, freegan or flighty utopian crank. But a system that worked in 1945 faces a whole new set of circumstances today. Technology is fundamentally altering the scope and possibility of human interaction and transactions. The gap between haves and have-nots is widening. Populations are growing, resources dwindling, and the safety nets of the postwar welfare systems are buckling under the strain. In such a context, economists are compelled to consider how the old structure is holding up, even when governments don’t care to. (There are exceptions: in October 2017, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s newly elected Prime Minister, was asked in a television interview, ‘On a scale of one to ten, one being a complete disaster and ten being a rollicking success, where are we at with capitalism in New Zealand?’ Ardern answered, ‘Has it failed our people in recent times? Yes.’10)

The system is out of whack; it’s not benefitting the majority. ‘There is no doubt that the cycle of production, consumption, disposal, recycling and production creates economic activity, jobs and, for some in the supply chain, wealth,’ writes Australian economist Richard Denniss in Curing Affluenza.11 ‘But does this process in any way ensure the efficient allocation of scarce resources? Is throwing away functional goods really a good way to “make the economy strong”?’ He thinks not. ‘Modern capitalism relies on billions of people searching for new products that will fill the hole in their lives that was briefly plugged by the last purchase. The banks, the manufacturers, the advertisers and the retailers all make their fortune by selling us the dream that “there’s happiness in them there hills”.’ Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor slide further into debt.

Those in power tend to have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, so they keep peddling the old Keynesian platitudes—that it’s our duty to spend, that if we don’t, the paradox of thrift will kick in causing spiralling recessions; that the market will do right by us; and that cutting taxes for the rich is good for everyone—but any fool can see there is something wrong when the way we do things promotes high levels of income inequality, traps those worst off in debt, encourages cronyism and fails to protect the environment.

While living standards keep rising in developing economies (despite all that food insecurity, since 1990 there has been a dramatic reduction in extreme poverty globally),12 in established ones the gap between rich and poor keeps on widening. The World Bank—hardly a radical organisation—warns that income inequality ‘is constraining national economies and destabilizing global collaboration in ways that put humanity’s most critical achievements and aspirations at risk.’13

The richest 1 per cent own as much wealth as everyone else combined. In 2017, eight men (including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Amancio Ortega) owned the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity.14 Gates, Microsoft’s founder who at the time of writing is worth over US$90 billion according to Forbes, thinks people like him ‘should pay significantly higher taxes’.15

‘Left unchecked, growing inequality threatens to pull our societies apart,’ writes Deborah Hardoon in the Oxfam briefing paper An Economy for the 99%:

It increases crime and insecurity, and undermines the fight to end poverty. It leaves more people living in fear and fewer in hope. From Brexit to the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a worrying rise in racism and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics, there are increasing signs that more and more people in rich countries are no longer willing to tolerate the status quo. Why would they, when experience suggests that what it delivers is wage stagnation, insecure jobs and a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots? The challenge is to build a positive alternative—not one that increases divisions.16

What might a new economic model look like? What if we introduced new measures of success? Health, for example, or happiness? Generosity? If we measured the success of our economy by how many people volunteered, or how many trees were planted? By how much time citizens got to spend with their families?

Tim Jackson, a British ‘ecological economist’, suggests we focus on wellbeing. ‘What does it mean to be well? It means that we have our health, that we have a good level of nutrition—of course, very material demands—but beyond that it also means that we feel secure, that we enjoy the love of our families, that we are strong in our community, that we have a sense of meaning and purpose, that we have creative goals, that our energy in the world is useful to society,’ he says.17 ‘When you think about these things, then it seems very clear that the wellbeing economy consists of care and craft and culture and creativity, and actually these tasks bring us into wellbeing and they also deliver wellbeing to other people.’ He acknowledges there are ‘still some practical things to solve’—what shape is such an economy?—but he says those should now be the focus of our economists, politicians and business leaders. ‘In some ways that’s a very nice place to be: we can see the means, we can see the end and we can develop, and we can begin to build it.’

Richard Denniss says we may have change if we want it. It’s not as if we’d be breaking the rules:

There is nothing in any economics textbook to tell us what our national goals should be. While talk of maximising growth, balancing the budget, increasing exports and improving national security all sound like answers to the question ‘What should we do?’, they aren’t. They tell us nothing about what we think we need more of, what we think we can do with less of, and how the benefits of production should be distributed.18

As Joseph Stiglitz says, ‘any good measure of how well we are doing must also take account of sustainability.’19 It is not just that we humans are too greedy, consuming too much, but also that there are so very many of us. The planet isn’t getting any bigger. In 2018 the global population is about 7.6 billion. There’s a website called Worldometers that shows the number of births rise in real time. It’s mesmerising to watch the numbers tick over. The deaths climb too, but in much lower numbers. According to UN projections, by 2050 there will be 9.8 billion of us competing for the Earth’s finite resources.

Using UN data, the Global Footprint Network measures the yearly ecological resource use and resource capacity of nations and calculates the deficit. Every year, the service records the point at which the Earth went into the red. Currently humanity is using the equivalent of 1.7 Earths. In 2018, Earth Overshoot Day fell on 1 August. There’s even an online tool you can use to measure your own footprint, as an individual, and find out ‘How many planets do we need if everyone lives like you?’ (visit footprintcalcuator.org). I found it sobering. While I barely drive, am energy efficient at home, shop local and am trying to reduce, reuse and go plastic-free, I fly a lot. Air-travel emissions are a major contributor to global warming (the International Civil Aviation Organisation warns that they could gobble up a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050) which is why The New York Times warns that for apartment dwellers who don’t drive much, flying is likely your ‘biggest carbon sin’.20

North Circular

Dame Ellen MacArthur knows what it’s like to worry about resource use. ‘The more I learned, the more I started to change my own life. I started travelling less, flying less, doing less. It felt like actually doing less was what we had to do,’ she says in her TED talk about how she went from being the fastest person to sail around the world solo in 2005 to one of the foremost proponents of the circular economy today. Doing less, she says, didn’t feel like the right solution. ‘It felt like we were buying ourselves time, we were eking things out a bit longer. Even if everybody changed, it wouldn’t solve the problem. It wouldn’t fix the system. It was vital in the transition, but what fascinated me was: In the transition to what? What could actually work?’21

MacArthur started thinking this through at sea, because on her boat her supplies were finite. Back on dry land, she became convinced that she must grab her moment of fame and use it to try to change the world. The more she researched, the more obvious it became to MacArthur that we need to transition to a circular economy, whereby both biological and technical nutrients are fed back into the system in a continuous loop. Given finite materials, a ‘take, make, dispose’ system will eventually shut down. This was not politics; it was physics—and common sense.

I interviewed MacArthur in 2018 at the annual Copenhagen Fashion Summit, where the fashion industry comes together to try to figure out ways to be more sustainable. Our current linear model is unsustainably wasteful, she told me. ‘It is a global problem which needs a global solution. This is not a part of a business that needs to change; it’s the very nature of the entire economy. And it’s a conversation for everyone. This isn’t a conversation in a box about Nature and the environment; this is our global economy that can’t function in the long term.’22

Like William McDonough and Michael Braungart, key thinkers behind the influential Cradle to Cradle concept, MacArthur advocates for changing the way products are made and systems operate to design out ‘structural waste’, thereby reducing environmental impacts and increasing wellbeing. ‘Neither the health of natural systems, nor an awareness of their delicacy, complexity, and interconnectedness, have been part of the industrial design agenda,’ say McDonough and Braungart. ‘[But] instead of presenting an inspiring and exciting vision of change, conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do.’23

I also interviewed McDonough in Copenhagen. ‘People don’t realise the power of their own ability to create,’24 he told me during a thrilling roller-coaster of a conversation that covers everything from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s theories of Nature’s ‘ineffable essence’ to how technology entrances us. ‘Is Nature here for our use?’ asked McDonough. ‘That’s a powerful concept that’s been around forever; that’s dominion. But stewardship is implicit in dominion, because you can’t have dominion over something that’s dead. I know. It’s a sad fact. We’re in the era of the Anthropocene [and] we’re affecting the planet.’ He describes climate change and environmental destruction as ‘our de facto plan’, not because we intend it, but because our actions cause these things unthinkingly. ‘We need another plan.’ Luckily, he’s got one: ‘Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power—economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.’

Another exciting thinker in this space is Jeremy Rifkin, an economist who advises the likes of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In his book and film The Third Industrial Revolution, Rifkin outlines his theories for reshaping the global economy for the future. He thinks millennials are uniquely placed ‘to rethink the economic assumptions that govern how we live on this planet and find new approaches to innovation, business, and employment’.25 He suggests we build a ‘radical new sharing economy’ out of the ashes of the clunky, old manufacturing-based one. He says we need a new, compelling economic vision for the world, we need to deploy it quick, and we need to get off carbon in four decades, everywhere. And he thinks we can:

In the sharing economy, ownership gives way to access, sellers and buyers are replaced by providers and users, social capital becomes as important as market capital, consumerism is upended by sustainability, and quality-of-life indicators become more important than GDP. The sharing economy can become a circular economy in which goods and services are redistributed among multiple users, dramatically reducing society’s ecological footprint.26

Could we really stop wasting and start sharing and caring about the environment, and not just between ourselves but on a mass, organised scale? Could we?