Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Srini Kadamati's avatar

My analogy here is with “processed foods”. Processing foods (freezing, canning, grinding to a paste, etc) was a crucial invention for us. It allowed early civilizations to eat during times that were difficult to grow or hunt. Later, it eliminated the need for every single person to be a farmer / hunter.

So processed foods are “good”. But, as with everything, we took a good thing too far. Eventually we invented food products that were never really food to began with. Oreos and instant noodles are “bad” processed foods. Sure they’re helpful occasionally in a pinch, but they’re also so cheap that many Americans rarely get access to food that ever resembled fruits, veggies, meats, or starches.

So adding some qualification I think helps. There’s a flavor of “unproductive” Consumerism here, like creating a craving for products that we don’t need then building to solve it. There’s unhelpful processed foods that are junk.

Expand full comment
Telamonides's avatar

I understood "consumerism" to mean not consumption itself, but the value system (hence "ism") where people seek self-worth or identity in consumption--that is, a "consumerist" is someone who thinks of themselves primarily in terms of what they buy, rather than either what they can make (as in the classic Protestant work ethic), or in their relationships, knowledge, skills, hobbies etc. The basic argument against consumerism is that since the latter are more likely to be actually fulfilling than the former, and people have only so much time and money to spend, consumerism is a pernicious distraction. People who buy lots of kitchen gadgets they never use or books they never read are probably a little deluded about the actual value those things will give them--better to keep the money and learn to cook a new dish with your old tools, or spend time actually reading rather than shopping.

It's true that only a small fraction of the world's post-Industrial-Revolution growth in consumption has been directed to consumeristic goods, but the same could be said of many types of consumption, from Hollywood movies to nuclear weapons. Neither amounts to much as a percentage of GDP, but they could hardly be called unimportant. I guess you can criticize "consumerism" the word on the grounds that it could be confused with "consumption," but that line of argument doesn't mean anything one way or the other for consumerism the phenomenon.

That said, it's not clear to me how widespread or problematic consumerism actually is. My own family and social circle don't seem particularly consumeristic, except maybe around Christmastime when they give each other too many books. I would be interested in seeing someone really try to measure consumerism and chart its history.

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts