"The Gospel of Consumption" or Why You Can Never Have Enough Stuff

Do you really need all of that stuff? Why do you need it? Is the need based in perception or reality? Are your desires being manipulated and exploited to feed more profit to the always ravenous Corporate beasts?

This is a fascinating and detailed read on the origins of Consumerism, one of the chief reasons we are in the throes of the financial mess we have now.

The Gospel of Consumption

…despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones...

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

…According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. “Commoners,” who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as “a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work.” Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for “more work and better work” breeds “radicalism.”

Related Link:

The Two Income Trap



[edit on 7/5/08 by kosmicjack]

Of course we're being manipulated in that way and thanks to tv for that, might be stupid but that's why I only let my kids (5 and 8) to watch it only few hours a week (and I choose what channel, call me tyrant...), I explain them what is the real purpose of advertisment...but I guess it's not enough yet...wait untill I take the power from my wife...(and they call french macho )

4 years ago I sold everything I owned that wouldn't fit into 2 suitcases and a carry-on and moved to Thailand. I've been here for 4 years, now I'm happily married, live in beautiful country, work 2 days a week, and fight the Infowar 5 days a week!

www.myspace.com/sheeplerevolt

Selling everything I owned was the most freeing feeling and I haven't accumulated anything much since. The things you own own you. You think about them, use them, repair them, dust them, update them, worry about them, buy new ones, etc. etc. for every single thing until you have so much stuff, the whole lot begins to have no value.

[edit on 7-5-2008 by freight tomsen]

I was particularly interested in Kellogg's idea, which is, I supposed similar in some ways to European job-sharing.

Here are some fairly eye-opening numbers on how we are literally killing ourselves and destroying our families in order to have more stuff:

Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods—the big stuff such as cars and appliances—was thirty-two times higher. Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.

Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.