The death of consumerism?
Home » Blog » Annabel McAleer » The death of consumerism?Does the US banking crisis mean the death of consumerism? Well, first we need to understand it. These links will sort you out.
The US economy is in crisis. The collapse of huge American banking institutions over the past week has been astonishing—and somewhat confusing. I've been trying to wrap my head around it all and found a few handy links:
Why don't they just print more money? Liam Dann at the Herald has put together an idiot's guide to the credit crisis that makes a heck of a lot of sense.
The Subprime Primer presents a backgrounder to how sub-prime loans worked (or not) ... in the form of a stick-figure-cartoon.
Then there's Buy My Shit Pile, the US taxpayer response to the US government's bank bailout:
With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their 'distressed assets', ie assets that no one else wants to buy from them.
Use the form below to submit bad assets you'd like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD 'MMMbop', it's not what you can sell these items for that matters, it's what you think they are worth. The fact that you think they are worth more than anyone will buy them for is what makes them bad assets.
What has all this got to do with sustainable living in New Zealand? Well, as the Chinese curse goes, we live in interesting times. Our growing environmental and social awareness, combined with increasing global interconnectedness thanks to the digital revolution, topped off with an economic meltdown or two, looks like it's building into some profound social and cultural changes.
And when one of the world's top advertising bosses starts talking about the end of consumerism—and other ad and marketing execs start joining in—something is definitely up.
"All our instincts as clients, agencies and media owners are to encourage people to consume more—super consumption,” he told one conference. People have become used to “the aspiration that you should consume more; the aspiration that you should have a bigger car; the aspiration that you should have a number of holidays, bigger houses and multiple houses ... Our view, which is counter to what you expect our industry to argue, is that conspicuous consumption is not productive, and should be discouraged.”
The whole article is worth a read, as is the Citizen Renaissance website/online book it links to (surpisingly far-left given it's co-published by Jules Peck, director of the UK Conservative Party's Quality Of Life Policy Group).
Besides which, there's an upside to the economic crisis, writes Felipe Fernández-Armesto in the UK's Evening Standard.
A spell of austerity will concentrate our minds ... We'll start relying more on the networks of families, friendships and neighbourliness in revulsion from unrestrained individualism and the cult of competition. I hope we'll regulate the markets so that incompetent executives can no longer work up billions of dollars of debt before taxpayers have to rescue them.
And if we really learn from experience, we'll never again allow predatory directors to milk their businesses, stiff their shareholders and insult their workers with obscene differentials in pay. We may even end up happier.
