The gods of consumption
By 
This is a very interesting essay, adopted from a book I want to read — meaning it goes on a list that at this point includes more books than all the books I’ve ever actually read, unfortunately and inevitably, and perhaps ironically given the subject of this post.
In a little-known 1958 essay reflecting on the conservation implications of the conspicuously wasteful U.S. consumer binge after World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the possibility that this “gargantuan and growing appetite” might need to be curtailed. “What of the appetite itself?,” he asks. “Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question.”
Galbraith quotes the President’s Materials Policy Commission setting out its premise that economic growth is sacrosanct. “First we share the belief of the American people in the principle of Growth,” the report maintains, specifically endorsing “ever more luxurious standards of consumption.” To Galbraith, who had just published “The Affluent Society,” the wastefulness he observed seemed foolhardy, but he was pessimistic about curtailment; he identified the beginnings of “a massive conservative reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of economic activity,” a backlash against the state taking responsibility for social direction. At the same time he was well aware of the role of advertising: “Goods are plentiful. Demand for them must be elaborately contrived,” he wrote. “Those who create wants rank amongst our most talented and highly paid citizens. Want creation — advertising — is a ten billion dollar industry.”
Or, as retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in 1955:
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.
Thus, just as immense effort was being devoted to persuading people to buy things they did not actually need, manufacturers also began the intentional design of inferior items, which came to be known as “planned obsolescence.” In his second major critique of the culture of consumption, “The Waste Makers,” Packard identified both functional obsolescence, in which the product wears out quickly and psychological obsolescence, in which products are “designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail.”
Ten billion 1958 dollars is about $100 billion in today’s money. Spending on advertising in North America has grown three times faster than that, as it is currently around $300 billion per year (Per capita wealth has also tripled in real terms over this same time frame).
Kerryn Higgs’s essay, which is adapted from her book, is full of fascinating observations about the creation of the modern consumer over the course of the 20th century. It leaves me wondering what mid-century social critics like Packard, Lebow, and Galbraith– along with unabashed propagandists for the capitalist campaign to commodify reality itself, like the inventor of the modern concept of public relations, Edward Bernays –would make of the world of 2022, whose consumerist frenzy makes that of 1950s America seem positively quaint, even as the climate change bill for that frenzy is beginning to become due.