Discuss: The Gospel of Consumption

What is missing from your essay is what people my age have been shunted into since becoming adults:  debt.

I remember after high school, that if your parent or scholarships didn’t appear you aquired a government loan for college.  A high school counselor told our class that “if you go to college you will earn a million dollars”.  Of course I neglected to ask if that was net or gross.

This time period included the rapid cost increase of college tuition, price of a car, rents, real estate well beyond inflation.  Coupled with wage stagnation you can see a whole generation shakled to work that unless you declare bankruptcy and throw it off, you won’t be agitating for unions or shorter work hours any time soon.

The religious left and the secular / green left should be working together:
http://www.sabbatheconomics.org/content/index.php

These issues aren’t new: the Bible has a lot to say about exploitation of workers and the burden of debt. Consumerism is a newer phenomenon, made possible by industrialization, although it’s really just another form of idolatry (spiritual redemption through material artifacts), another thing the Bible attacks.

Maybe this might help a little:

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5590&page=0

Cheers all.... Chris

Great article.  Some of the same ground about Bernays and commercial propaganda is covered in the various UK documentary series made by Adam Curtis, principally “The Century of Self”.

As a general point though, this article’s data about ordinary people spending huge multiples on consumer goods compared to the past seems to contradict the work of bankrupcy expert Elizabeth Warren who is eager to prove that it is the rise in the cost of basic things like (not very much bigger) houses, education, medical bills, and child care since 1970 that are pushing most Americans over the edge, not consumer goods like flat screen tvs, brand label clothes, or eating out. According to Warren’s data, spending on consumer goods has actually fallen.  To back up Yankee’s comment above, Warren’s data also shows that median male income has been stagnant for over thirty years.

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Great read! I’m an undergrad student currently writing about this very topic. Does the author recommend any additional books detailing the evangelism that our consumer economy is dependent on? Thanks in advance.

Thank you for this. I don’t think that the connection between environmental protection and labor rights is clear very many people, but this article draws a clear, bright line to connect them.

The thing is, the whole econmic system has mutated to the point that it is *ABSOLUTELY* dependent on continuous economic growth. Now that the growth as stopped, there are cries of “recession! recession” coming from all corners.

Why should it be so? Where I live (Québec), we are economically punished for not willingly assimilating in the anglo-saxon “norm” of North America, so we experience regular economic downturns. A side effect is that we have seen the emergence of a distinct class of entrepreneurs that are able to frugally weather economic hard-times without having to rely on “old-boy’s” business “rescue” networks. So when our entrepreneur rise above the rest, they really kick ass (one can think of Bombardier, who in 35 years, from next to nothing, became the third largest aircraft manufacturer, and the world’s largest manufacturer of passenger railroad rolling stock, even putting to shame mighty Alstom [maker of the world’s fastest train] in it’s own backyard!).

Another positive aspect of economic downturns is the affordability of goods and services. For example, housing is quite cheap here compared to similar urban areas elsewhere in North-America. People are less concerned with housing problems and thus can live well on a lower salary, thus helping to prevent inflationary outbursts.

Frequent economic downturns make people leery of mindless, gluttonous consumption; the net result is that the bourgeois are less wealthy and do not enjoy a disparate political influence, so the government is more compelled to do what has to be done, rather than what short-term panaceas to the problème-du-jour the wealthy are able to distract the government with to profit from.