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I just picked up a copy of Affluenza (by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss) after hearing a review on Tony Biggs’ radio show. I am sure that everyone who buys a copy has a moment of cognitive dissonance when they realise the inherent contradiction in buying a book on the problems of unnecessary consumption.

So far it is proving an easy read; interesting and informative without being overly academic. My favourite paragraph so far has been:

The Olsen sisters, who visited Australia in 2003, became famous as cute 5-year old twins in a US sitcom before growing into pouting teenage entrepreneurs promoting sexy lingerie, including matching padded bras and panties to their 6- to 12-year old fans. If adults who are sexually attracted to children are called paedophiles, what do we call adults who set out to make chidren sexually attractive? Advertising executives.

Update: The book is finished, and I enjoyed it immensely. Here are three quotes that I thought were worth underlining (apologies to whoever I lend my copy of the book to next).

In earlier times, when wealthy people made decisions to live beyond their means, their financial difficulties attracted little public sympathy…Today, though, newspapers, commentators and political leaders speak as though the imagined financial difficulties of the wealthy are the result of hard times rather than inflated expectations…The real concerns of yesterday’s poor have become the imaged concerns of today’s rich. Struggle Street, it seems, has become crowded; the trouble is the new residents want to build McMansions there.

The “reduce, re-use, recycle” mantra has been widely adopted, yet all the effort has gone into the “recycling” and “re-use” messages and none into the reduce message. Reducing consumption is bad for retailers, of course. And it can even be argued that the availability of recycling bins makes it easier for some people to consume wastefully.

Increasingly, Australians go shopping for the thrill of the purchase, rather than for the anticipated pleasure to be gained from owning or using something. As one marketing strategist puts it, “We are beyond satisfying basic demands and we have moved to a tertiary level where consumption becomes leisure.”

One of the things I wondered about when I picked up this book was whether I was part of a demographic with predictable consumption patterns that was simply being marketed to. I read Adbusters, consume independent music and other media, and I’ve bought at least one other book in the last year that espouses anti-consumption ideas. Hamilton and Dennis are one step ahead of me…

The marketing industry will seize on any social trend and try to exploit it to sell more products, and it is not shy about trying to turn anticonsumption trends into their opposite. For marketers, conscious consumers are just another demographic whose psychology must be dissected in order to know how best to get them to spend against their judgement.

Chapter 9 devotes considerable space to surveys that show that people want to spend less time working and consuming and more time building relationships with friends and family.

I’m a little unsure whether this is a valid conclusion. There is a big difference between what people say they want and what they really want. Actions indicate values better than words do. Exit polls in the United States said that very few people voted for Bush, who then went on to win an overwhelming victory. If you were being surveyed and were asked if you would prefer to spend an extra half hour per day with your family or be able to buy a new car, no one is going to say that they would prefer the car. The authors acknowledge the contradiction.

The responses to the various surveys discussed here show a large proportion of Australians believe that they do not have enough money and that society places too much emphasis on money and material goods. This suggests a disjunction between people’s immediate assessment of their own financial position…and their recognition that society in general is too materialistic and motivated by money instead of “the things that really matter”.

I had two minor nit-picks with this book.

1. At one point the authors claim that the average Australian full-time worker has a disposable income of around $50k. It should be gross income. There is a big difference.

2. When making the point that materialism is harmful to children, but “the response of governments and the advertising industry is to suggest that parents take more individual responsibility for what their children are exposed to”, the authors use the example of Internet pornography to demonstrate that both sides of government put the commercial interests of industry (in this case, Internet Service Providers) ahead of the wishes of the people (page 148).

While the overall point may be valid, the example is not. The government wisely chose not to mandate a form of Internet censorship that would be costly to implement, ineffective at blocking all pornographic content, and would have a high incidence of websites being blocked incorrectly (such as sex education websites).

The survey the authors quote, showing that 93 per cent of parents of teenagers want governments to require Internet service Providers to filter content, missed the point that some ISPs offer content filtering as an option already and parents are free to purchase Net Nanny if they are unwilling to switch ISPs.

If anything, this is a better example of middle-class welfare. 93 percent of parents of teenagers (who are rich enough to own a computer) want all Australian Internet users to share the costs of their content filtering software, whether they use it or not.

Aside from these two minor nit-picks, Affluenza has been an enjoyable and educational read. I would highly recommend this book to anyone ready to jump off the excess consumption train, or who just wants to re-evaluate their spending patterns and priorities.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 24th, 2005 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.