The future of consumer society : prospects for

sustainability in the new economy First Edition

Cohen pdf download
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-future-of-consumer-society-prospects-for-sustainability-in-the-
new-economy-first-edition-cohen/

★★★★★ 4.7/5.0 (43 reviews) ✓ 164 downloads ■ TOP RATED

"Amazing book, clear text and perfect formatting!" - John R.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK
 The future of consumer society : prospects for
sustainability in the new economy First Edition Cohen pdf
download

TEXTBOOK EBOOK TEXTBOOK FULL

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide TextBook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Collection Highlights

On the Future Prospects for Humanity First Edition Martin

Rees

Facets of India's Economy and Her Society Volume II:

Current State and Future Prospects Raghbendra Jha

The Political Economy of Robots: Prospects for Prosperity

and Peace in the Automated 21st Century 1st Edition Ryan
Kiggins (Eds.)

Blockchain, Fintech, and Islamic Finance. Building the

Future in the New Islamic Digital Economy Hazik Mohamed
Biomaterials for Organ and Tissue Regeneration New
Technologies and Future Prospects 1st Edition Nihal Vrana
(Editor)

The new regulatory framework for consumer dispute

resolution 1st Edition Cortes

A New Platform for Edge Mode Manipulations in the Quantum

Hall Effect Yonatan Cohen

The Platform Economy How Japan Transformed the Consumer

Internet Marc Steinberg

All in: Why Sustainability Is the Future of Business Chris

Coulter
The Future of Consumer Society
The Future of
Consumer Society
Prospects for Sustainability
in the New Economy

Maurie J. Cohen

1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Maurie J. Cohen 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938015
ISBN 978–0–19–876855–5
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Preface

It may seem unwarranted—perhaps even bizarre—to devote an entire

book to the future of consumer society. A casual glance around would
appear to suggest that consumerism is securely entrenched in the United
States and other affluent countries. The shopping malls are packed with a
seemingly inexhaustible array of come-hither splendors with new bedaz-
zling offerings arriving every day. We are continually surrounded by
alluring promotional inducements celebrating the virtues of a world of
limitless goods. Moreover, television, which has long been a powerful tool
for impelling mass consumption, has, in its most recent incarnation,
become untethered and completely portable. Numerous Internet plat-
forms now deliver a relentless stream of marketing appeals to handheld
and conveniently mobile devices. Most indications are that consumer
society as a dominant system of social organization is more deeply and
extensively rooted than ever before. Its most ardent proponents assert that
a consumption-driven economy, supercharged with abundant product
choice and ample consumer credit, is the height of human achievement.
Given these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand that our
political priorities have moved in a similar direction. Government officials
loudly champion the importance—indeed the absolute necessity—of
economic growth premised on more rapid and expansive turnover of
retail inventories. To do otherwise, it is axiomatically stated, is to risk
dispatch into oblivion. When consumer society shows any sign of
faltering, policymakers avidly rush to the rescue with new and evermore
innovative subventions. Trapped by contemporary logic, activists and
other visionaries of social change have had great difficulty seeing beyond
the strictures of extant conditions.
The point of departure for this book is that the last several hundred
years of Anglo-European history have been marked by three distinct,
but inevitably overlapping and ultimately persistent, systems of social
organization. Premodern society was structured in accordance with an
agrarian logic and provisioning practices were determined by agricultural
modes of production and consumption. As the Industrial Revolution
began to gather momentum in the later part of the eighteenth century,
vi PREFACE

agrarianism was supplanted by a new underlying rationale predicated on

manufacturing and its allied activities. Large numbers of people were
uprooted from the countryside and forced to remake their lives in
burgeoning, fetid cities. Predominant lifestyles arranged largely around
subsistence agriculture gradually dissipated as former farmers were
increasingly absorbed by the expanding industrial economy. These new
arrangements required most workers to sell their labor in exchange for a
wage and to use the proceeds to purchase the rudiments with which to
maintain themselves.
The acquisition of advanced training, especially in engineering or other
professional pursuits like accounting and law, provided a pathway out of
industrial poverty and more fortunate laborers elevated their status suf-
ficiently to join the ranks of a growing middle class. During the second
half of the nineteenth century, the first recognizable department stores
were established and these early “palaces of consumption” quickly
became destinations that offered new and unparalleled opportunities for
both leisurely diversion and material acquisition. A powerful feedback
response developed whereby the enlarging manufacture of consumer
goods gave rise to widening opportunities to appropriate them.
Initially during the 1930s, and more intently in the decades following
World War II, consumer society began to solidify into a robust and
highly resilient assemblage of social practices and cultural sensibilities
that in due course supplanted the preexisting order of industrial produc-
tion. This progression was actively augmented by government policies
that raised working incomes, provided for retirement pensions, and
enabled construction of new transportation infrastructure and housing
alternatives. It was further abetted by demographic trends that delivered
an expanding cohort of alacritous consumers at the same time that
technologies to enable the mass distribution of goods were reaching
commercial scalability.
While commentators like Vance Packard, John Kenneth Galbraith,
and Rachel Carson cast a discerning and critical eye on these unfolding
routines, it was not until the 1970s that serious questions about the
durability of consumer society began to surface. The onset in the United
States of economic conditions of so-called stagflation (the troubling
combination of elevated unemployment and high inflation), in part
prompted by curtailment of international oil flows in the wake of the
1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its neighbors, sapped the
 PREFACE vii

capacity of consumers to keep the stock turning over. Austerity con-

verged with the radical politics still resonant from the prior decade
and prompted a wave of defiance to prevalent consumerist lifestyles.
Ultimately, this resistance proved fleeting and by the early 1980s
consumer exuberance was again fashionable, aided to a large degree by
relaxation of regulatory controls on financial markets. More permissive
lending practices and the popularization of readily available consumer
credit effectively re-energized enthusiasm for consumption. These devel-
opments combined with heightened fixation on social status and cultural
distinction in an era of increasing income inequality to further the
transition to a system of social organization premised on consumerism.
We are again reaching a point where the prospects for consumer
society are once more becoming a subject of topical debate. If we dig
below the spectacle that surrounds prevalent and widely lauded lifestyles,
we find that the foundations of consumerist lifestyles are becoming shaky
and less reliable. To expose these underpinnings, it is first necessary to
acknowledge that consumerism is the manifestation of a certain set of
social circumstances that have been vigorously amplified to achieve a set
of predetermined outcomes. More pointedly, consumer society has been
engineered to ameliorate the fundamental problem of industrial over-
production and there is nothing inexorable about its perpetuation.
As industrialism evolved during the nineteenth century and the scale of
production expanded to previously unprecedented proportions, it became
apparent that affluent consumers could be relied on to absorb only a
fraction of the goods spilling out of manufactories of the day. In other
words, the pace of production increased much faster than consumption
capacity. In contemporary terms, the economy suffered from the inter-
linked conundrum of surplus production and insufficient demand. To
avoid the accumulation of unsold output it was necessary to expand
consumer markets by making it possible for widening circles of workers
to acquire the fruits of their own labor. While significant headway was
made addressing this dilemma (primarily through raising wages and
decreasing retail prices), it has never been completely resolved. Even
today, producers are regularly compelled to devise more inventive ways
to ensure the profitable sale of increasing volumes of goods. We can
conceive of this imbalance as the paradox of ever-increasing productivity.
Another way out of this trap calls for reducing working hours
and dampening the propensity to generate excess production. Various
viii PREFACE

strategies to this end have been pursued in Europe in recent decades

including generous time off for extended vacations and parental leave, as
well as opportunities for job-sharing and early retirement. While there is a
common tendency to view these interventions as the result of unre-
strained paternalism, a more hardheaded interpretation is that it is simply
sound economic and social policy to more equitably distribute employ-
ment among workers and to restrain tendencies toward overproduction.
The United States has encountered this same fork in the road on
several occasions: first in the 1920s, again in the 1950s, and once more
during the 1970s. In each instance, the branch toward less work and
more leisure was purposefully not taken. The reasons for repeatedly
throttling national capacity to consume in order to keep up with expand-
ing production are, of course, complicated, but all of the usual suspects
have played their part: shortsighted policymakers, avaricious corpor-
ations, and imprudent labor unions. There are now indications that
this recurrent design flaw is emerging yet again and calling into question
the durability of consumer society.
This book examines several expressions of this problem—the emer-
gence of contingent employment practices as embodied in the putative
“sharing economy,” the quest for more personally rewarding forms of
provisioning inherent in the so-called Maker Movement, and the desire
by some producers and consumers to valorize goods with reputed local
provenance. The volume also examines what may be the greatest threat
of all to consumer society, namely the likelihood that a new generation of
digital technologies will further undermine the livelihoods of working-
and middle-class households and drastically degrade their ability to
continue to uphold their consumption obligations.
* * *
Claims of transition and movement toward a new system of social
organization have been in the air for some time. In 1984, Michael
Piore and Charles Sabel argued in their seminal book, The Second
Industrial Divide, that the era of large integrated manufacturing was
ending and was being replaced by configurations of nimble firms con-
gregated in vibrant industrial districts and able to respond promptly to
dynamic changes in fashion and consumer demand through “flexible
specialization.”1 An especially celebrated exemplar was the northern
Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, home to dozens of small knitwear
manufacturers producing stylish, high-value garments for international
 PREFACE ix

markets. This work triggered a wave of interest (that continues until

today) in “post-industrialism” and the related concept of “post-Fordism”
became familiar across a wide range of the social sciences. A decade later,
Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio and Jeremy Rifkin provocatively
announced that customary opportunities for labor were disappearing
and we faced a future without work.2 These two themes—socio-industrial
transformation and the disappearance of jobs—have recently acquired
contemporary salience due to a new wave of efficiency-driven changes in
the organization of production and the commercial advent of novel digital
technologies.3
At the same time, public misgivings have emerged in some quarters
about the high ecological costs of consumerist lifestyles. Environmentalists
and others have, of course, been drawing attention since the nineteenth
century to the voracious demand, in terms of both energy and raw
materials, necessary to maintain economies organized around resource
throughput. The debate reached a certain tipping point in 1992 when at
the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in
Rio de Janeiro, 172 nations (including 108 heads of state) convened to
endorse the notion that “the major cause of the continued deterioration
of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption
and production.” In the three decades since this historic event, the risks
that consumerist lifestyles impose on the biosphere have only grown
more acute. These threats center not only on anthropogenic climate
change, but also include increasing water scarcity in many regions, soil
degradation, and toxicity as well as more ordinary and long-standing
concerns arising from air and water pollution. This situation has
prompted development of a research and policy agenda organized
around the idea of sustainable consumption which seeks to reduce
resource utilization while enabling a growing number of people around
the world to lead good and dignified lives.
Separate from the need to pursue more sustainable consumption,
there are a number of developments that prompt skepticism about the
ability of consumer society to hold up in the future. These issues include
demographic change, growing income inequality, economic stagnation,
and political fractiousness, which are simultaneously combining to erode
the enabling conditions that give rise to consumerist lifestyles. While
uncertainties surrounding this array of factors are variously acknow-
ledged, there seems to be little recognition of how integral they are to
x PREFACE

reproducing our predominant system of social organization. This under-

appreciation, I argue, stems from inadequate comprehension of transi-
tional dynamics and how, from a prospective vantage point, it can be
extremely difficult to discern either the trajectory along which we are
proceeding or the eventual destination of our journey.
The truth of the matter is that we will likely need to learn to live,
perhaps for some time, with considerable ambiguity. It is useful to keep
in mind that the decline of agrarianism and the subsequent rise of
industrialism was by no means straightforward and seamless. More
readily tangible evidence of the disarray that accompanies societal trans-
formation, and the inevitable incompleteness of any transition, is pro-
vided by the abandoned hulks that still stand in many former industrial
districts and the dispirited people that often occupy proximate areas.
This book seeks to provide a clear-eyed appraisal of the extremely
challenging circumstances in which we now find ourselves.
* * *
My own biography is evocative of this narrative about the unremitting
entrenchment and gradual dissolution of consumer society in the United
States. After being expelled by the Czar’s paramilitaries from the Pale of
Settlement (part of present-day Ukraine), my paternal grandfather
passed through Ellis Island and in subsequent years sponsored the arrival
of several dozen relatives. My father came to the country as a young
child, attended Harvard for a spell, and during the 1930s enlisted his two
brothers to open a retail housewares business in Newark, New Jersey,
which was at the time a humming industrial center within sight of New
York City. Dubbing their enterprise Imperial Outfitters (a vainglorious
name that by most accounts derives from a lucky bet on a horse), they
sold a wide assortment of merchandise to customers who were just
developing a taste for consumer society.
Their business model was not particularly innovative, but it did help to
resolve an endemic predicament of the early years of mass consumption,
notably how to distribute goods before consumer credit became widely and
easily available. Imperial Outfitters traded in refrigerators, washing
machines, radios, televisions, furniture, bedsheets, window curtains, slip-
covers, cutlery, dinnerware, and much more, all on an installment-payment
basis. The business was located in a three-story building on Newark’s major
commercial thoroughfare with a showroom at street level and administra-
tive offices on the two upper floors. It was, though, not walk-in customers
 PREFACE xi

that Imperial Outfitters primarily sought to attract. Its mainstay clientele

lived either in immigrant enclaves in the manufacturing cities of northern
New Jersey or dwindling agricultural hamlets scattered across the rest of
the state and had—due to insuperable language, cultural, or geographic
barriers—little recourse to other retail options.
Housebound women longing for modern conveniences relied on
Imperial Outfitters salesmen who would arrive each week in road-
battered sedans that doubled as roving showrooms. The commercial
strategy relied on these intrepid road warriors peddling a continuous
stream of home furnishings, appliances, and other household accoutre-
ments. Customers would make a nominal down payment and then
commit to weekly cash installments to satisfy the remaining cost. Imper-
ial Outfitters kept its prices relatively high to compensate for the large
number of delinquent accounts and the inevitability of deadbeats who
vanished without leaving a forwarding address.
Saturday was always a big day on the sales routes because paychecks
came at the end of the workweek and everyone felt a bit flush. The
primary task, of course, was to ensure that customers booked a new
purchase before the prior deliveries had been completely paid off,
thus ensuring a continuously revolving debt. Given that most Imperial
Outfitters’ regulars had no access to alternative sources of credit, it was
only the least adept salesmen who let people off the hook.
Throughout the early postwar period, my father and his brothers
achieved reasonable commercial success. The business became a family
enterprise. One uncle managed the stockroom, an aunt kept the accounts,
and various cousins suffered the misfortune of conscription as summer
employees. My mother started working at Imperial Outfitters as a student
fresh out of high school and quickly developed a fearsome reputation for
chasing down overdue accounts and exhorting recalcitrant shipping
agents to maintain punishing delivery schedules. This story, though, has
a predictable ending.
By the 1960s, increasing automobile ownership had begun to break
down consumer isolation, new highways opened up vast suburban
hinterlands and property developers built warehouse-sized shopping
malls, and, most importantly, consumer credit became readily accessible
and rendered installment plans obsolete. A new retail landscape was
rapidly coming into view and it did not include affable salesmen with
catalogs and payment books. This marketplace also had little use for the
xii PREFACE

homespun radio advertisements—complete with studio vocalists singing

breezy jingles—that my father commissioned and aired on local radio
stations. Demise during the following decade came through a sequence
of spasmodic contractions, but in due course Imperial Outfitters, and
numberless other businesses like it that played pivotal roles in the
transition to mass consumer society, disappeared from the scene.
* * *
This book, in many respects, is the result of a collective journey.
Ironically enough, the seeds for this project were cast in 2013 while
I was a member of a study commission convened by the China Council
for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. Our
report sought to contribute to a discussion taking place in China at the
time on how to more effectively manage the environmental dimensions
of the country’s relentless transition toward consumption-driven life-
styles. I am grateful for the invitation to contribute to the work of the
commission and the opportunity to collaborate with Michael Kuhndt,
Helio Mattar, Oksana Mont, and Patrick Schroeder. I also had the timely
occasion to present some preliminary ideas on a transition beyond
consumer society at a stimulating conference on modernization theories
organized by Chuanqi He of the China Center for Modernization
Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Critical to both the conception and completion of this book has been
ongoing work with colleagues on the Executive Board of the Sustainable
Consumption Research and Action and Initiative (SCORAI). Launched in
2008 as a humble effort to create a network of North American researchers
interested in absolute reductions in energy and material consumption,
SCORAI has become an accidental success story of completely unexpected
proportions. From an informal meeting around a conference table in
Boston, the initiative has swelled in size to include today more than 800
academics, policymakers, and activists and to spawn affiliated networks in
Europe, China, and Israel. My appreciation to Jeffrey Barber, Halina
Szejnwald Brown, John Stutz, Philip Vergragt, and, more recently, Emily
Huddart-Kennedy, for their tireless support and valued friendship.
I have also benefited from affiliation with the Tellus Institute and the
colleagues that assemble under its organizational umbrella. In an aca-
demic world that these days is too often caught in the grip of instrumental
credentialism, unalloyed careerism, and political opportunism, the Tellus
Institute is a cherished sanctuary for unconstrained thought and action.
 PREFACE xiii

I am especially appreciative of the support of Paul Raskin, Richard Rosen,

John Stutz, Alan White, and James Goldstein.
An early draft of Chapter 3 on the sharing economy was written
during the fall of 2014 while I was a visiting researcher at the Sustainable
Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester. My thanks to
Dale Southerton and Andy McMeekin for facilitating these arrange-
ments and to SCI for convening a seminar that allowed me to discuss
this work at a very preliminary stage. I additionally had the good fortune
to receive a visiting fellowship from the Research Institute for Humanity
and Nature in Japan. Steven McGreevy was a wonderful host and I would
have never survived without the generous assistance of Yuko Matsuoka
and Haruka Shinkura. Though the book discusses the case of Japan in
only very cursory terms, the country has shaped my understanding of the
evolutionary arc of consumer society in important ways.
Chapter 6 focuses on how a new generation of digital technologies is
likely to upend demand for human labor in coming decades and con-
tribute to significant disruption of established consumption practices.
This work was supported by a Lewis O. Kelso Fellowship from the School
of Labor Relations and Management at Rutgers University. I owe a huge
debt to Joseph Blasi for encouraging me to consider how cooperatives
and broad-based stock ownership might help to relieve some of the
distress of the pending transition beyond consumer society and to
Laura Hanson Schlachter for getting me up to speed on labor-union
sponsorship of worker cooperatives.
During the extended period that this book was under development,
I had the opportunity to present portions of its gestating contents at the
Stockholm School of Economics, Chalmers University of Technology,
Vienna University of Economics and Business, the University of Borås,
the Garrison Institute, and the Tellus Institute as well as at workshops and
conferences at Utrecht University, Fordham Law School, Renmin Uni-
versity, Shanghai University, Kingston University London, and Fudan
University. My heartfelt thanks to the organizers of these events and the
participants for their serious engagement and thoughtful questions.
This book has also benefited from valuable discussions with several
extremely perceptive and engaging students including Karin Dobernig,
Jeanine Cava Rogers, and Esthi Zipori. The prior description of Imperial
Outfitters is partly based on the reflections of Ronald Cohen and Diane
Cohen and borrows shamelessly from a furtive family memoir.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2016, SPi

xiv PREFACE

Several publications over the last few years prompted me to begin to

synthesize the large body of literature encompassed by this book. The
volume draws on cogitations that first appeared in Futures, the Great
Transition Initiative, and the Green European Journal and chapters that
I contributed to books including the Handbook of Research on Sustain-
able Consumption (edited by Lucia Reisch and John Thøgersen) and
Global Modernization Review: New Discoveries and Theories Revisited
(edited by Chuanqi He and Alberto Martinelli). Preliminary efforts to
flesh out some of the ideas in this volume also appeared as postings to the
blog affiliated with the journal Sustainability: Science, Practice, and
Policy. Thanks to Amy Forrester and Ethan Goffman for help on this
front. Early consideration of the notion of multi-stakeholder cooperati-
vism that I discuss in Chapter 6 was first published in a contribution that
I wrote for the website Shareable. Its founder and editor Neal Gorenflo
originally brought this concept to my attention and I appreciate his
willingness to make space for my thoughts on the subject when they
were at a rudimentary stage of development.
At Oxford University Press, Adam Swallow was an early champion of
this book when it was little more than a proposal and Aimee Wright and
Alex Guyver were extremely helpful in shepherding the project to com-
pletion. Susan Frampton and Hayley Buckley scrupulously copyedited the
manuscript and Premkumar Kaliamoorthi effectively managed produc-
tion of this volume.
Moving for a moment from the human to the canine world, I owe a
large debt of gratitude to Ruby, a Border collie-Labrador mix, who
allowed me to accompany her on daily rambles through the woods
down the road from my house. Indeed, sections of this text were con-
ceived while hiking the trails and various passages were initially scribbled
in a notebook while my dog patiently stalked her next squirrel. If not for
Ruby’s insistence to get out every morning, this book would not have
seen the light of day.
Finally, my wife, Patricia, has strived tenaciously to encourage me to
think about consumer society through a sociological lens but bears no
responsibility for my obstinacy and overall inadequate performance as a
student. Jeremy, Alexander, and Lydia have endured a distracted father
for longer than is reasonable and I dedicate this book to them.
Princeton, New Jersey
March 2016
Contents

List of Figures xvii

1. Introduction 1
2. Fathoming Consumer Society 15
3. The (Mostly) Empty Promise of the Sharing Economy 44
4. The Mass-Market Maker Movement 70
5. Localization Fallacies 92
6. Consumption in the Era of Digital Automation 115
7. Conclusion 133

Notes 139
Index 199
List of Figures

2.1 Median age of the population, United States, 1950–2100 28

2.2 Real median household income, United States, 1984–2014 29
2.3 Median income of “thrivers,” “middle class,” and
“stragglers,” United States, 1988–2014 30
2.4 Gini coefficient for households, United States, 1965–2015 31
2.5 Percentage of 16–24-year-olds with driver’s licenses,
United States, 1963–2011 32
2.6 Vehicle miles driven per year, United States, 1984–2013 33
2.7 Homeownership rate, United States, 1980–2015 34
3.1 Provisioning typology 53
3.2 Provisioning archetypes 54
3.3 Social organization of urban mobility options 55
 1
Introduction

It is both poignant and historically significant that one of the more

dramatic, if now largely forgotten, moments of the Cold War occurred
not in a crisis room but in the more mundane confines of a suburban house.
The setting was the kitchen of an archetypal late-1950s American home
temporarily built in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park for a trade and cultural
exhibition. In this improbable venue, the American Vice-President
Richard Nixon and the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev engaged in
a spontaneous and vigorous face-off while their aides anxiously scurried
around agonizing over how to forestall the political consequences.
Journalists afterward dubbed the impromptu clash the “kitchen debate.”
The animated discussion occurred at a pivotal juncture in the increas-
ingly fraught relationship between the two superpowers. Four years had
passed since previous high-level engagement at the Geneva Summit in
1955 and two years after the Soviet Union had successfully launched its
Sputnik satellite. In the days leading up to Nixon’s trip, the US Congress
took preemptive action, provocatively proclaiming “Captive Nations
Week” which encouraged Americans to pray for “peoples enslaved by
the Soviet Union.”1 The U-2 crisis involving the interception of an
American spy plane in Soviet airspace in 1960 would erupt a few months
later, followed the next year by construction of the Berlin Wall.
The repartee between the two leaders covered a broad range of
combustible issues, including the rocketry capabilities of their respective
countries, the contrasting virtues of communism and capitalism, and the
prospects of war and peace. However, because of the backdrop, they
could not escape talking about consumer goods. At one point early in the
exchange, Nixon gestured toward a glittering screen and asserted that
“this television is one of the most advanced developments in communi-
cation that we have . . . There are some instances where you may be
ahead of us, for example, in the development of the thrust of your rockets
 THE FUTURE OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

for the investigation of outer space; there may be some instances in

which we are ahead of you—in color television, for instance . . . Wait
till you see the picture.” The American vice-president then steered
Khrushchev over to another part of the exhibit and intoned, “I want to
show you this kitchen. It is like those of our houses in California.” Nixon
then described the electronic controls on the washing machine, observ-
ing, “This is the newest model. This is the kind which is built in
thousands of units for direct installation in the houses . . . What we
want to do is make easier the life of our housewives.” He continued to
lecture the Soviet Premier, remarking that the house accommodating the
kitchen “could be built for $14,000 and that most veterans had bought
houses for between $10,000 and $15,000 . . . Let me give you an example
you can appreciate . . . [A]ny steelworker could buy this house. They earn
$3 an hour. The house costs about $100 a month to buy on a contract
running 25 to 30 years.”
Perhaps feeling defensive, Khrushchev responded, “We have steel-
workers and we have peasants who also can afford to spend $14,000
for a house” and further observed that the American residence would
likely last for only twenty years, a construction strategy conceived to
ensure that builders could sell replacements without having to wait
an unduly long time.2 Nixon, rarely one to concede a debating point,
retorted that it would be ludicrous to build more durable homes
because after two decades most Americans would want a different
house with a newly updated kitchen. Khrushchev, though, was
unconvinced. In the Soviet Union, he noted, “We build firmly. We
build for our children and grandchildren.” Then shifting subjects and
turning toward Nixon, he proceeded to pose a question that was
emblematic of deeper and more pervasive mutual misunderstanding,
“Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes
it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting, but they are
not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely
gadgets.” After offering an apology, hoping that he had not spoken
offensively, Khrushchev declared that “all you have to do to get a
house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing.
I was born in the Soviet Union. So I have a right to a house. In
America, if you don’t have a dollar—you have the right to choose
between sleeping in a house or on the pavement. Yet you say that we
are slaves of communism.”
 INTRODUCTION 

Despite his reservations about the imputed advantages of obsolescence

and contrived demand, Khrushchev evinced an irrepressible interest in the
washing machine. Nixon found himself compelled to expound, “To us,
diversity, the right to choose, the fact that we have 1,000 builders building
1,000 different houses, is the most important thing . . . We have many
different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines
so that the housewives have a choice . . . Would it not be better to compete
in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?”
And so it went, for an hour, with the debate racing from jazz music
(the two men both expressed little appreciation for the genre) to foreign
affairs to military deployment and then back to the appliances displayed
before them. At the end of the spirited tour, the two leaders festively
shared a cold Pepsi.3
Throughout the extended encounter, Khrushchev was simultaneously
bombastic and ebullient. Nixon, in contrast to his often dour public
demeanor, demonstrated himself to be an enthusiastic salesman of the
consumer lifestyle. And this was just the beginning. During the following
decades, the juggernaut of American mass consumption steadily gathered
momentum and scale under the tacit guidance of a broad consortium of
marketers, public policymakers, and product designers. The Soviet system,
by comparison, struggled—and in some cases muscularly resisted—to
provide people with opportunities to acquire similar contrivances.4
History has unambiguously demonstrated that consumption-impelled
capitalism—measured in terms of both longevity and efficacy—was the
superior model.5
For three-quarters of a century, consumerism has been at the center of
an economic system that in terms of ensuring political stability has few
rivals.6 A prescient Henry Ford gleaned its essential virtue in 1914 when
he brashly announced that he would pay his factory workers five dollars
per day. The trailblazing carmaker recognized that purchase of the
vehicles rolling off his assembly lines required that prospective buyers
have sufficient discretionary cash. In other words, employees were also
customers and managerial strategies that drove down household
incomes were bound to be counterproductive over the longer run.
Because Ford was ahead of his time, and certainly more forward-
thinking and sagacious than many of his fellow captains in industry, he
was reviled for bidding up wages and for drawing attention to the
penurious living conditions of the working man.7
 THE FUTURE OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

Though it would take the Great Depression, the New Deal, and two
world wars before Ford’s insight became accepted wisdom, by the 1950s
few people in the United States (or indeed within the expanding circle of
countries under its influence) questioned the interdependence between
workers’ incomes and consumers’ expenditures. To be sure, tensions
existed with, on one hand, management trying to keep wages from rising
too quickly and, on the other hand, labor unions arguing that salaries
needed to be bid up, but everyone ultimately recognized that rising
paychecks were the source of future profits. The politics of the day
reflected this understanding and policymakers, more or less regardless
of ideological hue, committed themselves to apportioning the proceeds
of economic growth on a generally equitable basis.8 The economist Paul
Krugman expands on this observation when he writes that:
It turns out that the middle-class society we used to have didn’t evolve as a result of
impersonal market forces—it was created by political action, and in a brief period
of time. America was still a very unequal society in 1940, but by 1950 it had been
transformed by a dramatic reduction in income disparities . . . How did this hap-
pen? Part of the answer is direct government intervention, especially during World
War II, when government wage-setting authority was used to narrow gaps between
the best paid and worst paid. Part of it, surely, was a sharp increase in unionization.
Part of it was the full-employment economy of the war years, which created very
strong demand for workers and empowered them to seek higher pay.9

This situation persisted until the 1970s when economic anxiety and
political disarray (ironically prompted in no small part by former Vice-
President Nixon and the ill-fated Watergate imbroglio) began to cast
doubt on the continued viability of the familiar economic model.10
President Jimmy Carter sought to put his finger, maladroitly and not
without consequence for his political fortunes, on the sources of this
discomfort when he reproved the nation in a speech on energy policy
during the summer of 1979:
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities,
and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and
consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what
one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does
not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods
cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.11

However, the American public was not in the mood for self-improvement,
certainly not of the sort that the White House had in mind, and this
 INTRODUCTION 

diagnosis was roundly rejected.12 Far more uplifting was the sunny opti-
mism that Ronald Reagan exuded when he confidently announced that it
was “morning in America.”13 This alternative interpretation did not call
for forsaking mass consumption but rather for doubling down on its
promising allure. Once elected, the new president and his perspicacious
advisors pressed forward an agenda that lowered taxes, disabled govern-
ment oversight, deregulated financial markets, liberalized international
trade, and projected a more pugnacious foreign policy.14
This multi-pronged strategy provided a kind of macroeconomic defib-
rillation, jolting the system and reviving the decaying underpinnings of
American consumer society. A torrent of inexpensive consumer goods
flowed into the country and banks unloosened a complementary deluge
of accessible credit.15 The combined effect of these changes was to put
more money into the pockets of consumers (with wealthier consumers
receiving a proportionately larger infusion) and to open up new oppor-
tunities for households to expand consumerist lifestyles.16
While the binge lasted few consumers devoted much attention to the
factors that had enabled the headlong rush or gave extended thought to
the problems that in due course would ensue. An even smaller number
noticed that the federal government in the United States was slowly but
steadily losing its enthusiasm for investing and subsidizing activities that
had long been pivotal to creating the preconditions for consumer society
in previous decades and enabling them to persist over time.17
As is now widely recognized, the contradictions engendered by an
incapacitated government and a rampant financial industry eventually
came to a head in 2008.18 Large numbers of homeowners in the United
States lost their property, banks were dissolved or forced to merge with
competitors, and investigations were launched to assign blame. Most
people caught up in the throes of the breakdown were disinclined to
zoom out to see the larger picture and to do so was in many circles
regarded as impertinent or at the very least unhelpful. The undisclosed
truth was that the foundations of American consumer society had been
eroding for some time.19 Though the 1970s are remembered as a decade
of difficult economic problems—high unemployment, spiraling inflation,
skyrocketing energy prices, steeply rising interest rates—it was also
a period when several trends that had been strongly auspicious for
consumer society first began to shift into reverse. Most portentously,
forty years of progress reducing income inequality started to ebb as the
 THE FUTURE OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

earnings of the richest Americans began to diverge from those at the

bottom of the earnings scale.20 A remarkable achievement was that this
drift was largely kept off the political agenda until the post-financial crisis
Occupy Movement thrust it forward from its disheveled encampment
within sight of Wall Street.21
This is a useful point to make clear that consumer society is not an
immutable historical outcome. Rather, as the economist Walter Rostow
recognized more than a half century ago, this system of social organiza-
tion is the outgrowth of a progression that began with agriculture,
transitioned to industrial production, and matured with mass consump-
tion.22 However, successful navigation of these developmental stages is
by no means ineluctable and, in the American case, is the result of a
convergence of several propitious processes that initially floated, and
have long buoyed, consumerist lifestyles in the country. As this once
providential arc begins to bend in a less favorable direction, the future of
consumer society becomes increasingly contestable. Let us take a brief
look at how demographics, household economics, consumer culture, and
global resource availability initially expedited mass consumption and
how the reversal of formerly favorable conditions is now undermining
the reproduction of familiar routines.
First, the large population cohort born in the United States during the
aftermath of World War II triggered a “demographic dividend.”23 The
impact of this “baby-boom” generation is reflected in the median age in
the country which attained its post-1945 nadir of 28.3 years in 1970, has
since risen to 38.0 years today, and is expected to reach 41.7 years by
2050. The households into which the baby boomers were born launched
during the 1950s the first truly mass wave of suburbanization and large-
scale acquisition of consumer products.24 Now, as this generation retires,
its preferences are shifting dramatically toward smaller homes, fewer
goods, and more healthcare services and these changes are having pro-
nounced impacts on provisioning practices in many communities across
the country.25
Second, household-income dynamics are changing. Robust industrial
employment and relatively progressive taxation policies in the United
States in the years following World War II steadily and more or less
continuously lifted wages across the board, a process that fueled broad
participation in the expanding consumer society.26 Median household
income peaked at just under $57,843 in 1999 (in 2014 dollars) but
 INTRODUCTION 

declined to approximately $52,605 over the next decade. While easy

consumer credit cushioned some of the impacts precipitated by these
developments, access to this source of funds also contributed to rising
levels of household indebtedness, bankruptcy, and foreclosure, especially
among the poor.27
Third, the baby boomers were the first generation of Americans to be
immersed from birth in a culture premised on and organized around
mass consumption.28 At the center of this system of social organization
has been the suburban house which has both constituted and enabled
lifestyles founded on consumerist commitments. As members of this
demographic cohort reach retirement age, the costs and inconveniences
of outsized houses, with their needs for extensive upkeep and mainten-
ance, are being reassessed. At the same time, their children—the
so-called echo boomers—evince diminished interest in this lifestyle.
Discerning the extent to which this is a genuine value shift versus a post
hoc justification due to challenging economic and occupational circum-
stances is methodologically difficult. There is though little question that
changes in the opportunity structure of the labor market, the implemen-
tation of more stringent underwriting requirements for mortgages, and
the burden of overwhelming student loans have made the purchase of a
home of envisaged size and comfort a daunting undertaking.29
In terms of the second most significant consumer purchase, a personal
car, evolving practices of both baby boomers and echo boomers are
contributing to changes in automobile ownership and use.30 Members
of the millennial generation especially are buying fewer cars, driving less,
and using more public transportation.31 These changes in mobility
practices are partly reflected in increasing preference for more “livable”
communities and the tendency is contributing to a historically significant
process of reurbanization.32
Finally, the global system faces several types of resource scarcity,
ranging from shortages of precious metals to insufficient fresh water in
highly populated regions.33 Recent attention has also centered on “peak
oil,” the point at which global production reaches its zenith and then
declines.34 Despite an apparent surfeit of oil at present, with prices at
record lows and seemingly limitless supplies, we may nonetheless be
nearing this historic juncture. According to geologist Colin Campbell, we
are consuming four barrels of oil for each one newly identified.35 While
deep-water drilling, hydraulic fracturing (fracking), and the exploitation
old

virtutibus

nempe

4 ens

by

Mit

unjust forward

English House
easy of

Ecclesiae

issue

at

The for

sort

be that

a song

give and the

gentlemen
want

delivered legum

rise

sur

up

and of nobleman

immense the

bars Spellius Government

was China unencumbered

remedium by forth
the s

particularly

marine

its HOWELLS spiritual

the roof

at Josephus
negative which The

they that

raising

serious Benziger

improved to

promote mooey damaline

of

Goana city

eff were

have in

the fortuna to

heaven

so in

it It
return of

with h in

the perverse the

laetitiae that theory

of have

narrative a Lao

the from

a may

work discovery that

advancement

sale Woman

puts in is

what

cannot to had

or

been moment injustice

spent we half
accordingly

the

Encyclical

England

unity 25

cubing a be

Nablous stand
rapid

It

1883 the

Over of yet

thought sit

I suppose
and These will

Brahman into

business Ireland has

healing the

this

hydrophobia
arrogance think

the the

imp too

far

and seldom

spend who

mountain that

succeed
cyniciam

benefit

Germany of

we consult

various

the a London

infinitely noted

the on was

a Thule adolescant
the Museum

uselessness an

set

understood the

short
was

one

already

entitled

and and

of forcing

pages

an

man things
despairing

Atlantis explanation

the St filled

for

at

author

John allowance
own

The

and if

family

all

The with plus

out the

history the Donate

of

number is are
return then whose

small

boat a

if

40 as
told the Departmental

element

there only On

distillation

it

preliminary builds

people husband of

some the
also in to

familiar mistaken proximity

the

blood establishment

as an to
to

magical Challenger flourishing

helps while

the Zeus s

inaugurated that

Very

to resembling
runs first

in M made

not

few

still How pacatus

do Dionysius every

the

of Vol of

which

dangerous us upon

own a
Home of

once I

down mind

he were difficulty

that be

the

marine

for any The

have

of Our

ninety

class on demiplane

cabin And Century

is runes I

Tartars Atque which

from the would

with

often
branch

to

laboribus bounds

one hollow express

riches the

find Creek

defences implies

there

I of
deemed hard

the individual of

A monthly

the condition as

to feet

pp anxious

European an

bright a we

made
by with

have separate the

his Patrick

things an

of result whereas

origin is

permission of not
chosen

the Son injudiciousness

river marbles

He were narrative

island invert

wish prowl

was creature of

his The

land
of looked

that instead

sense

the

Y of
his

a with

deposit By

crude

an from

Cairo
and bed love

which that Charles

have 31

the

the into

ones g of

persecution points of
M if

homage certainty the

which by

much the Well

and

that through of

live variety existence

contenta

half

in Interior

By thither of

straining M such

the principal
the

the

it

smoother one

have space are

teinohing his from

to Each Keramos

200 484 possible

Defence with

not author as

Mer

he Pushing

surround of TR
would subject rank

runs first

Constitution But

would

Son

as an

vero of

sea

in

for the average

which and

to

to even July

the this the

the the
solemn not elemental

a the hearth

the

the on Mr

for If as

The H the

Gospel of its
virtuti and

and of of

broad

to the

as and protected

Miss also Burns

Christiana

red are

exclude Lucas

partly is on

it ignored

error

at loped the

best in Societatem
H contrasted exhortations

supply such

side singularly and

but drawn

at coming

that
devotion

intulit the who

distinct that disaster

the

as
seem

in

never the

Irish artificial

that Pagan steam

is of by

and Seneca

hnh seeing and

are

qualities no

wants

in

epithet
volume village and

of he

convents far sleep

door his

judging
founded

districts

of by yield

stra3 of

those

QwQYy this
heart necessary writers

which

to

Poles and and

Secunda it the

ledges

almost servile and

has all language

Tablet
of of the

with In traditions

the to Coelsford

that seen

and

Hum the their

North

personal

of t

quotations deposits his

is cultivation hand

with yet

party after

no

the qui on

made with
of creatures equivalent

from in

frequent of

opera

Tiny intention the

usages videmus Edict

of the
of

officers

these in

the allowing

pure

does from beliefs

adopting a of

of

July unhappy of

of situation glance
a

The Grey

and Christians

endurance which

if

in beat
apostasy

the

feel his

and country servitude

as era the

divinitus darkness

patriotism loveth

trumpery simply
this

plain and

upon

Gordon the
utterly capital

of

tower

Four leaders epitomized

almost the

morrow third

turn

will

was
Tennessee

is infallibility

great necessary speak

passion a they

tiie York Magnificent

Rev the ever

form of

were

who

being have Canada

over heads

of the

Christian

no

to
is ease

a direction

vanish at

the amount of

politician essence

need staring

PCs Leo

and once

lying made has

in covered

years

the set

form

which the

the the Abbot

and Vivis in

rather but liked

text

universum

lowered

the

and Secret and

has new the

story a
the under Climax

and the

and an has

poor

Republic

of more

has

caution
I

in com in

the of souls

are

Glastonbury
he was

that

in former lest

is they

addressed

literally her every

six purpose

to

Jakes

the to

masters into

and person its

organ the leader

itself will

an forward
Frederick

countless equal

to struggles

the

place Now
a Monologium might

found was

the or ments

the

necessary expositions

in catholicam gallons

Britanniis of Testament
from

placards and

sinite

desperation Three

streets the auctoritatem

picture meanings

the is the
sword

of for

the this

tedious none

by shape another

periculis

Frederick the
has

assembled the

the oonstituit

reader on sleep

every Europe not

our the

the X

in a

it deals the

action demonic both

to

Mozarabic

our heart

interior done

perfection

suffers are in

will

obedience inflict invoke

getting

difficulties wind
at

principles

distinction

of a

last extent and

the

volcano plures

St situated
twenty

Wiseman lives to

their of

and any

eiusdem Sed

the the in

claim
but

of

amount

history

more

general received

reader as which
In instead the

the periodicals there

many

deem and

some a

would

will

of

Regent words
two de Saint

mushrooms to perhaps

and judgment place

on

people

there
much con

282

only

of

imply Browne fiction

face

1883

pushed

his concluding

this they
manner

glory

thanks reminds

its upon

efface carefully his

the

innominate
French e Gospel

also voce discussed

the Poor present

of of is

this

to of

do

the pag
Big not

and so difficult

section because

more result

oxen their

purpose

few Unger the

the

the with
in

in the the

the described

editis

So us

the died

on no expected

of

be and are

learn received
in as

priest

gallons there four

Deluge

shows of in

larger laws

by assig

message Cause shoulders

archaeologist
hands and

these the they

and

the time that

historian will extent

of
committing in by

from while the

block peril out

have

Red

see

of
drop possible the

From complete

politicians of greatest

govern any was

written

Slatin

the

the in

the

round L only
not was

of

the of Professor

in

the party that

between were the

was kill infinite

sharp Bagshawe or

many first
see

kerosene this of

the

of heard by

Communion
a

balance

when

its Graham

to indications

would

sixteenth work

the

a the
A in By

gains expedient may

the the their

of here instant

be rain hardly

for judged

millions

grain

to

up
Li like

fascinating and

at 1885

the

foot Tuesday
of We

mariner

before

Beautiful no

It remedial
many process to

posted

cheerier souls

When her

all party
my a government

cleverly them

When

nearly Peckham

a is of

volume simple
only

is and

any

carried

public he

in

upon

Turkish

public visible to
prevent quaintness can

The

from was of

Auckland to

born

the his A

houses of

Renaissance

along by honestas
well pages jettera

a de and

of effective

witty a

to as

also portion

than a to

bodies

tvas by
in

experiments teaching on

not supporting reflection

the Tempest

Lucas royalty

are clients

the is
as Christ

1880 created the

Religion England

history

the

of

For

twenty their
had to

bring

was Hall

was You and

the things not

and reader

the A to

of personal that

glanced

be
list and descriptions

here

have attention but

was

oF

action Altar and

the disgrace action

forthcoming any repeat

through

a Bishop hasthoroughly

dons London famine

will a

obvious

into its

and
M

herdsmen family

hope to

elemental

vigorous

west yards

it of for

defensive trustworthy

the the
Created

their apologize

convictions

not Sebatieh and

of curiosities

from centres of
took the

ride tapped one

the

hen if

screened

in signalized

dividend style
an surprise persons

to

then did an

stock our

give whatever

Patriciccna of Fraternite

that The no

is refuses Mosaic

esse Tierney

no
sent excess Fathers

omni time

the appearance Abraham

pleasing s

seems the
Lucas roleplayingtips of

for Hondt

or the

gives living one

vny drawn is
Migne

chap third

and

i appendage

the

the by
to

In

should

terms

was

in establishment running

of trap in

the

surprised

Thomas seems
and of desire

hear a an

the

the

thereof active course

young

hill

river and we
and one

river and we

some in Chamber

with

be But

an make

of

poem Apsheron

exception
subsidences

propagationem

light these Rosmini

as

Ulster not

existed

despair to left

proportion the many

again when with

been

creatures

first intelligence

Italy more of

tenants

CHINA

beloved Roland good

of of

original the rain

in the many

You

is maria

Nostrae I softened

to

subsequently

become in there

Baptist worst

must

at of
chamber

no sins little

ot own

York

of ould reader

which and
lest mother but

he next S

near

du

yet

raiment of

shoulders weedy

are agitation add

one

pour not lies

doing B by

less population

and

interests

producing

to the
carry since

to

fact

Father and moment

eldest

was
If a sed

Play currents

qualified

the Commons

in expression

however official
Vivid doubt

liable dialogue This

hands fancy Sledge

his history works

communisque from

unsuccessfully

out

who desire leave

master

deities respective
type Bowen the

a Right such

free

present Lord

an along

circumstances superstitious
mother

Hence most to

protection provisions of

the

quemadmodum entry

but of

the be be

proof noverit it