Begin by opening your learning journal for this activity.

Activity 3 analysed five paradoxes about consumption. This activity focuses on another, and very puzzling, paradox: If consumption can cause so many problems, why has it become such an all-encompassing part of life today?

A key reason is that very few people in the world actually live a subsistence lifestyle any more. We have to consume to survive. We live in exchange economies where each person tends to specialise in one job, receives money for the time and effort involved, and then uses that money to purchase the goods and services produced by other 'specialists'.

This can be efficient - after all, if you were not a very good farmer or did not have access to land in the first place, you would soon go hungry.

The specialisation of labour in an exchange or market economy also gives people a chance to apply their time and skills to the things that they are good at (if jobs are available in that field). Working at the things that we are good at is important for our sense of achievement and satisfaction in life.

Purchasing goods and services from people who are skilled in their design, manufacture or delivery also means that the quality of the things we buy is higher than if we had to make everything ourselves. They can also be made more quickly, efficiently, and often less expensively, as well.

At least this is the theory.

However, this theory mostly applies to the things we consume to satisfy our needs. The theory does not apply so well when it relates to our wants.

In fact, the affluence of Northern lifestyles means that:

	the 20% of the world's people in the highest-income countries account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures;
	the poorest 20% consume a tiny 1.3%; while
	the middle 60% (around 4 billion people) consume only 12.7%.

These differences translate into the following consumer patterns:

Source: 1998 Human Development Report; Carley, M. and Spapens, P. (1998) Sharing the World: Sustainable Living and Global Equity in the 21st Century, Earthscan, London, p. 42.

These figures show that arguments about over-population being the cause of global environmental decline, poverty and famine need to be reconsidered.

See Module 13 on the 'new understanding' of population and development and Module 14 on 'world hunger myths' for further discussion of this issue.

Q8: Calculate the proportion of global consumer spending by the middle 60% of income earners in the world.

Q9: What is the message of the formula: I = C x T x P?

Q10: How might you use this formula in teaching about consumption?

There are many reasons - but the key one is because consumerism now touches on all every aspect of culture in the North today. Indeed, consumerism might be seen as a core value, not only in the North, but also in many countries of the South where Northern ideas about 'wants' are rapidly being spread by the mass media, western style education and other processes of globalisation.

Mass consumption is one of the key defining processes of economic and social life in the world today. In fact, daily life today is a material one with social life often revolving around the manufacture, exchange and consumption of material objects. Thus, it has been said that 'we are what we consume!'

This is because consumerism is not only a means of creating wealth or satisfying personal needs. Consumerism - and the values that owning and 'displaying' different products signify - is also one of the chief ways through in which we have learnt to establish a personal identity and present ourselves to the world:

One's body, clothes, speech, leisure pastimes, eating and drinking preferences, home, car, choice of holidays, etc. are to be regarded as indicators of individuality of taste and sense of style of the owner/consumer.

Source: Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Sage, London, p. 83.

As a result, consumption today is not just a matter of 'keeping up with the Joneses'. The type of food we eat, the 'labels' we wear, the type of cars we drive, the music we listen to - even the brands of computers, watches, cameras and sports shoes we have - are 'social symbols'. Thus international economist, Wolfgang Sachs, argues that consumption represents:

A system of 'signs' through which a purchaser makes statements about him- or her-self. While in the old days goods informed about social status, today they signal allegiance to a lifestyle. But the proliferation of options makes it increasingly difficult to know what one wants, [and] to cherish what one has.

Source: Oneworld.net.

Q11: Summarise the roles that the following 'driving forces' play in promoting unsustainable levels of consumption:

	Globalisation		Alienation from nature
	Population growth		Changing technology
	Consumerism and personal identity		Rising living standards in the South
	The work-and-spend cycle

These processes are more than just driving forces to mass consumption. They are also influential aspects of our experience of the world. In fact, it is possible that the very centrality of consumerism in contemporary life contains within it the roots of democratic social change.As a result, many goods and services have been developed from a constructive critique of consumerism and have come to signify ethical social and environmental lifestyle choices.

Examples of such goods and services include ones that seek to:

	Change or improve products and services; or
	Change patterns of consumption - at household, government and corporate levels.

These developments and case studies indicate that it is overly simplistic to view consumption only in a negative way. Indeed, it has been said that:

. . . . . late 20th century consumerism contains within it far more revolutionary seeds than we have hitherto anticipated.

Source: Nava, M. (1991) Consumerism reconsidered: Buying and power, Cultural Studies, 5(2), pp. 171.

Thus, while consumption may be a cause of many social and environmental ills, it is also a vehicle through which present and future solutions to the problems of unsustainability may be reached.

Q12: Suggest ways in which three driving forces of consumption could be reoriented to promote sustainable consumption.