David J alerted me to an article which says that Australian kids are taking luxuries for granted:
Yesterday’s luxuries have become today’s necessities, giving children a bad case of “affluenza”, parenting experts say.
Increasing wealth, cheap toys, gadgets and time-poor parents have produced a generation of children who often can’t tell the difference between need and greed, according to analysis from the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
And this means kids take for granted things that were once considered luxuries – like having a bedroom of their own, their own mobile phone, a TV or computer in their room, and having the latest gadgets such as iPods, iPads, PlayStations and Xboxes.
The idea behind ‘affluenza‘ is that people in the Western world try so hard to get material things and money that we become stressed, overworked and wasteful. Therefore, the theory goes, we should not try so hard to attain material possessions in the pursuit of happiness, and the idea that consumerism brings happiness is a fallacy of Western capitalist society. I presume that if parenting experts are saying that children suffer from affluenza, the hypothesis is that parents are stressed and overworked in trying to provide material benefits for their children when these things are not the things which make children happy or fulfilled in life.
Here, I’m just going to think aloud about this concept, and my own ambivalence with regard to it.
Needs vs. wants
When my daughter was about 2 years old she used to say to me, “Mummy, I neeeeeeeeed chocolate!” I would reply to her, “No dear, you don’t need chocolate, you simply want chocolate. There’s an important difference.” [Although at least Eaglet No. 1 is not like Petra Ecclestone, daughter of Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, who apparently told her father that she needed a six-storey mansion with a garden in Chelsea for her dogs to play in.]
Basically, the things we all need to live are clean water, adequate food, adequate health care, safety and shelter. Once you have a situation where any of those basic needs are not being met, you are needy.
The question is then what we need beyond those basic needs to live happily. Arguably, for instance, I do not really need a computer. I can quite easily write down my thoughts on paper, as hundreds of generations did before me, before the advent of computing. However, if I want to blog, and work from home some days, and submit electronic manuscripts to journals, I need a computer or access to computing services to achieve those goals. A computer makes my life much easier, and opens up my options for communication. So really, I do need it if I want to be able to live in the modern world.
Scarcity makes the heart grow fonder
It is true that if you don’t have a thing, it makes you appreciate a thing vastly more when you do get it. You know what it is to live without a certain thing, and you can clearly see what a difference it makes. Whereas if you’ve always had a thing, you are more likely to take it for granted. Economists and marketers know this: it’s the simple principle of scarcity economics – make a thing scarce and people want it more. And if you value something, you are less likely to waste it, and more likely to use it efficiently.
But people presume a peculiar kind of virtue in not having things. (Even Jesus thought so: “The meek shall inherit the earth”). For some reason when I read that article cited at the beginning of the post, I was thinking of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl, which could be seen as a fable about affluenza. I read it recently to my daughter, and was struck by it. In that book, the virtuous hero Charlie starts off with almost nothing – not enough to eat, no warm clothes, inadequate shelter. The other four children who win Golden Tickets are provided with everything, and, unlike Charlie, they take the excess with which they have been provided for granted. Augustus Gloop is a glutton who gorges on more food than he needs. Veruca Salt just has to demand a material item and her father gives it to her. Violet Beauregarde chews too much chewing gum, and her parents cannot deny her. Mike Tevee watches television all the time so that he ignores real people. The other four children are portrayed as spoiled, repulsive, ungrateful and wasteful. In the end, Charlie triumphs and becomes heir to Willy Wonka’s factory.
The thing that struck me as an adult was that there is an immense irony underlying the story: Wonka’s factory could not exist without capitalism. The Golden Ticket ploy is in fact a marketing coup which leads to immense consumerism on the part of children around the globe, as well as unparalleled commercial success on the part of the factory. The factory depends upon children like Gloop, Salt, Beauregarde and Tevee for its immense capital, which it can then use to invent more amazing lollies. (I see a similar sort of irony when I see people like Dick Smith railing against consumerism and excessive population, when of course, Smith established Dick Smith Electronics and made a fortune trading off people’s consumerist impulses (as is pointed out in comments to the Catallaxy piece here).)
If there is a peculiar kind of virtue in being deprived, would I want to deprive my children of things? The answer is no. I want them to have things.
However, I also want them to appreciate what they have, and to appreciate the fact that not everyone else is so lucky. I want them to realise that you have to work hard if you want to achieve things, and you can’t just expect to have things delivered to you on a plate. I do not want to give into my children’s every demand. As I often say to my daughter (most recently last week when she told me she wanted a ZhuZhu Pet Princess Carriage), “I’m sorry, but you can’t always get what you want.”
(Said carriage for the benefit of people who do not have five-year-old daughters!)
The nub of the problem
The problem with providing children with everything they want is not really consumerism, in my opinion. I don’t care if a parent chooses to give a child an in-ground trampoline or a PlayStation. That’s the parent’s choice. I am enough of a liberal with a small ‘l’ to think it’s not my place to police those kind of choices.
However, those parents should realise that the difficulty is that if you give your child everything she asks for, she will think the world always works like that. She will not appreciate the advantages that she has, and will not realise that she has to put in effort to achieve things, nor will she realise that other people are not so lucky. She may well be selfish, and she may lack empathy for others in different and more difficult circumstances.
This made me think about a number of conversations I’d had recently. Conversation 1: a friend has a colleague who is very privileged. He has great difficulty thinking of anyone else’s needs or in functioning like a normal person, and he consistently fails to take responsibility for his actions or to think of others. Conversation 2: a friend was telling me about a research class she recently gave to university students. One girl wasn’t listening, and my friend chided her. “It doesn’t matter,” said the girl. “I don’t intend to do any research myself; I’ll pay other people to do it for me.” (I hope she was joking, but I suspect she wasn’t). There’s a part of me which wants to take these two kids and slap some sense into them. Are they kids who always got everything? I suspect so.
The issue is not that these kids have lots of stuff. It’s that they have a sense of entitlement, that they believe that they don’t have to work to achieve, and that they do not think of the needs of others. Their parents may have thought they were doing them a favour by giving them everything, but actually it has done them an immense disfavour. When they get into the real world, where Daddy and Mummy can’t buy them results, the wheels fall off. And they are unable to interact appropriately with other people because they are selfish and self-indulgent. So you need to deny your children sometimes if just to teach them about real life.
My daughter had a funny conversation with me the other day. Apparently there is a naughty boy in her class who is in trouble for misbehaving, being rude and disrupting the class. Eaglet No. 1 said to me, “Mummy, every day he has a lot of money to spend at the tuck shop, much more than anyone else. You know what? If I was his mummy, I’d tell him he could only get the money if he behaved well in class. Then he might learn to be good.” Clever, clever girl, she’s gotten the idea already…now where did she learn that? 
Inequality
Part of the difficulty in the world is that some people have more, some people have less. Sometimes (often?) that distribution doesn’t seem altogether ‘fair’. [I think it is my preoccupation with equality is what differentiates my own views from SL's, incidentally. She is concerned with liberty, and I am concerned more with equality.] Why should a spoilt young woman ‘need’ a mansion in Chelsea, while thousands of other children are starving to death, or can’t get adequate water or health care?
Still, I am enough of a pragmatist that I do not think we can get rid of inequality. We all have different skills and advantages in life. SL and I were wondering off-blog whether the reason why some smart people are not receptive to arguments about equality is because when teachers create ‘equal’ groups at school or university, the smart kids end up carrying people who aren’t clever. School and university has a tendency to put you in groups where everyone is notionally at the same level, but one of the reasons I am allergic to group work is because my experience of such groups has been so uniformly bad. When I was about eight, I already knew communism wouldn’t work because people are not all equal in that kind of way. Hey, I’d been last picked in sport since I was five years old, so I knew that I was not as physically able as some others. There is equality and equality. I’m never going to be the equal of an Olympic sports champion.
I think some kind of hierarchy is built into society – all we can do is to try and mitigate the unfairest effects as best we can. I do not want a vastly unequal society, where a few have a lot and many have very little.
The real question is…do you bring down the haves so that they are more like the have-nots, or do you bring up the have-nots so they are more like the haves?
The problem with affluenza
I sometimes feel that those who protest against ‘affluenza’ think that we should all be brought down to the status of ‘have-nots’ (although I also suspect that they exempt themselves from the category of those who should be brought down because of their own moral and intellectual superiority, it is only ‘bogans‘ who should be so limited). Similarly, some love to rail against environmentally unsound McMansions (how dare the lower class have a spacious and comfortable house, bigger than middle-class people!) There is a part of me which agrees with Melbourne academic David Nichols: this is all about class. One can’t hate the lower class if one is left-wing and righteous, but a righteous left-winger can legitimately laugh at and hate the lower class if they are relabelled as ‘bogans’ instead. So, some of my problem with articles such as the one cited at the start of this post is that I think the broader agenda of ‘affluenza’ critics is in fact a deeply conservative one. It’s almost a version of ‘sumptuary laws’ – an attempt to regulate who is and who is not allowed to consume certain goods and services.
The truths of affluenza
On the other hand, I have seen people in the law who work and work and work. Their children have every single toy that moves and beeps, but they seldom ever see their parents. I wonder what the sense in this is. The children may have all their material wants satisfied, but that is no substitute for parental love and affection. What are the parents trying to achieve?
And sometimes, even with my own kids (who do not have as much as some others I know), I get angry that they have so much. If they don’t play with something for a certain amount of time, I do a cull, and give away stuff to charity because two kids don’t need all that. There will be other kids who need it more. It is wasteful to have so much.
Also I think it is good to have to work for something rather than just be given it (even if it’s having to save up for something you really want by doing Saturday morning jobs or something like that). You do feel differently about something that you’ve earned rather than just been given on a plate. By putting labour into the getting of something, it’s almost like there’s a little more of yourself in there than there otherwise would be (is that too Lockean?).
Ultimately…
I think I want everyone to have more, as opposed to reducing existing entitlements and choices. Yes, there is always a downside to such an approach (spoiled children, people who don’t appreciate what they’ve got, the potential of waste). But I’d rather that than the downsides of people not having enough. The downsides of not having a ZhuZhu Pet carriage are obviously minimal. But at the other end of the spectrum, the downsides of not having necessaries in life are pretty much fatal. And, like my example of computers above, there’s a whole bunch of things which are not necessary for subsistence, but which are really, really useful for participating fully in modern society. The bottom line is that I think the reason we have enough time to worry about stuff like consumerism, our effects on the environment and the like is because we’re not living hand to mouth. Development has its downsides, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives (yes, I’m a fan of Amartya Sen).
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That article makes me a bit skeptical. Sure there are children who have it all, I work hard to ensure that my children aren’t like that although I do have the wherewithal to give them those things if I was so inclined. But I want them to realise the difference between a need and a want. They do quite okay without getting everything they set their eyes on. I also know quite a few children, at my son’s school, who don’t get much of anything at all, and at times may struggle to get their basic needs met. More than one teacher has an extra couple of biscuits or piece of fruit on hand for children who come to school without food. So while I suspect there is a significant co-hort of their generation who expect everything given to them, there is also still quite a large number who might want but will struggle to get until they can get it for themselves. Panicing about a spoilt generation simply erases the children who are still struggling.
You are so right, Mindy. I had a friend who used to teach in the outer suburbs who had to feed some of the kids in her class.
This is a piece of spin which has been put about by developers and the political entities which feed off them (and whose noses should be growing about a metre long with their ingenuous seizing on “class” as a stick to beat their detractors with.) No matter who lives in McMansions, their size, cheapness, poor materials and poor design guarantees a worse environmental outcome in the future, but it’s become politically incorrect to say so because then you’re accused of being against the poor struggling working class (usually by people whose concern for poorer people is noticeably absent when they’re, for instance, in trade unions or on benefits). I call bullshit on that.
Thank you for the carriage picture, not having children makes getting all the references difficult on occasion.
My biggest concern with the whole idea of affluenza is the development of a newer and more materialistic sense of entitlement.
Possibly this is a re-branding of an older social malady. It is the development or observation of a new aspect of an underlying issue present within the social structures of the species. Is this a new pop-culture referrence to an old game?
I find that there are many persons who feel that they have a particular entitlement. Be it to material reward, social position or treatment under the law. Such sense of entitlement is not always based on a logically coherent reason. They are just particularly special in their own minds and they should get what they sense to be their due.
The interesting aspect of this concerns the fact many of these persons are not from an economically advantaged strata of society. As such I would not expect they suffer from the newest malady.
As such I would consider that this materialistic situation is not really all that new as social classes and groups have often felt an entitlement based on their own particular situation.
These have included class, color of the skin, religious affiliation or even a sense of anti-entitlement*.
So I suggest this article is merely describing the old class system of privilege and in some ways it rails against those who find they are comfortable within a position of privilege.
Of course I will be purchasing the latest in Mountain Bikes so I can play, and I will require that pubic land be put aside so I can go play. As such I invite all persons to treat my observations with skepticism and admire my hypocrisy.
*Anti-entitlement is a term that I use to describe comments regarding minorities such as Indigenous Australians and Migrants where they are alleged to receive more than others due to their minority status. If memory serves me this was found in One Nation rhetoric. I get very angry on this subject as anti-entitlement often overlooks the disparity in the basic starting position of the minority group.
I disagree with the general thrust of this post. Many of the people who worry about over-consumption are not well off middle class people. It certainly concerns plenty of low income people in the rural area in which I live.
“The bottom line is that I think the reason we have enough time to worry about stuff like consumerism, our effects on the environment and the like is because we’re not living hand to mouth. ”
Humans depend on the environment for survival every bit as much as a beast in the wilderness. The only difference is that the “carrying capacity” applicable to humans is very difficult to ascertain because of science, technology etc… Concern about the survival of a particular species of butterfly may be a luxury concern, concern about overexploitation of resources, pollution etc are survival concerns.
Dick Smith is correct to be concerned about population. According to most estimates we are headed for around 9 billion people by 2050. You may well “want everyone to have more” but the reality is that the current 6 billion people on planet earth cannot consume like westerners do today because of carrying capacity constraints. The situation will be far worse by 2050 and I imagine by then your apparent “me, now” philosophy will be thoroughly discredited.
I don’t think there’s a definable line between need and want. I think peoples understanding of the difference would be related to where on the political spectrum they find themselves. Those on the far left would see things necessary for an individual to fully participate in society as needs, while those on the far right would see only the essentials required to sustain life as needs.
When it comes to kids I do wonder if the increase in working mothers (without any corresponding decrease in working fathers) is causing parents to spend more money on kids in place of the time they spend at work. The material wants of the children are framed as needs to justify the dedication to career rather than raising children. It could explain observations of a broader trend towards a more materialist parenting style, rather than any underlying cultural shift in values.
That’s somewhat true. Although a generation of spoilt children could ingrain an acceptance of, and hence exacerbate, the inequality that causes many children to go without.
Here I was sadly thinking that I hadn’t been controversial enough this morning when there were no comments, and now I’ve got a bonanza. Excellent.
Cast Iron Helen, what precisely do you call shit on? I’m guessing you don’t think Robert Crawford’s piece on McMansions is classist. Why then is he not railing against people in Toorak with huge houses as well? Surely he should be railing against both, not just the “bogans”.
What is more, there’s research to suggest that he is in fact wrong and that inner city people are more of a drain on the environment (see eg, here and here).
Mel, what kinds of over-consumption are the people you know concerned about? I think that people who live off the land are particularly acutely aware of the delicate balance between use and over-use. Of course that is a valid issue. But I think railing about affluenza and children’s toys is a bit of a furphy, really.
I’d add education, and freedom, to this list – and then the world would be, if not perfect, then at least starting from a better place. After that, I tend to go with SL’s take – and expect that some will do better than others; and that some will be envious of that inevitability.
The thing is, most parenting decisions are not based upon the consideration of extremes such as six storey mansions for one’s pets, or the child whose parents cannot afford to provide school lunch; they are made individually for each child, by each parent. Extremes exist unfortunately, but give no guidance.
The fact that todays’ affluent child (via parent) considers that a mobile phone by the age of 9-12 is “vital” says nothing about their worldview, other than that their worldview has moved on quite remarkably from earlier generations. The fact that some other kids still have no lunch is not their fault, not currently their responsibility, not theirs to “suffer”. But it is ours – if you agree with LE’s basic statement.
LE, you do realise you’ve upset the feminists (with a pink carriage), the PETA brigade (with animals being exploited) and me – ’cause I want a Kung Zhu Pets Ninja Warriors – Spider Skull Tank – and I WANT IT RIGHT NOW!
ROFL!
“Mel, what kinds of over-consumption are the people you know concerned about?”
Overconsumption of non-renewable energy for one thing. Overuse and misuse of rural land is also very evident in my area and pretty well everywhere else in Australia- with massive erosion occurring after heavy rain. Across the road from me is a huge erosion gully that turns into white water rapids after heavy rain.
My partner and I live in an absurdly large 4 bedroom house with two living areas. It is one of the woefully designed houses that deservedly attracts criticism. The amount of energy required to heat and cool the place is enormous and is a result of poor building design. Unfortunately it would cost a small fortune to rip open and properly insulate the walls etc. I bought the place for the land, not the butt-ugly house. One can criticise such buildings without sneering at the occupants.
The bulk of scientific opinion takes issues like AGW, land degradation, pollution, energy depletion etc seriously. If you think the problems are not as serious as the science suggests then you’ll need to do more than sneer and smear folks like Dick Smith to be worthy of being taken seriously.
So you don’t think Smith is being just slightly hypocritical in criticising people for consuming when that’s how he’s made his fortune? Sure, he can criticise people if he wants, but he should at least acknowledge that he has made his substantial fortune by encouraging people to do the very thing he is now criticising them for doing… In short, he’s welcome to his opinion, but I’m also welcome to think that his actions do not match up with what he advocates.
Like RipleyP, I also needed a picture! Kids have obviously moved on from train sets and Barbies
This is an immensely complex issue, although when it comes to the parenting part, I’m pretty sure I agree with what Mindy says up above. There are whole schools where kids have to be fed breakfast because they’ve eaten nothing at home that morning. Admittedly this isn’t often due to poverty, but extremely chaotic family structures are, I suspect, a type of poverty.
People do need to take hypocrisy seriously, I’m afraid. I’m inclined to dismiss a putative advisor if he can’t live up to his own ideals, and would expect to be similarly dismissed if I purported to give advice on something where I have been a notable failure (how to behave towards one’s publisher comes to mind).
That said, a lot of modern buildings (not just houses) are butt ugly and badly designed. My former partner was a builder and he used to despair at new builds in Rocky with roofs of black tiles. Sure, they looked funky, but I dread to think what the occupants’ power bills looked like.
I’m by no means a greenie, but I do think one of the great failings of modernity is in building design and construction. We now know that if you stick people in ugly council estates, crime rates go up. Add that to increased energy costs and we’ve got a nicely toxic stew developing…
LE@11 – Dick Smith shops under Dick Smith and under Woolworths are entirely different shops. One was mainly for components, with almost nothing “ready to plug in”, the other is really just a Harvey Norman Consumer Electronics competitor. Very different.
Way back when, overconsumption was buying twice as much solder or bakelite dials as you needed for your current work.
These days if you went into Dick Smith and ask to see their breadboards, the staff would think you were an idiot who should be in a kitchenware shop.
If you are going to be critical of overconsumption, the first thing to do is look at it from the point of view of diminishing (or negative) utility returns – with food a good example of too-much-is-worse-than-not-enough. Fashion would definitely be a utilitarian FAIL.
So… LE’s computer is definitely utilitarian, and now necessary. A Gucci-branded one with designer titanium and gold casing…. however….
I must admit, I’m a sucker for spoiling my grandson. Relent without blinking an eye when he spies something like a David Attenborough DVD, a little slower for things like a Wild Thornberries DVD, or another Rascal the Dragon book, but Transformers movies? Computer Games? Kung Zhu Pets Ninja Warriors? That’s easy – “Ask your dad next time you visit him! He might have it already”
* As to “In The Night Garden” DVDs/books/toys… NO. Not in my house. Not if his mum buys it. Not if he threatens to scream the shop down. Over my dead body.
Eloise and Josh don’t like that program. Eloise used to like it when she was about 2, but now she screams, “Not that silly show!” if it comes on, and of course Josh has to copy what she does…
I think it’s perfectly legitimate to criticise the class outlook of Robert Crawford, author of the linked article about environmentally friendly McMansions (a word dripping in condescension). The most telling part of Crawford’s article is this paragraph:
“There is an increasing number of people going against the norm, opting to live in smaller houses that are designed to make the most of our natural energy resources, while still meeting the needs of residents. For these people, their choice of housing makes a statement about their concern for the environment and for our children’s future **rather than using their house to advertise their personal wealth**.” [my emphasis]
This reveals Crawford as a moralist of the anti-human Clive Hamilton type. A pro-human would say something like. “since there are environmental costs and limits involved in having the sort of houses people want, we need to find the most efficient techniques possible to build, heat or cool, furnish and power them”.
As a far-leftist I despair that today far-left thought is commonly understood to involve opposition to industrial development. I’m in favour of the maximum possible amount of tools and toys being available to humans all over the world, and that means far more development than we have today, and it will also need to be as efficient as possible.
My current slogan on this topic: Ferrarris for All!
I think there is an easy narrative to fall into when talking about mcmansions that doesn’t reflect reality. They really aren’t a lower class (who could never afford them) or exclusively blue collar thing. People across the educational/occupational spectrum chose living space over amenities. I worked at a government department filled with white collar, university educated workers, earning 50-90k and about 1/3 lived on new developments. Maybe it is just a Brisbane, but I suspect it isn’t.
When people talk about bogans now, they appear to mean basically everyone who isn’t part of the creative or professional services industry.
AJ, I dunno what bogans are really. Certainly when I was a teenager it meant people who came from the Western suburbs of Melbourne and wore moccasins. There was a definite “class” aspect to it, and in those days it seemed to mean “lower class”.
I suspect the thing is that certain skilled labouring jobs aren’t badly paid these days. So if you’re a plumber, an electrician, a builder etc you might end up doing quite well for yourself financially. Which is a very good thing IMO – I think it says good things about our society. I think these are the bogans people love to hate. They are not (generally) university educated, but they earn as much as if not more than a middle-class educated person, and they do not necessarily follow the dictates of the educated middle class on how one should consume or behave. Thus people like Catherine Deveny sneer at those who chose to have large TVs rather than read books. I think the anxiety is about class confusion. “Those” people (skilled labourers) “should” be lower class, but here they are with money, buying what they want to buy!
I dunno, I don’t really think it’s my place to lecture people on how they should or should not consume. Basically I really don’t like the moral police going around telling others what to do. If people want to spend their money on expensive children’s toys, that’s their choice. And, like David J, I don’t understand why being left-wing seems to involve being anti-development for many. I’d prefer that we think up more efficient ways to develop which are environmentally sound than stop development.
Comments here tend to take a little while to come up to speed. I reckon it’s because of the preponderance of “think” posts — we all have to go away and digest a bit.
You’re an old-fashioned materialist leftie. A dying breed, unfortunately.
I think there’s an unfair double bind being placed on the left here. On one hand if you haven’t been involved in business you’ll get dismissed as not knowing anything about how the world really works, on the other if you’re successful in business you’ll get labelled as a hypocrite.
I don’t really consider it hypocritical to still work within the system as it is when advocating for a change to the system. When people are advocating law reform, we don’t expect them to just start acting as if the law has already been reformed do we?
I don’t think it’s fair to describe the left as anti-materialist. I think sustainable materialist (which implies the efficiency David is after) is a better way to describe it.
LE @11: “So you don’t think Smith is being just slightly hypocritical in criticising people for consuming when that’s how he’s made his fortune?”
That is the sort of disingenuous statement that robs you of credibility on environment related issues. The link you use as evidence to sustain your smear starts off thusly:
“It has become obvious to me that my generation has over exploited our wonderful world – and it’s younger people who will pay the price. Like many people my age, I’ve benefited from a long period of constant economic and population growth – we are addicted to it. But sooner or later this consumption growth will have an end. We appear to be already bumping against the limits of what our planet can sustain and the evidence is everywhere to see.”
Smith clearly acknowledges his role in creating the current problem. A little googling and you’ll see numerous other admissions of responsibility. You’ll also note Smith began raising these concerns AFTER he made his fortune. The charge of hypocrisy therefore doesn’t even make it to court.
Smith is also very clearly not suggesting that we all whack on hairshirts and live in poverty, rather that we live sustainably, which by way of definition is the only possible path if future generations are to avoid some sort of Soylent Green future.
Another point regarding Smith is that he always puts his money where his mouth is. As an example he has put millions of dollars into conservation projects. Without doing the calculations I cannot be certain but I think it is reasonable to assume his actions, in spite of his wealth, represent a net gain for the environment.
Fuck, this right wing idea that financially successful people should be precluded from public discussion of environmental issues really shits me.
desipis @20:
“I think there’s an unfair double bind being placed on the left here. On one hand if you haven’t been involved in business you’ll get dismissed as not knowing anything about how the world really works, on the other if you’re successful in business you’ll get labelled as a hypocrite.”
If you are working class and speak in public in support of an environmental cause you’ll be denounced as a dirty hippy.
If you are middle class and you speak in support of an environmental cause you’ll be denounced as a trendy latte sipper.
If you are wealthy and you speak in support of an environmental cause you’ll denounced as a hypocrite.
And, yes, Al Gore is fat.
On bogans (CUBs or traditional), I have a simple test I reckon is pretty accurate: when you scan the TV guide, is there a channel you don’t bother looking at?
As to consumption, I /do/ think there is a moral issue – and it’s pretty easy to look at relative resource consumption intensity. Think of Kant’s rule – if we all lived with the consumption habits as urged by politicians and plutocrats, we’d all be screwed. (I’m reminded of the tubes of drosophila that fall to the back of the shelves, running a few generations in the limited medium – eeeeeyyyyewwww!)
There’s a Goldilocks principle, the happy mean. Epicurus was pretty clear saying something like “Sure, Grange Hermitage is good stuff, and nothing wrong with enjoying it every now and again, but if you have it every day, you can’t go to your mate’s place and enjoy a good evening’s conversation when all he can offer is Chateau Armpit. Getting used to luxury is a pretty good way of ensuring unpleasant sensations. Stay happy enough with Chateau Armpit, visiting poor friends is enjoyable, and you can properly savour the Grange when you get the chance.”
There /is/ a thing called modesty, and it /is/ a virtue. Conspicuous charity is immodest – not just conspicuous consumption. Even conspicuous extreme asceticism is immodest.
Overconsumption of resources is really a form of gluttony, and often comorbid with avarice. Are we a society of overconsumers? The national waistline, the obesity rates, say “yes”.
The fundy nutters, the “prosperity gospellers”, go on about the sins of Sodom yet revel in the more destructive sins of Sybaris.
I don’t believe that financially successful people should be precluded from public discussion of environmental issues. I just don’t particularly like being dictated to by someone who was quite happy to encourage consumerism when it suited him, but now (that he’s made his fortune) turns around and says that we shouldn’t? I don’t see Dick Smith as left wing in the least, by the way. In fact, I don’t really like the left- and right- wing labels.
Many aspects of the green movement are in fact deeply conservative (conservation = conserving one’s resources). And you know what, that’s a good thing, we need to be conservative about some things. The world is a place of swings and roundabouts.
But what I really hate is the notion that there’s morally superior progressive types and morally inferior other types (anyone who doesn’t believe exactly what they believe). It reminds me of fundie Christians. I don’t like being morally lectured, and it’s likely to make me react badly. Sorry, just the way I am. It’s why I don’t have any religion, and it’s why I don’t belong to a political group.
I really resent being lectured by progressive types who say, “We’re all going to have to pull our belts in” when they’re doing fine and dandy, thank you, and if they have to pull their own belt in it won’t mean that they’re going to suffer particularly. (Cate Blanchett, you are surprised that some people didn’t react well to your carbon tax ad? Well you’re not the one who is going to really have to pay, are you? You’re entitled to say what you did and appear in any ad you want, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t really be surprised when some people react angrily, because it’s an easy choice to pay a carbon tax when you’re a millionaire.)
I have a friend who really lives the way that one should live if one has environmental ideals (and I suspect that you’re like this too, Mel, which is why I will listen to you respectfully). She does her best to live sustainably, she cycles everywhere, she does all the things one is supposed to do. I’m happy to put up with her lecturing me from time to time because she actually lives the life that she espouses for others. Perhaps I’ll listen to Dick Smith when he downsizes to a two bedroom house, cycles his kids to school, eats sustainably from his vegie garden and handwashes his nappies in environmentally friendly soap.
Dave, as it happens I agree with you. My own personal philosophy is that moderation is a good thing in all areas. Oh, apart from books. I just can’t seem to stop myself from consuming books.
LE@25. Books don’t count unless it’s likr something out of Harry Potter or Narnia and the letters disappear as they are read.
LE @ 7:
The ACF study which you refer to gives per capita figures for all consumption which naturally give a better result for larger households (including households with children). The bulk of the present consumption effect the study identifies is a function of “affluence” and the embedded water use (which makes up about 80% of water use), etc, from what we consume.
Those figures are not inconsistent with Crawford’s figures for households: he is concerned with matters more specific to housing and its location.
Nor am I sure that your comparison between big houses in Toorak and McMansions at the fringe is entirely to the point, particularly if you are comparing an existing big house in Toorak with an it-could-be-built-better proposed new “McMansion.” Crawford is concerned about the latter (that’s where the numbers are, after all) and his analysis necessarily presupposes the continuation of capitalism. You can’t blame him if he doesn’t also propose subdividing Toorak mansions into affordable housing or rather, think of the howls if he did!
When it comes to the environment, yes, we are all sinners. How can we be expected to live otherwise when our society is organized as it is? That actually is a very big part of the reason why action on CO2, for example, needs to be economically systemic (emission trading or “carbon tax” as a proxy for that) rather than by piecemeal direct interventions.
I think the thing which Helen @3 was “calling shit” on was the invocation of the interests of the poor by people who don’t seem too concerned about those interests when the poor are employees or welfare recipients, but who have a vested interest in making a buck out of them as consumers.
LE:
“I just don’t particularly like being dictated to by someone who was quite happy to encourage consumerism when it suited him, but now (that he’s made his fortune) turns around and says that we shouldn’t?”
Don’t be so hysterical. Dick Smith sold electronic goods and made a buck out of it. This does not translate into encouraging rampant consumerism. Nor is he lecturing the public any more than you are lecturing the public each time your post an opinion on this website.
But in any event what Smith says or does is irrelevant and it is a mischievous distraction to put personalities front and centre in the debate.
Either it is true that we are over-exploiting the earth and that many/most of the 9 billion people projected for 2050 will die or seriously suffer as a result or it is false. I happen to think it is a “more likely than not scenario” because that is what the science tells us. I nearly always go with the science. Others, such as yourself, obviously think ideology trumps science.
Here is the latest State of the Ocean report, released two days ago. It seems to very clearly back what Smith and others like him are saying while thoroughly discrediting your “I want everyone to have more” cargo cultism.
I would dislike that notion too. I think it’d be unfair to morally judge someone for doing the best they can within the system they have. However I don’t think the issue is about moral judgement of past or present actions. It’s about a strategic view for the future.
And as Mel points out, focusing on the messenger instead of the message is a logical fallacy.
Great post LE. As a reward, a nice site for amusing plush toys.
The problems of modern housing design is a particular bugbear of mine, since so much of it is from bad regulatory structures. Classic example–bluestone is a traditional building material in Gippsland that it is now very hard to build with because council planners are not comfortable with it, so resist approving it. The “comfort zone” of bureaucrats-whose-approval-is-required and the perverse incentives of land rationing generate much of the problems.
Abolishing official discretions and land rationing for housing would not guarantee better design but it would make design innovation much more likely.
On environmentalism, it is conspicuous that the Greens have the highest average income voter base of any of the major Parties by quite a long margin. It seems to be a Maslow hierarchy thing: having managed material comfort, one starts getting concerned about other stuff. Trouble is, a lot of status claims then get smuggled in.
As someone who goes to lots of different schools, there are very definite school “cultures” which evolve over time. (In other words, there is an interaction between parenting, peers, institutions and wider culture.)
I can think of two very prestigious boys schools: one of which seems to be increasingly turning out rather nicely behaved young gentleman and the other entitled brats, even though I suspect their parental income and occupational profile would be rather similar.
L@31 – Looks at per capita income of greens supporters. I think the correlation between education and income is being happily ignored by L.
The demographics are a bitch (i wrote flybuys data merges with census data at subsubditrict level, so I have a moderate feel for some areas), and you have to look at it booth my booth, CSSD by CSSD. Even in Higgins, you look at the Toorak (North West Higgins) booths, low Green (and previously low Dem), more money and fewer degrees, while CSSDs in Eastern half of Higgins with booths have more degrees, middle incomes (for higgins) and high greens. The Windsor end (South West) has low income, low green, relatively fewer degrees and high ALP vote.
My *gut-feel guess* is that “Eastern Higgins” has relatively more science/engineering types than “Western Higgins” – but it’s been a while since I had good data – I’m going from the vibe of the people on the street – although I only visit the Toorak corner once every couple of years.
(And yes, I’ve still got a black armband on after the demise of the Dems, who tended to have derived reasonable policies that the “save the forests for the gay whales” types only happen upon by accident).
As to L@32 – Mate…. catch the 5,6,16 trams and correlate uniforms with behaviour. What the hell are they doing at St Michaels they don’t do at Wesley or, worse still, Xavier? (I reckon public transport is perhaps the best way to judge the ethos of a school).
D@29, I don’t even peruse a tv guide, and I work in professional services (AJ@16), I grind my own coffee and eat raw meat (in several different ways).
But I live in a pretty big house with a moderately big car and I LOVE THEM BOTH. TO BITS. When I lived in the US for a stint recently I drove a Chevrolet Suburban AND I LOVED IT!!
Boganism is cool and consumerism rocks! Dick Smith suffers from that weird syndrome where people’s ego is so big it spills over into their conscience and merges with it in weird ways (it’s often called Al Gore syndrome) – a common side-effect is that sufferers’ imaginations and sense of perspective are both suffocated by the massive swelling super-ego-conscience complex.
Sounds like Paddy is back on the Guinness. But I digress.
Dave, click on Lorenzo’s link @30. You in particular will appreciate it. I’m not a biologist/medic/pathologist and it tickled my funny bone.
Patrick, I’ve got enough Scottish blood in me to be modest in my own personal consumption. However, I wish I had a bigger house. We have a tiny house. My computer is in the kitchen (nowhere else to put it). But, ah, a room of my own to work in would be so nice…
P.S. Re Lorenzo’s link: I want the petri dish…oh dear, that consumerist impulse…
Marcellous@27 and Helen@3:
I have had to think long and hard about this one. On a personal level, let me make it clear that I am a very strong supporter of decent wages, safe workplaces and protections for those in a vulnerable position in the workplace. It is one of those core value kind of things for me.
But once people do get good wages and the like, I don’t think it’s up to me to tell them how to best spend it, that’s their choice.
My main concern is not consumer choices when people have the money to buy what they want. My concern is when people don’t have the capacity to afford what they are buying, but they are lured into buying by the availability of easy loans/credit etc. I used to repossess houses. Many people whose houses I repossessed should never have been given a loan. Thus, it was inevitable they would default. These people were caught in a kind of hideous poverty trap. They overextended themselves with the willing abettance of lenders and credit providers and then they got gouged when they defaulted.
That is when I get concerned about working-class consumerism – when people are lured into buying more than they can afford and then, because they don’t have smarts with regard to money, it all ends in disaster. Of course, it happens to people of all classes, and as I’ve discussed here, intelligence or education is no indicator of whether someone can handle money or not, but people who are middle or upper class generally have more fall back options if disaster hits. They might have to downsize their house, but it’s less likely that they’re going to end up homeless. If you’re at the bottom already, there’s nowhere to go. So, insofar as I worry about consumerism, that’s my concern – where vulnerable people get trapped in poverty when they can’t afford things but attempt to buy them anyway because people put out inducements suggesting that it’s possible. And I think that’s more important than whether some middle-class family in Kew has an inground trampoline and a Playstation for their kids.
Also, re Mindy@1 and SL@12: I think it’s true that when kids come to school unfed, it’s not simply a matter of their parents lacking money. It’s often that there’s other things going on which means that the parents simply don’t have the emotional and practical resources to provide for the kids. The parents may have problems with one or more of the following: marital breakdown, domestic violence, drug abuse and mental illness.
LE: “. We have a tiny house. My computer is in the kitchen (nowhere else to put it). But, ah, a room of my own to work in would be so nice…”
Heh. Let’s do a Monster Move and swap houses then. I’m fed up with having to pack a cut lunch to get from the bedroom to the computer room. And spending hours cleaning the dust out of various nooks and crannies.
On the issues of toys and all that, my wife has 11 brothers and sisters. As a result of birthday gifts, most of the kids have literally hundreds of toys, enough to stock a medium sized toy store is some cases. I refuse point blank to add to the excess. The only presents I buy now are books and things like goats for poorer folk in developing countries.
One more point before I get off my soapbox- we have various examples already of humans pushing the boundaries of carrying capacity. The Maori are a good example because it happened so recently. Not long after colonising New Zealand they had exterminated all larger animals; seals, large flightless birds etc.. By the time white folk arrived hunger and malnutrition were serious problems and Maori society was hierarchical, militarised and in a state of perpetual warfare. Eating the vanquished, and occasionally one’s own kin, became a major source of calories and protein.
I’d wager much the same sort of stuff went down in the centuries after the Oz Aborigines exterminated the megafauna.
A conservation ethic is a necessity not a luxury.
have you noticed the amazing number of words you all use?
Yes JM@41, but a famous lady once told me “words are all I have”.
I like it, KVD, I must use it.
John M, my mother said that she didn’t read this post fully on account of it being too wordy, and my husband didn’t finish it either (mainly because Eaglet No. 2 tipped his milkshake on his lap). Tsk, tsk, I shall aim to be more succinct in my next post. I suppose I was thinking out aloud rather than offering any kind of concluded view.
LE@43 ok by me, but royalties may be due to DEM
Hah! I knew I recognised it from somewhere. That DEM has such a beautiful way with words.
I don’t think there are too many words in the posts at SL but the font size is awfully small- are pixels a scarce resource in need of rationing? I find Club Troppo much easier to read.
Mel@46 ctrl+ or ctrl- may assist, if you wish to be pixel-profligate..
DB@33 Education is a factor, but that is because intellectual capital is a major source of income in our society. And more education hardly makes people less likely to engage in status claims …
Listened to a talk on Friday by a former staffer of Ms K Keneally’s. She made the observation that entitled aristocrats have employed intellectuals for millennia to write about how evil and vulgar commerce is and then added ‘nowadays, we call this environmentalism’. The audience laughed.
M@40 The great examples of such collapses are technologically stagnant, commercially isolated societies. There is a reason for that …
I have no objection to intelligent conservation: it is when environmentalists start acting like fourth century Christians in the Roman Empire using the state to impose their self-righteous sense of salvationist entitlement that I get angsty.
The tendency to recycle the romantic, Counter-enlightenment naturalist crap of late C19th and early C20th Germany and Austria is not reassuring either. (And that was all about the classes sneering at the masses too.)
L@48 – I have a similar distaste for Counter-Enlightenment naturalistic crap of the C19/earlyC20. They were into what could be called “animal spirits” and objected to the quantitative advances in science and engineering.
Now, if there’s a lateC20/earlyC21 set that trusts in animal spirits and against the scientists, its … um… the owners of the dark satanic mills with an unjustified sense of entitlement, advocating a lifestyle that they, but not the majority, could attain or sustain.
L@48: “M@40 The great examples of such collapses are technologically stagnant, commercially isolated societies. There is a reason for that”
I think you’ll find scarcity usually prompted innovation, such as agriculture. But the point remains, no matter how innovative we become Earth has finite resources. And outside of science fiction, Earth is commercially isolated from the rest of the galaxy
“The tendency to recycle the romantic, Counter-enlightenment naturalist crap of late C19th and early C20th Germany and Austria is not reassuring either. (And that was all about the classes sneering at the masses too.)”
I think the “sneering out the masses” meme is an ideological device that serves a purpose. Like all good ideological devices, it contains a grain of truth while disguising a larger and more important reality.
“I think you’ll find scarcity usually prompted innovation, such as agriculture. But the point remains, no matter how innovative we become Earth has finite resources.”
Let’s assume that to be true, even if it is not. Those finite resources may still be plenty sufficient for 9 billion people and the simple truth is that you don’t have a clue either way Mel.
“I think you’ll find scarcity usually prompted innovation, ”
When do you think there has been more innovation, in the first 7,900 years after the spread of agriculture or the last 100 years? I think you’ll find there’s no connection between the type of scarcity you’re thinking about and the level of innovation.
“The great examples of such collapses are technologically stagnant, commercially isolated societies.”
No, it is the growth of statism that creates problems for otherwise advanced societies.
Pedro@51 – I cannot think of any criticism of Gibbon involving his omission of the growth of statism as a cause for problems in advanced societies. Maybe I missed it as I left off once the Dark Ages kicked in.
When Gibbon *does* admit to other reasons for the Dark Ages other than Christianity, he seems to stress too much spending on the military for domestic political purposes (from memory, 10% of GDP was his threshold for overspending on the military when national survival isn’t seriously threatened), and the enfeeblement of mind and virtue by addiction to luxury.
On the other side of the coin, we have the obvious economic and intellectual benefits of the Scottish Enlightenment – big on virtue of individuals and society, and being Scottish, frowning on profligacy or the titillations of luxurious overconsumption. I’d have to rely on SL’s knowledgeable liberal rightiness to be specific and would welcome her guesses about how her heroes would view the practices of those accused of affluenza.
Re: the ZhuZhu… you do feel that when the toys have their own toys it’s getting a bit much.
Ah DB, the allure of that Scottish prurience…of course, this created largely the exact opposite of the puralistic liberal societies that most of us enjoy living in…
Seriously, that Scottish prurience was little more than a moral straightjacket – as long as the dominant moral discourse was so unrelentingly and powerfully applied there was no need for more than a minimal legal apparatus. Personally, I wouldn’t mind. But I am conscious that the happiness of millions (gays, non-conservative Christians or people of any other religion and indeed nearly anyone who simply wanted to do something outside the narrow band of ‘acceptable’ endeavours) would be seriously reduced by moves backward to such a society.
This is not to say that conformity does not have its virtues: I would not have to experience quite as much frustration at seeing other people publicly express stupid views, for example
P@54 : prurience and prudence are very different.
prurience might say “no (descriptor) sex”, the other “no (descriptor) sex without a condom”.
I think the scots have been generally imprudent about once in the last millenium – a central american financial adventure – and the poor buggers got lumbered with Westminster and the English Pound as a result. Mind you, I’m not including imprudent disinhibition about “a wee dram”
DB@49
Food miles = local food is an obvious example of recycled ideas. But the belief that the masses could not possibly obtain such a life style given available resources was a belief back then too.
M@50 What counts as resources depends on technological capacity, so the notion of ‘finite’ lacks a certain definitiveness. Earth’s commercial isolation from the rest of the solar system/galaxy/universe is a matter of technological capacity too, after all.
Well, DB, in English language they might be, but in the Scottish culture you are referring to they aren’t.
Lorenzo:
“M@50 What counts as resources depends on technological capacity, so the notion of ‘finite’ lacks a certain definitiveness.”
That’s merely rephrasing what I already said.
“Earth’s commercial isolation from the rest of the solar system/galaxy/universe is a matter of technological capacity too, after all.”
It is also a matter of physics.
L@56, not everything is a matter of technology. Just ask the question, why don’t we all have flying cars yet? We already have the technology.
Desipis@59. We /do/ have flying cars – they are just damn expensive (and probably the double-registration for road and air is a real killer too).
On earth cut off commercially – Thinking about the Galactic Agreement on Tariffs and Trade …. anti dumping clauses “No pulling 1000-year-old electronic goods out of landfill and selling it as advanced technology to the earthlings…” The nice aliens don’t ruin the planet with super-destructo-beams, they’ll just blow the economy away…
Dave, that’s my point. We have the technology, but everyone still doesn’t have a flying car now do they? We can’t rely on technology to solve all the worlds problems.
Yup and outside of computing and communications, nearly all technology today is only improving in small, incremental baby steps. Today’s cars are big hunks of rusting metal fueled by a non-renewable and rapidly diminishing fossil fuel just like they were 50 years. Even the engine has only been subject to incremental improvement.
In medicine we are now going backwards in some ways, with antibiotic resistant infections killing us or requiring amputations at rates not seen since the pioneering days of penicillin. Hospitals are now having to use honey as a treatment for antibiotic resistant bugs, FFS.
Ditto for agriculture, construction materials etc etc etc…
Is the dead hand of capitalism suppressing new technology or is some other factor involved?
M@62 Given that technological creativity seems to be the most intense the more capitalist you are, perhaps we take a remarkable degree of technological dynamism for granted?
D@61 Technology creates capacities, it does not determine action.
L@63 says “Technology creates capacities, it does not determine action.”
If true, then there’d be vanishingly few people lining up on the night of release of new version of gizmo (e.g. apple-anything!) or rushing in when a new model comes out. (Oh… sorry, how often is there actually new technology in those things! What’s different? The version number on the box!)
It’s part of the unnecessary luxury thing, unless one deems it necessary to one’s self-esteem to have the latest version of a gizmo, or, especially, to have it when your neighbor doesn’t.
Technological advances are chaotic and the capacity they create often doesn’t align with the capacity needed by society. So relying on technology to provide capacity currently unavailable seems like a risky approach to me. I think underestimating capacity due to unforeseen technological advances is a much better outcome than overestimating capacity.
lol. Technology is merely an expression of human ingenuity, and I don’t know what else I would want to rely on – certainly not human ability to rationally plan things.
M@62, it’s interesting that you say that. First, technology and communications are of course enabling technologies that can drive substantial productivity improvements in almost every other area.
Secondly, agriculture is of course one of the most highly regulated areas of human enterprise, in which innovation tends to be actually outlawed by luddite moralists. So a dead hand, absolutely, but hardly that of capitalism!!
Thirdly, medical innovation is proceeding faster than you realise, clearly – the slower part is medical services innovation, but even that is proceeding more rapidly than you might think: have you heard of health tourism?
Paddy:
“Secondly, agriculture is of course one of the most highly regulated areas of human enterprise, in which innovation tends to be actually outlawed by luddite moralists”
Would you care to elaborate, Paddy.
Lorenzo:
” Given that technological creativity seems to be the most intense the more capitalist you are, perhaps we take a remarkable degree of technological dynamism for granted?”
Oh please get your invisible hand out from under the table.
I’ve been reading State of Innovation: : The U.S. Government’s Role in Technology Development lately. It is remarkable how even in America, the most “capitalist” of all western countries, the Government plays such a central role in innovation.
To give one example- Big Pharma in America spends much more money on schmoozing politicians, regulators and doctors and general marketing than it does on R&D. Much R&D that does occur only happens because the Government does it directly, indirectly or the private sector does it only in response to government heavy petting.
And so on and so forth.
That’s apposite, Mel, because Big Pharma is running out of innovation…big government’s teat may run generously but seemingly lacks cream.
As for elaborating on agriculture, I assume that you are aware that the world is awash in barriers to agricultural trade (I think that only people and fissile material are more tightly regulated) so must mean the illegal innovation bit. Again though; are you serious? Have you ever heard of genetic engineering? It is quite contentious as far as I can gather.
Plus planning regs (green belt vs brown belt etc.) and things like the UK government legally forcing farmers to dip their sheep in neurotoxic organophosphates even after the danger was known.
Henry2 said he was a cockie – I’d be interested in his view of agricultural regulation.
M@68 The role of government in innovation is very mixed: it promotes with one had and deters with another. And it remains true that capitalism and innovation are highly correlated. A vibrant commercial sector both creates itself as well as runs with/adapts what might be cooked up in government funded research. Governments long had a role in military research, but are relative late-comers to other areas.
In the longer run, ability to retain and disseminate knowledge and techniques, density of commercial interactions, variety in interactions and competitive jurisdictions all seem to be important.
China dominated innovation from c.500BC to c.1500AD with all but the last. But the true take-off in innovation post-1750 was definitely a product of capitalism.
DB@64 That looks like an cultural/anthropological pattern to me.
L@71 – you are slightly right correlating innovation with capitalism.
Most of the real innovation has come from war, at least proximally… with the root cause greed (there is surplus to invest in development of rocks and clubs through to rockets and computer networks). So maybe capitalism is a good correlation in recent years after all.
The other real innovation driver (in the physical world) is more humane, the desire to know and play – things like the advances in genetics, which until recently, have had little military or political application.
Innovative thought, like buddhist insight or small-is-beautiful thinking, to be efficient and ultimately consume less rather than efficiency gains to consume more, doesn’t attract capital or political encouragement, even though the innovative outlooks have the potential to enhance human happiness more than anything else. Hence the long time-to-market penetration of such thoughts from the time they were demonstrated in the “lab” of the minds of buddha, lao tzu, confucius, epicurus and epictetus. In the minds of the modern majority, the notion of human happiness and realization has gone backwards from the axial age to the paleolithic – if not the jurassic.
DB@71
That comes perilously close to “not even wrong”. Military technology does tend to be the cutting edge of technology, since it is about life-and-death and the power of power-holders.
Yet war has been a ubiquitous element in human society, innovation has not been. Innovation has tended to be concentrated in particular societies. My rule of thumb is that, if it was invented before 500BC it was first invented in the Fertile Crescent; if it was first invented between 500BC and 1500AD it was first invented in China; if it was first invented after 1500AD, it was first invented in the West. Except for anything to do with horses, when it was first invented in Central Eurasia and a partial exception for Indian mathematics.
What set off the UK’s creation of the Industrial Revolution was that innovation became liberated from previous energy constraints. But European innovation had already become much broader and more commercialised in medieval times (even though it was more adaptation than invention).
And, btw, capitalism does not encourage war mongering. The great wars of the C20th were motivated by political and ideological reactions against capitalism and its implications. The more capitalist Europe became in its economic activity, the longer its periods of peace.
To continue my comment about war and capitalism, capitalism is pre-eminently the increased creation and importance of capital. This broadens the way people can make a living, and the productive interactions between them, so leads to a reduction in the importance of violence and stationary resources (most obviously land) in human relations. It does not guarantee peace; it merely increases the possibilities of peace and reduces the benefits of violence. But that turns out to be a big thing.
This is particularly important for women, since decreasing the importance of upper body strength increases their potential relative economic performance: decreasing the returns from violence is part of this.
L@73 : Must disagree with you looking back at what is different in my daily life from 50 years ago – microwave ovens, computers, and the internet. The old name of the internet is a giveaway – DARPAnet. Computing without Rear Admiral Grace Hopper? (Not professor, and even though I abhor cobol environments). And the use of microwaves for cooking goes back to WW2 britain, the boffins working on radar warming up their tea with unshielded magnetrons. Communications via rockets (thankyou V2) … Hell… Even the steam revolution absolutely depended on good instruments, and the reason the poms did it is that the Admiralty had pushed them to make a reliable clock so warships knew where the hell they were.
Don’t embarrass yourself, Paddy. GM crops are planted on over 300 million acres and there is little restriction on them in North America and various other countries. The research on yield gains is conflicting on balance I’s accept that some modest gains have occurred.
Your link on medical research merely demonstrates the R&D lethargy of the private sector.
DB@75 The marine chronometer and the steam engine developed at the same time, not sequentially. The urge for effective measuring instruments goes back to the medieval period (those cathedrals), was given a large push from the profits of trade as well as the cognitive shock to Aristotelian verities the results of exploding onto the globe created.
European innovation took off because it was broad-based, not merely a matter of state action (that became the Chinese problem). Even military technology spreads rapidly into ordinary life. A spread we tend to take for granted, but should not: it is a remarkable feature of our societies.
Your average custom designed and architecturally sound Toorak mansion is a far cry from a maximum m2/$ heap of junk selected from a bunch of stock designs and plonked on an undersized block with no thought for orientation.
A lot of purveyors of crap homes are selling a lot of ticky tacky to your “bogans”. It’s neither classless nor clever to dream up jibes against people who are aghast at mcmanshionland for simple, practical and truly classless reasons.
This isn’t elitism. It’s physics and economics. I’m with Helen.
Thanks Alphonse, that’s pretty much my response – Haven’t replied in this thread because I’m putting a post up at my place instead. Will be up soon.
On the McMansions point, Australian housing has become less adaptative to local conditions the more regulated (i.e. determined by bureaucratic comfort zones and land rationing) it has become and the more people have been buying expectations of capital gains.
If land-approved for housing is so expensive, then blocks get smaller and verandahs disappear.
Not a uniquely Oz problem. Jasper Becker points out that the modernist crap the Beijing regime has been building and authorising deals with Beijing’s climate less well than the C15th housing it replaces.
The modernist delusion that new is always better has been particularly disastrous in architecture.
Alphonse, Helen, you may call bullshit on the claims Alphonse makes. But they aren’t the ones the article LE is reacting to makes – that article is almost wholly about size and location.
And like LE, I can’t stand the whingeing about the size of other people’s houses – I feel glad that we live in a society in which so many people can afford such a big house, and I feel that most if not all of the people who are
are not at all making
but are actually making a statement about the relative importance to them of their local amenities vis-à-vis the size, and dressing it up in a convenient cloak of moral superiority.
LOrenzo:
“M@68 The role of government in innovation is very mixed: it promotes with one had and deters with another. And it remains true that capitalism and innovation are highly correlated”
Needless to say I disagree. It also needs to be pointed out that capitalism is woven seamlessly into the cultural and governance fabric of any society where it exists and to talk about it separately is senseless in a way . As an example of such senseless thought I note crude libertarian elements often belt on about the dynamism and innovation of corporations and the badness of government without stopping to think that the limited liability corporation is itself a government invention.
You might also like to ponder on the merits of capitalism in states with ineffective governance, for example Somalia.
I think analytically separating capitalism from the context in which it occurs is a little like trying to separate wetness from water.
M@82 Capitalism at its simplest is a system based on private creation, ownership and use of capital. Law and government will affect profoundly how it operates, but the prime problem with places such as Somalia are not too much capitalism, but too little. A good system of laws, for example, are important but you cannot then claim it is all “really” the result of state action because law matters. Good laws allow all sorts of useful non-state action.
Part of my point is that even states in capitalist societies are more likely to support effective innovation than non-capitalist ones. Not least because they have more to work with, in all sorts of senses. But also because the focus on application and use of capital encourages such a focus.
But one only has to consider the effect of regulation housing, or the way EU regulation tends to be more restrictive of various types of commercial research than in the US, to see the mixed effect of even such states on innovation.
LOrenzo says:
” … but the prime problem with places such as Somalia are not too much capitalism, but too little.”
Yet more empty, evangelical rhetoric, Lorenzo. Once you take out the government, charity and not for profit sector economic activity, capitalist enterprise accounts for less than 60% of economic activity in most advanced western societies. In a country like Somalia I imagine it accounts for more like 80% of economic activity.
M@84 60% of lots is much more capitalism than 80% of bugger-all: refer back to my original definition.
A good discussion – I’ve been following it but did not see much that I could usefully contribute.
One observation, though, to Mel’s “resources are finite” remark. Of course they are but human ingenuity seems to find substitutes as things become scarce and expensive. Spices were once the most valuable commodities on earth.
And as countries become more affluent, demand for “things” seems to flatten. Services and information become more important.
My guess is that there will be plenty of oil left in the ground when we stop using oil – it will be more expensive to extract than alternatives.
So I don’t lie awake worrying about resources.
Come to think of, it I don’t lie awake worrying about much at all in the future of humankind. I don’t see that we are going to stop muddling through as we have done for many thousands of years.
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