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Public squalor, private bling |
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The stuff we splash out on! But even in our worst excesses, David Boyle finds valuable clues – to make the pursuit of public goods feel more rewarding. Bling, bling. It’s David Beckham’s £20,000 mobile phone – made from diamonds, platinum and the lightweight alloy used for the space shuttle......
Corporate excesses across the Atlantic, of course, can out-bling even Beckham. Take Dennis Kozlowski, the fraudster and former Tyco chief executive who managed to spend $6,000 on shower curtains, $15,000 on an office umbrella stand, and literally millions on a birthday party for his wife, held in Sardinia around a vodka-urinating ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David.
But why are we so loath to spend money on other ‘goods’ – like less congestion, clean streets, healthy air and other goals of sustainability? There is no doubt that we want them, because we complain about not having them – in 2001, one government attitude survey showed that a staggering 94% of us wanted stronger controls on polluting factories.
Yet, of all the possible priorities, when we have money available that could make a difference, we choose to splash out on ever flashier phones, £50 frying pans, toasters which could make the beds, or ice versions of major Renaissance statues.
‘Private affluence, public squalor’, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed it back in 1958, is a central issue when it comes to working out how to save the planet. Our chances of tackling global warming are pretty slim if we consume so inefficiently, yet baulk when it comes to paying for a congestion charge in Edinburgh – or complain about the fuel tax, although it barely pays for half the actual cost to society of driving.
There are anthropological explanations for our fascination for material goods, because they express who we are, where we belong, and what our dreams are. There are also social explanations: private spending gives us status. Then there’s sheer habit – plus the power of the institutions that encourage us to consume, while simultaneously limiting our choices.
“The trouble is that we are surrounded by messages that the dream is out there,” says Professor Tim Jackson of the Centre for Environmental Strategy at Surrey University, one of the UK’s major experts on consumerism. “We don’t have the right structures for people to negotiate identity, meaning and purpose. We have delegated all these tasks to consumer society and it isn’t doing a very good job at it.”
This has become known among academics as the ‘post-purchase dissonance argument’. Paradoxically, it provides a small ray of hope. When the status and meaning we think we’ll get from shopping fails to satisfy, can we find more solid satisfaction through joint engagement in the pursuit of public goods?
If our structures and social messages were different, you could imagine people finding status, dreams and a sense of self from cleaning up rivers, just as they now throw their money at ‘stuff’.
The evidence is that people would actually be prepared to spend more to make our lives sustainable – just as they happily changed their mind about the congestion charge in London – if they see the change. The problem is that they don’t trust the institutions which would make this happen, whether it is their local council or the United Nations. It isn’t that they believe politicians are dishonest – they are just not sure they have the power.
We need a new kind of insurance product that would add a small premium to the cost of joint investment ventures – anything from cleaning up the local park to cutting air pollution over London. It would then pay back most of people’s investment if the enterprise failed to achieve the desired result.
David Boyle is the author of Authenticity and an associate at the New Economics Foundation.
See full article at:
http://www.greenfutures.org.uk/features/default.asp?id=2384 |
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