Status

It wasn't always about hyper consumption. We can return to that way of life.

Photo by Daniel Salcius on Unsplash

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

• Paul Mazur, an executive at Lehman Brothers back in 1927 in an article from the Harvard Business Review. Mr. Mazur is no longer with us, but he’d be pleased to know, that he succeeded. Just look at this next quote.

“The American way of life is non-negotiable.”

• President George H.W. Bush in 1992. He meant that the American consumption machine that Paul Mazur demanded in 1927 was up and running and would not stop for anything. Thanks to Jan Andrew Bloxham for calling this one out to me yesterday. It fits here nicely.

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

• Economist Herbert Stein, 1985.

We can sum up this journey of hyper consumerism in America (and elsewhere) in three easy steps.

1. Until about 100 years ago, America was not a hyper consumer culture, and even then, it took a while to get going. The marketing machines and consumer culture that convinced most of us that our wants were really our needs didn’t get going until after WWII.

2. In the 1990s our President reminded us that you would have to pry our over consuming culture from our cold dead hands.

3. Fast forward to today, and the cold dead hand is on its way. We have overshot 6 of 9 planetary boundaries, with ocean acidification on the way, and we are not slowing down our consumption for anything. The new administration in the US denies climate change is a problem and would likely deny the other planetary boundaries are a problem, if they knew what they were. Companies are stepping away from net zero promises they made just a few years ago because these promises aren’t popular anymore

What is status?

We humans have always been vain, envious and jealous creatures. Moses came down from the mountain thousands of years ago with the final commandment warning us about coveting anything our neighbor had that we wanted.

We aren’t doing very well on that last commandment.

That is the system we have built. A capitalist market economy may have been destined to get to this point but look back at that quote by Mr. Mazur that began this story. He knew that Americans needed to be trained to mistake their wants for their needs.

Capitalism needs envy and status seeking in order to fully optimize profit. If we realized we really didn’t need that much (which we don’t) capitalism would still be the system that we operated under, as it was in Mr. Mazur’s day, but it would be a very different world we live in. Global use of materials didn’t outstrip the planet’s ability to provide those resources until about 1970, so this is a recent phenomenon in human history. It didn’t have to be this way, and it still doesn’t.

We have always wanted status (see that last commandment), but that didn’t mean hyper-consumerism until relatively recently.

It was always there, but what started with Mr. Mazur’s observation in 1927 has been turned into a science. And not the cool sciences that give us advances like GPS, the Internet and Tang, but the malevolent ones that turn us against ourselves and mine our insecurities for the profit of the few and powerful.

It is no surprise that in a lot of degrowth literature, one of the main industries that is seen as disposable is advertising. Advertising is the science of convincing us to be unhappy with our otherwise wonderful lives, and to see as an overconsumption that ultimately destroys our life-support system as the only cure.

Currently about 2 million people around the world work in advertising. The United States spends about $368 billion on advertising each year. That is per year, about the same as was in the 2022 Inflation reduction act to deal with climate change ($391 billion), whose dollars of investment are spread out over a much longer horizon.

Is the loss of status a fate worse than death? We are going to find out.

We have always and will always crave status. That part of human nature isn’t going to change anytime soon. However, the high cost of our current brand of status seeking has caught up with us. Keeping up with the Joneses and conspicuous consumption make us feel better about ourselves in the short-term, while damaging our environment in the long-term.

I saw a story recently that may signal that we are turning a corner, and that we are on to Mr. Mazur's tricks, and we don’t want to be consumers first and human beings second. It is only a small thing, but here’s hoping it is the start of something bigger.

An increasing number of consumers are taking the “No buy 2025’ pledge cited by the Wall Street Journal which reports the “buy nothing” movement may be reaching critical mass. More and more people on social media are pledging not to buy anything but essentials this year. You can even find people crowing about making the “No buy 2025” pledge on Instagram; which I guess is advertising that you aren’t giving in to advertising.

To save ourselves from the worst of what is coming we have to change how we live, change our culture. If status becomes giving the middle finger to worrying about status, maybe there is hope for us yet.