Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that “Consumerism, the mass participation in the values of the mass-industrial market . . . emerged
in the 1920s not as a smooth progression from earlier and less 'developed' patterns of consumption,
but rather as an aggressive device of corporate survival.”
sociation of Manufacturers enlisted a team of advertisers, marketers, and psychologists to formulate
a strategy to counter government efforts to plan and manage the economy in the wake of the De-
pression. They proposed a massive, ongoing ad campaign to equate consumerism with “The Amer-
ican Way.”
Progress
would henceforth be framed entirely in economic terms, as the fruit of manu-
facturers' ingenuity. Americans were to be referred to in public discourse (newspapers, magazines,
radio) as
consumers
, and were to be reminded at every opportunity of their duty to contribute to the
economy by purchasing factory-made products, as directed by increasingly sophisticated and ubi-
quitous advertising cues.
While advertising was an essential prop to consumerism, by itself it was incapable of stoking
sufficient demand to soak up all the goods rolling off assembly lines. In the early years of the last
century Americans were accustomed to paying cash for their purchases. But then along came auto-
mobiles: not many people could afford to pay for one outright, yet nearly everybody wanted one.
In addition to being talked into desiring more products, consumers had to be enabled to purchase
more of them than they could immediately pay for; hence the widespread deployment of time pay-
ments and other forms of consumer credit. With credit, households could
consume now and pay
later
. Consumers took on more debt, the financial industry mushroomed, and manufacturers sold
more products.
Though consumerism began as a project organized by corporate America, government at all
levels swiftly lent its support. When citizens spent more on consumer goods, sales tax and income
tax revenues tended to swell. After World War II, government advocacy of increased consumer
spending was formalized with the adoption of gross domestic product (GDP) as the nation's primary
measure of economic success, and with the increasing use of the term
consumer
by government
agencies.
By the 1950s, consumerism was thoroughly interwoven in the fabric of American society. In
1955, economist Victor Lebow would epitomize the new status quo, writing in the
Journal of Re-
tailing:
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life,
that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and
our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and
discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Meanwhile critics had identified a couple of serious problems with consumerism.
First problem: Consumerism, according to the naysayers, warps human values. Way back
in 1899, when consumerism was barely a glimmer in advertisers' neurons, economist Thorstein
Veblen asserted in his widely cited topic
The Theory of the Leisure Class
3
that there exists a funda-
mental split in society between those who work and those who exploit the work of others; as soci-
eties evolve, the latter come to constitute a “leisure class” that engages in “conspicuous consump-
tion.” Veblen saw mass production as a way to universalize the trappings of leisure so the owning
class could engage workers in an endless pursuit of status symbols, thus deflecting workers' atten-
tion from society's increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and their own political impotence.
