The Virtues of Consumption
We've spent centuries rewarding production. Maybe it's time we gave consumption some credit too.
Perhaps this is a bit philosophical for an e-commerce newsletter, but I think technically it ties out to the prompt - we are talking about consumption after all. We’ve organized our days (and much of our ethics and allocation of esteem in society) around production. This is logical to the extent we need each other’s labor to make goods and provide services. I am not a prognosticator; this is no prediction. I don’t really know if future developments in technology or society will mean that there’s greater demand for human labor or less. I just know that whether our lives have meaning and whether we have self-worth should not hinge on the answer to this question.
I guess it is possible to make what may feel like a correction to the historical record. People often talk as though we are working harder than ever, and this is demonstrably untrue. This is the case even if you include non-market work (at-home childcare, food production, etc.). Total hours worked per year has come down from roughly 5,000 in 1800 (take all this with broad strokes) to around 3,000 in the developed world and 4,000 globally. Whatever our subjective experience, the claim that we are busier than ever is wrong.
Where has that additional time gone? Some of it is that we have created new categories of time expenditure - namely leisure - that did not really exist in the past, or to remotely the same degree. The other big one that often gets forgotten is we’ve added retirement, a whole new stage of adult life. When Social Security was created in the 1930s, the age of eligibility was set at 65, which was roughly the life expectancy. It was insurance for the risk that you outlast the actuarial tables. Today, we make it, on average, until almost 80, and don’t often think of these “golden years” as an enormous increase in non-labor time over the course of a lifetime.
So, a large part of the answer to the question posed in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes in “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” about what we would do with our time a 100 years later in a far richer world is that we did indeed take more free time for ourselves, if not reducing work all the way down to the 15 hours per week he predicted (although the roughly 20 hours per week in market labor per adult in the United States isn’t that far off).
But won’t life without work be devoid of meaning? The evidence would seem to point otherwise. When self-evaluated on a 10 point scale, citizens of wealthier countries, who work less on average, score their lives higher than citizens of poorer countries. The richest countries rate life 7-8 whereas the poorest score it 3.5-5.5, with a steady upward trend in between. It is likely, if you looked back in time, that you would see a similar trajectory within each country as it became richer, though the data is sparser. Whatever we might disclaim to each other, we actually are doing better as we’re doing better.
So far, we have managed our emotions by, to some degree, cosplaying worker bees even as that looks less and less the case. Maybe we can maintain that self-deception for the duration, or maybe it becomes less viable if the trend continues in the same direction. At some point, it wouldn’t be so awful if we give our consumer selves the same credit we do our working selves. Or, perhaps, more credit. Maybe what we choose to eat and do and read and watch and love should count for more in our ledgers than what we have to do to fund it.