The Gospel of Consumption
orionmagazine.org
orionmagazine.org
Most of the budget goes into things which are either mandatory (taxation, social security) or artificially constrained (housing). The total cost of discretionary spending is so proportionately low that it makes no difference if you buy a ps5, you’re still spending most of your paycheck on rent, taxes, food, education/loan servicing and healthcare.
This “blame consumption” thesis makes no sense in the context of reality: people work a lot because the essentials are expensive.
I live in a country where gasoline and cars are 2x as expensive as the US. My fully-loaded transportation costs are around $2k/year . That's driving every day. My utilities cost around $1000/year. What lifestyle is this that people have been suckered into?
You can't totally ignore capital cost, since cars have a finite lifespan. Even if you buy cheap cars, the amortized cost is hard to get under maybe $500-750/yr. So that's $1-1.5k/yr in amortized capital costs for two. The average cost of car insurance for a household is around $2k/yr, though that varies significantly by location, age, and driving history. Probably another $500-1k/yr for regular maintenance for two cars, depending on how easy on the tires/etc. your location is. You can probably trade more maintenance costs for lower amortized capital costs if you buy cheaper used cars, but you'd have to DIY maintenance to come ahead significantly. Then let's assume these are 40 mpg, and there's a couple who each work 250 days a year and both have the average U.S. commute of 32 miles roundtrip. That's $1200 in gas at TX prices, or $1600 at CA prices. So the overall estimate is maybe $5-6k/yr, even being pretty frugal. And I'm also assuming you don't have to pay to park at home or work, or pay tolls on the commute.
We decided to build roads, and wide roads, as well tons of suburbia.
The IRS has to conduct an annual study of the average cost of operating a vehicle, to set the mileage reimbursement rate for cars driven for business purposes. They currently estimate it at $0.56/mile (including depreciation, insurance, registration, gas, maintenance, etc.). So $9k/yr is 16,000 miles/year. The average U.S. household has 1.9 cars, so that's 8500 miles per car. If you commute 250 days a year, that's only a 17-mile commute each way, which is not coincidentally just about the U.S. average.
My parents use 900kwh of electricity / month and complain that PG&E are ripping them off when their bill is 400$ / month. Have they bothered to do anything to bring down their consumption? Nope.
I have a T2 diabetic friend that complains about the cost of insulin, yet refuses to exercise and loose weight.
People have not been suckered into anything. Most people lack the agency to change their circumstances.
Losing weight and keeping the weight is hard. It isn't a coincidence that we have an obesity epidemic for a reason. Suppose your friend did try to lose weight? More likely than not your friend will gain weight back. Yes, there's no excuse to try. but there's no expectation of success.
People have not been suckered into anything. Most people lack the agency to change their circumstances.
This is called learned helplessness and it is a big problem, but there are also contributing problems other than learned helplessness, such as structural problems surrounding housing options. In any case, blaming people for their lack of moral fortitude isn't really a solution at all. It means we stopped asking questions and looking for solutions.
I do not believe the status quo bias is learned helplessness. I believe it is the natural state of most people and that rational agency is an outlier. We are, as individuals, extremely predisposed to just doing what we do and discounting alternatives.
But it is clear that parts of the brain involved in feeding behavior can override the cortex.
And, of course, people use food to deal with stress.
You drink water almost all the time and eat mostly green stuff, you should be fine.
Do you have a citation (preferably one that tries to control for genetics, but I'd appreciate any)?
But I think the formula of “sleep right, eat right, excercise right, in that order” is pretty accurate.
“Sleep right” contains the stress portion of being healthy.
I do not even know if a proper controlled experiment could be conducted for such a complicated topic with our current technology. I just look at the habits of people I think are doing it right, and try to tease out the commonalities.
Discipline is really the one trait that I guess leads to success in the above process, and probably everything else in life. Who knows how much of that is nature vs nurture.
There was a recent EconTalk podcast about this. The author/guest is an expert in this type of behavioral change. Her opinion (which is the most informed I've read), is that discipline is not very important trait w.r.t. behavioral modification. Discipline is an active process and one must be constantly vigilant at a cortical level to execute it.
Her view was situational control was the most important. With situational control, we learn to not put ourselves into situations beyond our control. For example, not buying a bag of Doritos is _MUCH_ easier than not eating a bag of Doritos sitting in front of you. Not going to a Casino is _MUCH_ easier than not gambling away all your cash for a gambling addict. Some thing for alcoholics etc.
If you are lucky enough to have parents that sparingly eat Doritos or soda and do not keep it in the house, I assume that it will have a greater likelihood of rubbing off on the children.
If you eat more, you will simply burn more calories as a result. It's a mistake to think your calories out is a independent variable, rather than a dependent one.
Also, your basal metabolism changes in response to exercises, especially long term. Metabolism calculators don't account for this.
> If you eat more, you will simply burn more calories as a result.
That statement is false. Calorie burn is a series of factors from activity, metabolism, size, etc. Caloric intake has little direct impact outside of how it affects your weight.
> Also, your basal metabolism changes in response to exercises, especially long term. Metabolism calculators don't account for this.
The effect is < 10% for base metabolism alone. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16741271/
Sounds hard.
If you actually do find that too hard, pay someone for pre-portioned meals or go to a nutrionist.
Also, just keeping track of calories is a lot of work. I've done it before, it isn't hard in a mechanical sense, it's hard in the sense that you have to do it all the time, for everything you eat, for quite a while, before you really have a reasonable picture.
And it takes about five mins from your day to track calories. Get a piece of paper, write calorie counts of food you are consuming on it. Stop consuming food when the total exceeds your desired caloric goal ( TDEE - speed of weight loss ).
If that is genuinely too hard for you, there are a number of pre-portioned food programs you can get.
Or spend some money at a sports clinic to get hooked up to a machine:
There are many, many things that influence your mental state including whether you've been through a breakup, have depression, are in a stressful situation or have mild anxiety. Changing your diet may help some of those things but it will not remove them from the equation. If you're stressed, you might still eat all the time even when not hungry.
> How much you actually eat doesn't matter.
It is literally almost the only thing that matters.
> Tracking calories isn't even necessary because your body will track fat and protein intake on its own.
Controlling caloric intake, whether by counting or other restrictions, is literally the only way to lose weight. Plenty of people will continue to eat past the point of satiety for no shortage of reasons, or they may be eating food that doesn't make them feel satiated, or they may have medical or mental reasons for not registering the feeling of satiety.
Stress influence insulin and glucose level, which affects your fat store. So it's important to destress for hormonal reasons, not just to prevent overeating.
There are many, many things that influence your mental state including whether you've been through a breakup, have depression, are in a stressful situation or have mild anxiety. Changing your diet may help some of those things but it will not remove them from the equation. If you're stressed, you might still eat all the time even when not hungry.
Caloric restriction and exercising more is clearly not working, despite weight loss. Because what matters is if people can keep the weight off and maintain it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4803033/
The point is that your basal metabolism changes in response to exercise over time, so it doesn't add as much weight loss as people think.
Don't get me wrong, people should exercise for its health effect, but don't expect to lose weight.
Dietary change is much easier.
Consumerism is an ethos. Life is understood to be about consuming things, and in this case, literally consuming food. If you want to eat it, then eat it. Watch how overweight people eat and live. Except for a small percentage of people with metabolic disorders, you'll find your answer there. Consumerism turns traditional virtue on its head. Whereas once a man was a slave to his passions if he couldn't refuse himself their satisfaction, now satisfaction of them is the highest law. We even have the chutzpah to claim that this is the essence of freedom. Oh, how our ancestors weep! Yes, the man who can't control himself is now "free".
Now, because we live in a consumerist society, the market is more than happy to indulge and enable what would have been previously considered a bad gluttonous habit. Junk food on every turn. Even foods that are supposedly healthy have less nutrition than they used to or contain various additives and sugar and all sorts of crap that I suppose people don't understand should be avoided. In turns, these additives can throw your metabolism out of whack. Libertarians will tell you that this is freedom and anything else is socialism, but that's bullshit. If industry is exploiting people's vices for profit, then this isn't freedom and it is the government's role to regulate and criminalize such things to protect people. That government can use protection as an excuse to push nefarious laws and regulation does not mean that it is always the case.
(Mind you, the consumerist citizen is also easier to manipulate by the government, not just industry. If you are unable to refuse yourself things, then the government can better predict how to manipulate you. The same enslavement to one's passions also darkens the mind and makes you less capable of discerning the political control being used against you. It's the same with sexual liberation. Porn is a tool for social engineering and MeToo is the result of consumerism entering the sphere of sexual relations.)
Now, because we live in a consumerist society, the market is more than happy to indulge and enable what would have been previously considered a bad gluttonous habit.
Food should be enjoyed. You shouldn't be shamed. Back in the country of my births, we have all sort of delicious food and enjoy feasts(sadly no delicious steaks or American BBQ).
These are much healthier than the standard American diet, which are simply subpar and low quality.
But I think diet not the only thing we should focus on. We should focus on cutting out unnecessary meals and snacks. You don't need to eat three square meals plus snacks, or breakfast, or be forced to eat if you're not hungry.
That largely formed the basis of my weight loss strategy. Regimented intermittent fasting, sometime as long as two days, and eating clean. No sweetener of any kind(to avoid any kind of insulin response, known or unknown).
There are multiple factors but let me simplify everything.
A lot of obese people are either hormonally or mentally ill. Their body or mind is no longer able to track food consumption and they overeat because of their hormonal state or because they are depressed and eating helps them overcome it.
Obesity fuels hormonal and mental problems so it is a self reinforcing loop. If there are factors outside your control that make you obese then you will most likely stay obese because of the sheer amount of will power it takes to stop being obese. Obese parents make their children obese, transportation by car and easy desk jobs make obesity bearable, food quality is going downhill causing hormonal imbalances or lack of satiation.
Bodies don't track calories for satiation, they track intake of nutrients. If you eat fatty foods your body will track how much fat you are eating and thus regulate how much fat to burn or store. Same with proteins. Carbs are different. They affect your insulin level but they don't affect satiation all that much. It's very easy to overeat carbs and run into hormonal imbalances where you feel hungry even through you already ate too much from a purely caloric perspective. The sheer density of calories in carbs is causing problems. If we wanted to stop the obesity epidemic we probably have to introduce carb/fat/protein ratios that must not be violated in processed food. Plus we need smaller packaging for food that cannot meet these ratios to prevent overconsumption. (no more 1.5 liter bottles for soda unless it is sugar free)
Disclaimer: I don't know anything. I'm just a random person on the internet.
Edit: The reason why intermittent fasting (and fasting in general) works is because it is the act of not letting your hormones or mental state decide your eating habits.
Well, in Sweden the price for that would be $160. You seem to be kicking downwards by reflex.
Neither of those cures diabetes. It can help little but, but if he needs insulin he will continue to need insulin. There is no cure currently.
Also, insulin has no reason to be expensive.
People diagnosed with T2 diabetes who lose weight and re-gain it will lose control of their blood glucose with the regained weight. For semantic reasons, this is called remission, not 'curative'.
Note this is also seen in people who lose weight via gastric bypass.
Note this does not apply to T1 or mixed T1, T2 diabetics.
If you have e.g. a day job, it becomes much less realistic.
> Not to take away from your excellent point but is spending $9k/year on transportation really mandatory?
Before "Cash for Clunkers", an Obama-era program that removed a lot of older vehicles from the road, it was normal to be able to purchase a functional and clean used vehicle for $2-3k. It is clear that the program was a great success at removing these vehicles. But with the average American car today being a mid-size SUV, it's not clear that it achieved its objective of reducing our CO2 emissions. Either way, the cost of a used vehicle today is much higher.
> $7k on utilities?
This is $700 per month. Someone in a medium-large house in a state with high electricity costs might spend this during the summer months. But the median American utility bill is probably in the $200-300 range, or $3600/year at the high end. The actual category on the linked web page includes "and other household operational costs". Figuring 1% of home value per year spent on maintenance, for a $300,000 home, that's another $3000. And that, combined with the utilities, gets us pretty close to the $7k number.
If not even higher..
> 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 satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.
> These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.
-- Victor Lebow, "The Real Meaning of Consumer Demand", Journal of Retailing, 1955
Milton Friedman predicted that in the future our productivity would be so high that we'd only work 15 hours a week. Well it's the future now, and he significantly underestimated the productivity we'd have. Yet, the average worker of today works longer hours than before, and higher status people work even more than that.
They talk about consumption and desire, advertising and innovation, whether it's possible or desirable that we learn to be content with less. As an anthropologist Michael Lewis talks a lot about a society that lives very differently, and adds some nuance to the current meme that hunter gatherers had it better than the farmers that followed.
Most middle class Americans can easily make this change. You just need to live by the lifestyle of the 1970s. No cable TV, internet or cell phones. No frequent air travel or goods shipped in weekly from overseas, certainly no grocery delivery or Uber or laptops or software.
We don’t because we don’t want to. Not because we can’t. (The picture for the lower classes is more constrained. That said, 15 hours a week at a hair above minimum wage is quite liveable in many parts of the country.)
They included literature around reducing consumption and the importance of that for sustainability.
Enough residents installed these that it led to a city budget deficit, since water consumption went way down, and they therefore generated less revenue.
Their answer to this? Raise water prices.
Raising taxes on citizenry because they're using less resources == bad thing worthy of riots
It would have been nice if the reward for doing so was less cost, since that was one of the big marketing messages of the campaign.
Instead they opted to give us less for more - perhaps that was the intention all along.
I'd say reducing water usage was a good thing even if it lead to higher prices but unless the population of that city is growing it clearly is a waste of potential to have all that infrastructure sit partially idle.
Some that come to mind are garbage collection (our town reduced waste bin sizes) and parking costs.
Deflationary policies encourage saving currency which creates a higher bar for investments and spending. It is deeply unpopular at the moment, but I believe deflationary monetary policy as the only meaningful solution to our current climate crisis.
Also, it seems that the article is from 2008.
The former is a Western cornerstone; the latter is the crass idolatry that renders contemporary culture a disaster.