What’s Mine Is Yours

What’s Mine Is Yours Rachel Botsman Roo Rogers In the 20th century humanity consumed products faster than ever, but this way of living is no longer sustainable. This new and important book shows how technological advances are driving forms of ‘collaborative consumption’ which will change forever the ways in which we interact both with businesses and with each other. The average lawn mower is used for four hours a year. The average power drill is used for only twenty minutes in its entire lifespan. The average car is unused for 22 hours a day, and even when it is being there are normally three empty seats. Surely there must be a way to get the benefit out of things like mowers, drills and even cars, without having to carry the huge up-front costs of ownership?There is indeed. Collaborative consumption is not just a buzzword, it is a new win-win way of life. This insightful and thought-provoking new book by Rachel Rogers and Roo Botsman is an important and fast-moving survey of the dramatic changes we are seeing in the way we consume products. Many of us are familiar with freecycle, eBay, couchsurfing and Zipcar. But these are just the beginning of a new phenomenon. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers have interviewed business leaders and opinion formers around the world to draw together the many strands of Collaborative Consumption into a coherent and challenging argument to show that the way we did business and consumersism in the 20th century is not the way we will do it in the 21st century. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers What’s Mine Is Yours How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live For my nana, Evelyn Amdu     Rachel For Bernie, Ruby & Mei     Roo Introduction What’s Mine Is Yours In October 2007, designers from all over the world travelled to San Francisco to attend the annual industrial design conference. The city’s hotel rooms had been sold out for months. Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, old friends and graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design, were among the ten thousand people planning to attend. The classmates had recently moved into a big loft in South of Market, San Francisco, or SoMa, as it is known, to start a business. During a conversation Gebbia and Chesky had about making some quick money to help pay their rent, they asked themselves, ‘Why not rent our extra room and advertise it on the conference website?’ They did, and made close to $1,000 in just one week. Chesky and Gebbia thought that people in their twenties would respond to their offer. Three people ended up staying: a male designer from India who read about the idea on a local design blog and who saw it as a great way to meet new people; a thirty-five-year-old woman from Boston who thought it was better value than a hotel; and a forty-five-year-old father of five from Utah. ‘It completely blew away our assumptions,’ Gebbia recalls. The friends were also surprised that they didn’t feel like they had strangers in their own home. ‘They are strangers until you have a conversation with them,’ Chesky explained. Convinced they could start a business matching visitors who wanted rooms with locals who wanted to rent out extra space, Chesky and Gebbia, joined by Nathan Blecharczyk, a close friend and Web developer, built a simple website in early 2008. They initially thought of the idea ‘air beds for conferences’ solely for large events such as the Republican and Democratic conventions – where hotels were unavailable because they were sold out or unaffordable. ‘When Obama announced he was speaking in a 75,000-seat arena, and there were only 40,000 hotel rooms in Denver, the maths just really worked in our favour,’ Chesky recalls. Their website’s traffic grew. They appeared on CNN and in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. During the first few months of the launch, the trio were surprised by both the number and the mix of people wanting to rent out space as well as by the diversity of travellers – families, newlyweds, students, and even businessmen – willing to pay for a rented room. Chesky, Blecharczyk and Gebbia realized that conferences were just a narrow slice of the larger market. On the whiteboard in their apartment, they drew a spectrum. On one side they wrote ‘hotels’ and on the other they scribbled rental listings such as craigslist, youth hostels, and nonmonetary travel exchanges such as Couch-Surfing that help people travel by creating a network of couches available to sleep on for free. In the middle was a big white space, an untapped market: people looking for reasonably priced accommodations with the added benefit of a local experience. They were, however, wary that this opportunity appeared so large and untapped for a logical reason – trust. Was the act of attending the same event, whether a political rally, a music festival or a design conference the critical factor in building trust between strangers? Would people stay with one another if they just shared an interest such as photography? What about if they were alumni who had graduated from the same university? Was it possible to create an entirely open peer-to-peer marketplace for people to stay anywhere around the world? These were questions the three men chatted about for several months before agreeing that the answer could be ‘yes’ to all of the above. The success of other matchmaking services such as eBay indicated that trust could be built. By August 2008, Airbnb.com, their company’s website, was born. ‘The name came from the idea that with the Internet and a spare room, anyone can become an innkeeper,’ explains Blecharczyk. In October 2010, Airbnb.com had over 210,000 registered users, with more than 28,000 properties across 8,122 cities in more than 157 countries. In the UK alone, there are 13,295 Airbnb members, with over 1,100 of them playing host in 1,362 properties. Just as eBay is for goods, the site is a diverse marketplace for spaces. Listings include everything from a ‘Charming studio in Bastille, Marais’ for $90 a night, to a ‘Harlem Haven Private Apartment, New York’ for $120, to an entire villa in the ‘Bophut Hills in Koh Samui, Thailand’ for $275 per night. Chesky marvels, ‘When we started I never thought people would be renting out tree houses, igloos, boats, villas and designer apartments.’ For the most part, the people and places are not vetted, inspected or interviewed by Airbnb. It’s up to users to determine if they want to host a guest or if they want to stay with someone based on kaleidoscopic photos of the property, detailed profiles and other users’ reviews. As the site has grown, in fact, the founders have removed rules they initially thought would be required. They took away the initial cap on charges of $300 because they realized that people were using the Airbnb community for far more than budget accommodation. Today you can find castles for rent in England for $3,000 a night. The only fixed rules on Airbnb are that the travellers must be able to ask the host questions before they book, and rooms can’t be a commodity, which excludes most hotels. ‘A Marriott in New York City and a Marriott in Ireland will look exactly the same,’ Chesky says. ‘And you don’t know what room you are getting or even what floor you are on. We are providing the opposite.’ Blecharczyk has since moved with his wife to a bigger apartment in Palo Alto. In January he made $1,200 from renting out their extra bedroom via Airbnb to three different individuals for a total of fifteen days in January 2010. When the founders launched, they didn’t consider that the service would enable people to use their spare space as an investment rather than it being a liability. Some users have an extra bedroom in an expensive neighbourhood, so why not rent it out every now and again? Angela Rutherford moved into a large two-bedroom loft in New York’s financial district. After having previously lived alone, she was hesitant about sharing her room with a full-time roommate. Instead, she decided to furnish the spare room and rent it out on Airbnb for about fifteen nights per month. ‘I can control when I’m sharing the space and when I’m not,’ she explained. ‘I use the extra cash to help pay off my credit card debt, and it covers about half the rent.’ The motivation for hosts using Airbnb is typically a blend of making extra money and meeting new people. The children of Jill Banounou from Denver went to college: ‘I have an empty room now and it’s interesting to have people every once in a while.’ Stephanie Sullivan from Pittsburgh needed extra money to help pay for the maintenance on her 110-year-old home and loves having people stay. Matthias Siebler from Boston used the money to pay for an entire trip to England so he could attend an old friend’s wedding. Sandra Bruce from Washington is ‘hosting to save for my retirement. I also like having the company.’ Some people have started their own business with the extra money; for others it has helped them keep their home. In January 2010, the team received this email from a woman named Kendra Mae Tai, a host in New York City: ‘Hi Airbnb, I am not exaggerating when I tell that you literally saved us. My husband and I just married this past May after losing both of our jobs and our investments in the stock market crash last year. We slowly watched our savings dwindle to the point where we did not have enough money to pay our rent. At that point, I listed our apartment on your website and received so many requests. . You have given us the ability to keep our home and travel together and the peace of mind of knowing we can make it through this challenging time in our life. Thank you so much.’ Remarkably, out of the ten thousand completed trips to date there have been no reports of theft. Sometimes an apartment is not clean or someone does not show up, but these cases are rare. Chesky believes that a ‘trusted intermediary’ and secure payment system have a lot to do with this record. When making a booking, guests put the reservation on hold using a credit card or PayPal account. Hosts are not paid in full until twenty-four hours after a guest has checked in. Airbnb charges hosts a standard 3 percent service fee and travellers an additional 6 to 12 percent depending on the reservation price. Aside from turning Airbnb into a real business with a profitable revenue model that has been growing at more than 10 percent every month since they launched, the founders believe that some form of payment ‘puts both parties on the best behaviour and makes the whole process more reliable.’ When Chesky told his grandfather about the idea behind Airbnb, ‘It seemed totally normal to him. My parents had a different reaction. I could not figure out why at first.’ Chesky later realized that his parents grew up in the hotel generation, whereas his grandfather and his friends would stay on farms and in little houses during their travels. Airbnb is not very different from that experience. ‘We are not the modern invention, hotels are.’ Indeed, prior to the 1950s, staying with friends or friends of friends was a common way to travel. Airbnb is an old idea, being replicated and made relevant again through peer-to-peer networks and new technologies. There is now an unbounded marketplace for efficient peer-to-peer exchanges between producer and consumer, seller and buyer, lender and borrower, and neighbour and neighbour. Online exchanges mimic the close ties once formed through face-to-face exchanges in villages, but on a much larger and unconfined scale. In other words, technology is reinventing old forms of trust. Chesky predicts, ‘The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills or services.’ The Rise of Collaboration Over the past couple of years, we started to notice that stories and business examples like Airbnb weren’t unusual. At dinner parties, instead of bragging about their new Prius, friends boasted how they had given up their cars altogether by becoming ‘Zipsters’ (members of the car-sharing service Zipcar). More and more friends were selling stuff on craigslist and eBay; swapping books, DVDs and games on sites such as Swap and OurSwaps; and giving unwanted items away on Freecycle and ReUseIt. On a trip to Paris, we saw cyclists pedalling around on sleek-looking bikes with the word ‘V?lib’ (Paris’s bike-sharing scheme) on their crossbars. A friend in London told us about her new favourite Channel 4 programme called Land-share. And we kept hearing about the number of people joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programmes or local co-ops. We saw stats and stories about online cooperation and the growth in virtual communities. Every day there are more than 3 million Flickr images uploaded; 700,000 new members joining Facebook; 50 million ‘Tweets’; and 900,000 blogs posted. There are twenty-three hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute, the equivalent of Hollywood releasing more than 90,000 new full-length films into theatres each week.[1 - Statistics on online networks taken from ‘A Day on the Internet’, www.onlineeducation.net/internet.] ‘Collaboration’ had become the buzzword of the day with economists, philosophers, business analysts, trend spotters, marketers and entrepreneurs – and appropriately so. We stumbled on articles about sharing, bartering, lending or swapping, often with some kind of ‘co’ in the headlines, such as ‘Co-Housing for Gen X & Y’, ‘Co-working: Solo but Not Alone’, ‘Couch Surfing: This Isn’t Just About a Place to Crash’, ‘Can Community Co-Ops Revive Our Towns?’ ‘Social Networking for Communes’, ‘Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online,’ ‘Living Together: Modern Answer to the Commune’, and ‘Governing the Commons’. Even science, social psychology and economic journals brimmed with popular articles about the self-organizing behaviours of ants, the ‘intelligence’ of swarming honeybees, and the cooperation of schools of fish and flocks of birds. The more we examined these trends, the more convinced we were that all of these behaviours, personal stories, social theories and business examples pointed to an emerging socioeconomic groundswell; the old stigmatized C’s associated with coming together and ‘sharing’ – cooperatives, collectives, and communes – are being refreshed and reinvented into appealing and valuable forms of collaboration and community. We call this groundswell Collaborative Consumption. The collaboration at the heart of Collaborative Consumption may be local and face-to-face, or it may use the Internet to connect, combine, form groups, and find something or someone to create ‘many to many’ peer-to-peer interactions. Simply put, people are sharing again with their community – be it an office, a neighbourhood, an apartment building, a school or a Facebook network. But the sharing and collaboration are happening in ways and at a scale never before possible, creating a culture and economy of what’s mine is yours. Every day people are using Collaborative Consumption – traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again. Social networks, smart grids and real-time technologies are also making it possible to leapfrog over outdated modes of hyper-consumption and create innovative systems based on shared usage such as bike or car sharing. These systems provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and – consumption. In this book, we have organized the thousands of examples of Collaborative Consumption from around the world into three systems – product service systems, redistribution markets and collaborative lifestyles. Together these systems are reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume. Although the examples of Collaborative Consumption range enormously in scale, maturity and purpose, they share similar underlying principles essential to making them work that we explore throughout this book – critical mass, idling capacity, belief in the commons and trust between strangers. Collaborative Consumption is not a niche trend, and it’s not a reactionary blip to the 2008 global financial crisis. It’s a growing movement with millions of people participating from all corners of the world. Many of these participants may not even realize that they are part of this groundswell. To illustrate the explosive rise of Collaborative Consumption, let’s first look at the growth stats behind a few mainstream examples: Bike sharing is the fastest-growing form of transportation in the world,[2 - Abha Bhattarai, ‘Bike-Sharing: Cycling to a City Near You’, Fast Company (26 June 2009), www.fastcompany.com/blog/abha-bhattarai/abha-bhattarai/bike-sharing-cycling-city-near-you.] with over 500,000 trips being made in the first six weeks of operation for London’s Barclays Cycle Hire. Zilok, a leader in the peer-to-peer rental market, has grown at a rate of around 25 percent since it was founded in October 2007.[3 - Statistics on Zilok taken from Reuters release, ‘Rent Your Way Out of the Credit Crunch Online’ (5 December 2008), http://www.reuters. com/article/idUSTRE4B44DE20081205.] Two billion dollars worth of goods and services were exchanged through Bartercard, the world’s largest business-to-business bartering network in 2009, up by 20 percent from 2008.[4 - Statistics on bartering taken from William Lee Adams, ‘Bartering: Have Hotel, Need Haircut’, Time (2 November 2009), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1931665,00.html.] UK-founded Zopa, the first online peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the world, did more business in its fifth year, at ?35.5 million (March 2009 to March 2010), than in the previous four years combined at ?34.5 million. By October 2010, Zopa members had lent over ?100 million between each other. Freecycle, a worldwide online registry that circulates free items for reuse or recycling, has more than 5.7 million members across more than eighty-five countries. More than twelve thousand items are ‘gifted’ every day through the network.[5 - Statistics on Freecyle taken from Freecycle press release, ‘Largest Environmental Web Community in the World’ (9 September 2008), www.freecycle.org/pressreleases/08-09-09_Freecycle_press_release. pdf?.] U-Exchange, one of the most successful of all swap sites, saw a 70 percent increase in new members in 2008, and the membership of the trading site Swap grew tenfold in 2009 over the previous year. On thredUP, a clothing exchange for children’s clothes, approximately twelve thousand items were exchanged within the first eight days of launching in April 2010. Landshare, a site that connects gardenless would-be growers with unused spare land, has more than 55,000 members across the UK today. CouchSurfing, a global website that connects travellers with locals in more than 235 countries and territories, is currently the most visited ‘hospitality service’ on the Internet.[6 - Statistics on CouchSurfing: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=900&h =500&r=3m&y=p&u=CouchSurfing.org/&u=hospitalityclub. org&u=globalfreeloaders.com&u=place2stay.net&u=servas.org and www.CouchSurfing.org/statistics.html.] In the United States, there are more than 2,50 °CSA schemes – where people pay a sum of money at the beginning of the year to a local farmer who will deliver a weekly box of fresh produce throughout the growing season – compared with only 1 in 1985. In the UK, there are more than 100,000 people on the waiting list for an allotment (a plot of land that can be rented by an individual for growing fruits and vegetables) and in some parts of London the wait is up to forty years.[7 - Statistics on allotment waiting lists were widely reported in the British media in August 2009, such as ‘Forty-Year Wait for Allotments’, BBC coverage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8193100.stm.] In the midst of the global financial crisis, when the federal government was bailing out the ‘Big Three’ car companies, car-sharing membership increased by 51.5 percent in the United States.[8 - Joseph Pisani, ‘Car Sharing Takes Off’, CNBC (4 December 2009), http://76.12.4.249/artman2/uploads/1/Car_Sharing_Takes_Off_-_ CNBC.pdf.] By 2015, it is estimated that 4.4 million people in North America and 5.5 million in Europe will belong to services like the one from Zipcar, whose membership alone more than tripled in 2009.[9 - David Zhao, ‘Carsharing: A Sustainable and Innovative Personal Transport Solution’, Frost & Sullivan Automotive Practice (28 January 2010), www.frost.com/prod/servlet/market-insight-top. pag?Src=RSS&docid=190795176.] UK-based WhipCar, the first neighbour-to-neighbour car-sharing service had over 1,000 owners accepting bookings within the first six months of launch. We could go on. Collaborative Consumption is a snowball idea, one with enough heft to keep gathering momentum and enough adhesion to keep growing bigger. Many of the companies we explore in this book are already profitable or have growing revenue models. The more established companies are making hundreds of millions in revenue (Netflix made $359.6 million and Zipcar $130 million in 2009), while others like SolarCity and Swap are just starting to turn a profit. Specific sectors of Collaborative Consumption are predicted to experience phenomenal growth over the next five years. The peer-to-peer social lending market led by the likes of Zopa and Lending Club is estimated to soar by 66 percent to reach $5 billion by the end of 2013.[10 - Statistics from Gartner Research (5 January 2010). Retrieved January 2010, www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1272313.] The consumer peer-to-peer rental market for everything from drills to cameras is estimated to be a $26 billion market sector. The swap market just for used children’s clothing (0 to 13 years) is estimated to be between $1 billion and $3 billion in the United States alone.[11 - Value of the market sector of used children’s clothing provided by James Reinhart, founder of thredUP.] Car sharing or per hour car rental is predicted to become a $12.5 billion industry. Even organizations such as CouchSurfing and Freecycle that were set up for a purpose not explicitly about profitability are helping create consumer acceptance and paving the way for similar businesses with a revenue model. CouchSurfing, a nonprofit organization, created the space for the likes of Airbnb and CrashPadder. And it’s not just the companies making money. As The Economist noted, individuals involved in Collaborative Consumption are becoming ‘microentrepreneurs.’[12 - L.S., ‘Collaborative Consumption’, posted on the Economist blog (22 April 2010), http://www5.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/04/peer_to_peer_car_rentals.] Some people are making a little money on the side and others are making significant income from peer rental of products and spaces that would otherwise be sitting unused and idle. The average New Yorker participating in Airbnb is making $1,600 per month. And that is just the average. Renters on Zilok are making over $1,000 a year from renting out just one item such as a camera or bike. It is estimated that an owner of a saloon car such as a Camry can make over $6,250 per year through peer-to-peer car rental sites such as RelayRides, Gettaround and Whipcar by renting the car for twenty hours a week. Some owners, such as ‘Dave,’ a twenty-six-year-old designer, are using Whipcar to help pay for general living costs. Others, such as sixty-six-year-old ‘Maureen’, hardly use their car and use the extra rental money to pay for holidays. People may throw an ‘out of necessity’ brick at Collaborative Consumption, claiming that it will slow down or crumble when the economy fully recovers and prosperity returns. But not only is Collaborative Consumption driven by consumer motivations that extend far deeper than cost savings, the habits started to stick and spread before the financial collapse of 2008. Economic necessity has just made people more open to new ways of accessing what they need and how to go about getting it. When the great recession hit in 2008, some pundits and economists heralded the end of consumerism, while some suggested that consumers needed to be prodded to shop again. Either way, they assumed that the traditional model of consumerism, the one in which we buy products, use them, throw them away and then buy more, would continue, even if at a hobbled rate. While the ‘spend more, consume more’ way out may be a short-term fix, it is neither sustainable nor healthy. While the rampant and unregulated financial system led to investors losing millions in Ponzi schemes, hedge funds, insurance companies and even savings banks, everyday people pursuing the supposed American dream felt the worst impact. In all corners of the world, millions lost their homes, their jobs, their buying power and their confidence. But within weeks of the crash, there were signs of a new and increasing consumer awareness, tinged with anger. We have been living in a society that for more than fifty years has encouraged us to live beyond our means, both financial and ecological. As Thomas Friedman wrote in a New York Times op-ed, ‘2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”’ While the world awaits a new big idea to reinvigorate and rebalance our economy, we believe the transformation will start to come from consumers themselves. The convergence of social networks, a renewed belief in the importance of community, pressing environmental concerns and cost consciousness are moving us away from top-heavy, centralized and controlled forms of consumerism towards one of sharing, aggregation, openness and cooperation. To build on an idea Charles Leadbeater discussed in his book We Think, in the twentieth century of hyper-consumption we were defined by credit, advertising and what we owned; in the twenty-first century of Collaborative Consumption we will be defined by reputation, by community, and by what we can access and how we share and what we give away.[13 - Charles Leadbeater, We-Think: Mass Innovation Not Mass Production (Profile Books, 2008), 26.] The phenomenon of sharing via increasingly ubiquitous cyber peer-to-peer communities such as Linux, Wikipedia, Flickr, Digg and YouTube is by now a familiar story. Collaborative Consumption is rooted in the technologies and behaviours of online social networks. These digital interactions have helped us experience the concept that cooperation does not need to come at the expense of our individualism, opening us up to innate behaviours that make it fun and second nature to share. Indeed, we believe people will look back and recognize that Collaborative Consumption started online – by posting comments and sharing files, code, photos, videos and knowledge. And now we have reached a powerful inflection point, where we are starting to apply the same collaborative principles and sharing behaviours to other physical areas of our everyday lives. From morning commutes to co-working spaces to the way we borrow and lend money to the way fashion is designed, different areas of our lives are being created and consumed in collaborative ways. This book does not posit that we need to pick between owning or sharing. In the future, most of us will have our feet in both camps, just as successful business models such as Airbnb may become a hybrid of both traditional commerce and collaboration. Collaborative Consumption will sit side-by-side and eventually may go head-to-head with the old consumerist model, much as blogs such as the Huffington Post now compete with hundred-plus-year-old newspapers such as The New York Times. But in the same way that the one-way flow of information from the media is over, we are reaching the close of a pure one-way consumerist culture based on just owning more and more stuff. ‘Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the eight track, what the solar panel is to the coal mine. Sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern; owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward,’ New York Times journalist Mark Levine commented recently.[14 - Mark Levine, ‘Share My Ride’, The New York Times (5 March 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08Zipcar-t.html.] Concepts and connotations of ‘sharing’, ‘collectivism’ and ‘communalism’ need to be updated. In his classic novel Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll writes, ‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all”.’[15 - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (Macmillan, 1871), 205.] Meanings of words can change as our cultural acceptance of ideas is reframed.[16 - This idea was raised in the blog post ‘Socialism or Not: Lessig Responds to Kelly’, Adrian J. Ivakhiv (31 May 2009), http://aivakhiv. blog.uvm.edu/2009/05/socialism_or_not_lessig_responds_to_kelly. html.] Hotels don’t call their business ‘bed sharing’ for good reasons, and as Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard University, says, craigslist does not call its ride-sharing board ‘hitchhiking.’ Collaborative Consumption is not asking people to share nicely in the sandbox. On the contrary, it puts a system in place where people can share resources without forfeiting cherished personal freedoms or sacrificing their lifestyle. A distinguished political scientist who shares this view is seventy-six-year-old Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom. In October 2009, while we were writing this book, she won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Oliver E. Williamson. Ostrom is the first person ever to win the award with a proven theory on the efficiency of commons-based societies and how they work. Michael Spence, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, commented shortly after Ostrom won the prize that her work demonstrates that ‘economics is not really fundamentally about markets, but about resource allocation and distribution problems.’[17 - Michael Spence, ‘Markets Aren’t Everything’, Forbes.com (12 October 2009), www.forbes.com/2009/10/12/economics-nobel-elinor-ostrom-oliver-williamson-opinions-contributors-michael-spence. html.] From alpine grazing meadows in Switzerland to irrigation canals in Spain to forests in Japan, Professor Ostrom has spent her life studying commonly managed resources and probing how they succeed or fail. Her research has demonstrated that even in capitalist societies, if simple rules are applied, a self-organized commons can work. Individuals will cooperate to act in the common good. Perhaps what is most exciting about Collaborative Consumption is that it fulfils the hardened expectations on both sides of the socialist and capitalist ideological spectrum without being an ideology in itself. It demands no rigid dogma. There are, of course, limits to the system, specifically situations where people simply won’t and can’t give up on individual ownership or doing things by themselves. But this rigidity, too, could shift. Although this book is a good-news book about promising solutions and long-term positive change, we start out by showing how the system of consumerism that we live with today – the system that is now our collective habit – was manufactured. Entire books have been written on this subject, and it is not our goal to provide another detailed history or critique of the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century. Ultimately, we are much more interested in the future. But if we can look back and deconstruct what got us on what cultural critic Juliet Schor calls the consumer escalator, ‘ever moving upward’, we can then look forward to figuring out how to get off it.[18 - Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Basic Books, 1998).] Part 1 CONTEXT Chapter One Enough Is Enough Way out in the Pacific Ocean, just east of Japan and west of Hawaii, a gigantic accidental monument to the waste of modern consumerism has formed. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest landfill in the world, except that it is not on land; it’s in the ocean. This swirling mass of rubbish is estimated to be roughly twice the size of Texas and in some parts one hundred feet deep, if not deeper. It’s a floating stew of 3.5 million tonnes of garbage, 90 percent of which is plastic, containing everything from bottle caps and toys to shoes, cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, nets, babies’ dummies, wrappers, takeaway containers and shopping bags from all corners of the world. For years the patch was out-of-sight, out-of-mind, lying just beneath the surface of the water, invisible to satellites. The patch is located in a remote part of the ocean that is usually dodged by sailors because of its gentle breezes and extreme high pressure systems and shunned by fishermen, who call it the ‘desert’ due to its lack of fish. Charles Moore, a sailor, environmentalist, organic farmer and onetime furniture repairman, discovered the patch by accident on 3 August 1997. He was on his way home with his crew after finishing in third place in the Los Angeles – to-Hawaii sail race known as the TransPac, when he decided to take a shortcut. He steered the Alguita, an aluminium-hulled catamaran, into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre – a part of the ocean known for its vortex of swirling undercurrents that trap debris. Moore, an old sea dog who had been voyaging in the Pacific since childhood, knew that the region lacked the wind to propel the boat but was not worried, as the Alguita was equipped with engines and an extra supply of fuel. In the week it took them to cross the Gyre, the crew were astonished to find themselves surrounded by so much floating rubbish in such a desolate place, thousands of miles from land. As Moore later wrote in his story about the discovery, ‘I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, the Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.’ Moore resolved to return to the area as soon as he could on a proper trawling and research mission with marine scientists to start to learn what was going on. And so he did, just over a year later, with a team of volunteers and a net apparatus resembling a manta ray that skimmed the ocean surface. The crew found ‘a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of thousands of plastic fragments – a plastic-plankton soup’.[19 - Susan Casey, ‘Our Oceans Are Turning into Plastic . . . Are We?’ Best Life Magazine (20 February 2007).] Venturing out on inflatable dinghies, they picked up everything from a cathode-ray tube for televisions to a traffic cone to a gallon bleach bottle so brittle it crumbled in their hands. Birds and fish mistake the plastic for food, especially the bottle caps, which Moore calls ‘poison pills’. One bird, when dissected, contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.[20 - Ibid.] The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, sadly, isn’t a lone phenomenon, though it is perhaps the biggest of them all. Together, these areas could cover 40 percent of the sea. ‘That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,’ Moore says. ‘So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.’[21 - Ibid.] To convey the scope of the problem, Moore likes to give the example of Pagan Island (between Hawaii and the Philippines), where there is a ‘shopping beach’. ‘If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of the plastic trash that’s washed up there from thousands of miles away.’[22 - This section was heavily influenced by Richard Grant’s, ‘Drowning in Plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Twice the Size of France’, Daily Telegraph (24 April 2009), www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/5208645/Drowning-in-plastic-The-Great-Pacific-Garbage-Patch-is-twice-the-size-of-France.html.] Rubbish has been tossed into the seas for centuries. In preindustrial culture, it was broken down over time by microorganisms, as the materials, for the most part, were safely biodegradable. Today we have a spectacular abundance of products heavily dependent on plastic, a material that in any shape or form is 100 percent nonbiodegradable. The 100 million tonnes of plastic produced each year will always exist; it just ‘photo degrades’ by the sun into smaller pieces and then smaller pieces resembling confetti.[23 - Statistics on annual consumption of plastic materials come from ‘Plastics Recycling Information’. Retrieved August 2009, www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/Plastics.htm.] Even the 5.5 quadrillion lentil-size plastic polymers, known as ‘nurdles’, made each year for our plastic-wrapped and packaged world are too tough for even the most voracious bacteria to break down. Plastic now outweighs surface plankton six to one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.[24 - Thomas M. Kostigen, ‘The World’s Largest Dump: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, Discover Magazine (10 July 10 2008), http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/10-the-worlds-largest-dump.] The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a hideous illustration of the way we’ve ignored the negative consequences of modern consumerism. In the past fifty years, we have consumed more goods and services than in all previous generations put together.[25 - Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Rocky Mountain Institute, 1999), 4, www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid5.php.] Unfortunately, the consume-and-dispose engine is only going faster. Since 1980, we have consumed one-third of the planet’s resources – forests, fish, natural minerals, metals and other raw materials.[26 - Tim Radford, ‘Two-Thirds of World’s Resources “Used Up”,’ Guardian (30 March 30 2005), www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/mar/30/environment.research.] Deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year – more than 250 million acres. Americans are some of the world’s worst environmental offenders. A child born today into a middle-class American family will live to about eighty years old and consume on average 2.5 million litres of water, the wood of 1,000 trees, 21,000 tonnes of petrol, 220,000 kilos of steel and 800,000 watts of electrical energy. At these rates, the average American child will produce in his or her lifetime twice the environmental impact of a Swedish child, 3 times that of an Italian, 13 times that of a Brazilian, 35 times that of an Indian and 280 times that of a Haitian.[27 - Ervin Laszlo, The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads (Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2006), 17.] If everyone on the planet lived like the average American child, we would need five planets to sustain them during their lifetime.[28 - Global Footprint Network and WWF’s Living Planet Report (September 2009), www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/EO_Day_Media_Backgrounder.pdf.] Sadly, it would seem that the vision of unlimited consumption that Victor Lebow, a retail analyst, put forward in 1955 has come to fruition. ‘Our enormously productive economy,’ he said, ‘demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. The economy needs things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.’[29 - Victor Lebow, ‘Price Competition in 1955’, Journal of Retailing (Spring 1955), www.scribd.com/doc/965920/LebowArticle.] A big part of the problem is that many of our consumer behaviours have become so habitual that we are unaware of our impact. Psychologists call this consumer ‘lock-in’, as it can be difficult to make deliberate choices about what to buy and what not to buy because habits, routines, social norms and cultural values lock us into unsustainable behaviours. One example would be buying bottled water.[30 - Tim Jackson, ‘Motivating Sustainable Consumption: A Review of Evidence on Consumer Behaviour and Behavioural Change’, published in a paper by the Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey (2005), www.epa.gov/sustainability/Workshop0505/5d_Jackson_Tim.pdf.] These behaviours stick because individuals acting in their own self-interest feel immediate gain, but they will not feel the losses from the impact of their actions for many years to come. We are always tempted by immediate self-gratification. At the same time, our brains cannot comprehend the cumulative impact at a collective level. If all the world’s 1 billion personal computers were switched off for just one night, it would save enough energy to light up New York City’s Empire State Building – inside and out – for more than thirty years.[31 - Statistics on PC energy usage are from the 2009 P.C. US Energy Report, www.1e.com/EnergyCampaign/downloads/PC_ EnergyReport 2009-US.pdf.] Artist Chris Jordan, who creates arresting images about unimaginable statistics of western culture, puts it this way: ‘As individuals we do these things all the time every day. But when millions of people go about these unconscious behaviours it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants, and that nobody intended.’[32 - The artist Chris Jordan talked about this idea during his talk at the TED conference (June 2008). The video can be viewed at www.ted. com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html.] The Emergence of Throwaway Living In 1907, Hugh Moore and his college roommate, Lawrence Luellen, dropped out of Harvard to pursue a business idea. At the time, people drank at public water fountains from the same ‘tin-dipper’ cups, which were rarely washed and never replaced. The friends, aware of recent findings that diseases were spread through sharing cups like these, spotted a moneymaking opportunity. Luellen had come up with the idea of a water vending machine with paper cups, and together he and Moore bought a factory, located next door to Alfred Schindler’s Dixie Doll Company. Shortly after, they introduced the first paper cup, known as the ‘Health Kup’. Moore, who never liked the original name for the cup, noticed the word ‘Dixie’ every day, as it was printed on the doll company’s front door. ‘Dixie Cups’ were born.[33 - ‘Dixie Cup Company History’, Lafayette College Libraries (August 1995), www.lafayette.edu/~library/special/dixie/company.html.] The idea was not a runaway success. But eight years later, Moore and Luellen repitched Dixie Cups for ‘clinical use’. The friends and business partners became known as ‘The Cup Campaigners’ with a widespread education blitz telling the public that single repeat-use metal cups at water fountains were the main source for germ contamination. Only disposable cups were sanitary. They distributed a pamphlet with a graphic illustration of a cup in the shape of a skeleton perched on a fountain. This campaign was not all propaganda. The common drinking cup did spread serious diseases, in particular tuberculosis and smallpox, and in this sense the disposable paper cup did have a positive impact on society. Fast-forward to today, and a staggering 220 billion paper and plastic cups are used worldwide per year, with 146 billion cups consumed in North America alone. A day’s worth of cups is as high as a forty-two-storey building.[34 - Jordan, TED talk.] For manufacturers, a product that is thrown away after being used, forcing the customer to keep coming back for more, creates endless profit potential; a potential first discovered in the years after World War I, when there was a great need to find new uses for the abundance of materials produced for the war piled high in warehouses. For example, an absorbent material made from celluloid that had been used for military bandages and gas mask filters later gained a new use as the disposable Kotex sanitary towel. Manufacturers also had to figure out how to transform the wartime ethic of thrift and reuse – darning socks, keeping odd pieces of string, using tea leaves to clean carpets, and sewing rags into rugs – into a culture that embraced ‘throwaway habits’ and the willingness to spend money on new ‘stuff’. During the war, the US government produced posters declaring ‘Waste Not, Want Not.’ By late 1917, the government was giving shops across the country signs to display in their windows reading ‘Beware of Thrift and Unwise Economy’, to help encourage repetitive consumption.[35 - Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2006), 25.] Advertisers touted mass-disposable goods as more convenient, time-saving and hygienic than reusable products. They became increasingly attractive in the early fifties as more women entered the workforce, were pressed for time and had greater disposable income. It is not surprising that it was against this backdrop that entire lines of disposable products flooded the market, including Kleenex tissues, Q-tips, Band-Aids, paper towels, paper straws, disposable shopping bags and so on. And along with these products came the boxes and cartons they were packaged in and the ads, catalogues and window displays to promote them; more stuff used and then thrown away. Thirty years later, in 1955, Life magazine ran a front cover with the headline ‘Throwaway Living’ and a photo of a three-child family tossing various disposables high in the air, including paper plates and trays, aluminium pie pans, and nappies. The overall message was liberation for housewives, as disposability became synonymous with convenience and a metaphor for freedom.[36 - Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Henry Holt and Company, 1999). Strasser talks at length about the connections between disposability and woman’s liberation.] Looking back on these relatively simple and useful inventions, you may wonder: What was the harm? People embraced new products in the name of progress, and these products have their benefits. The crucial shift was when the cultural acceptance of disposability broadened past health concerns. How did disposable cups become ubiquitous in our homes and offices, where people have easy access to sinks to clean their own mugs or glasses? How did disposability change from a symbol of health to one of waste and environmental mess? And therein lies the constant tug-of-war between what is seen as progress at the time and future damage. When Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first man-made plastic, in 1907 – the same year Moore and Luellen started to pursue their cup idea – he intended to make a material that could be bent, moulded, twisted and plied in a number of different ways. It’s impossible that he could have foreseen that Americans alone would one day dispose of about 100 billion plastic bags each year. Most are used just once and discarded.[37 - Kay Bushnell, ‘Plastic Bags: Smothered by Plastic’, a paper produced by the Sierra Club, www.sierraclub.org/sustainable_consumption/articles/bags1.asp.] The stories of the paper cup and plastic waste both follow the ‘law of unintended consequences’, where the actions of people have unanticipated and unintended effects, in some cases more significant than the intended effects. Sociologist Robert K. Merton identified five sources of unintended consequences: ignorance, error, immediate interest, basic values and selfdefeating prophecy. Two of these sources are particularly relevant to hyper-consumption: first, ignorance (it’s impossible to anticipate everything); and second, the imperious immediacy of interest. By the latter Merton was referring to instances in which an individual wants the intended consequence of an action (or product) so much that he purposefully chooses to ignore any long-term unintended effects. Both shoppers and manufacturers engage in a combination of these as they participate in the modern-day consumer system. Just like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the environmental effects of consumerism sit just below the surface, a hidden history of materials, resources and impacts. The amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer, for instance, is close to four thousand times its weight.[38 - Hawken et al., Natural Capitalism.] The tiny micron chip inside that same computer requires 1.7 kilograms of materials to produce and its production generates 100,000 times its weight in waste.[39 - Sarah Graham, ‘Making Microchips Takes Mountains of Materials’, Scientific American (6 November 2002).] Until recently, much of the hazardous e-waste from products including old computers, mobile phones and televisions from wealthier nations was shipped to countries in the developing world, including China, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Even though restrictions imposed in the Basel Convention by the United Nations have slowed the export of e-waste exportation, it continues on a gargantuan and destructive scale.[40 - Slade, Made to Break, 5.] For the most part, marketers don’t put this kind of information on the label. That’s the ‘ignorance’ part of Merton’s analysis. But we keep our laptops for only two years on average (it was six years in 1997).[41 - ‘The E Waste Problem’, posted on the Greenpeace website, www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics/the-e-waste-problem.] That is a conscious choice we make in the immediacy of self-interest. As John Thackara says in Inside the Bubble, ‘It’s the accumulation of such tiny, unnecessary acts that weigh so heavily on the planet.’[42 - John Thackara, Inside the Bubble (MIT Press, 2006), 22.] We are now a society addicted to ‘throwaway habits’, and many of us are anaesthetized to the consequences. In Britain, every man, woman and child in the country combined produces enough waste to refill London’s Royal Albert Hall every two hours.[43 - Neal Lawson, All Consuming (Penguin, 2009), 41.] According to the EPA, only 30 percent of this rubbish is recycled or composted, 13 percent is incinerated, and the other 57 percent ends up in landfills. What exactly do we throw out – and why is there is so much of it? David Chameides, an Emmy award-winning cameraman in Los Angeles, wanted to find out. He decided to conduct an experiment: he would not throw anything away for one whole year. Chameides kept every single item of rubbish that he created at home and on the road in the cellar of his house. A large tin box was used to hold bags of waste paper, and rubbish bins to hold the rest. Most of the family’s leftover food was given to the dog and the rest was put into a worm composter. Dave created some rules. Any waste that was not safe – medical waste from doctor’s visits, for instance – would be disposed of. The experiment did not apply to his wife and two children. Beyond that, he didn’t create a masterplan for his year of no trash.[44 - Brian Walsh, ‘Meet Dave, the Man Who Never Takes Out the Trash’, Time (22 September 2008), www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1843163,00.html.] Dave even admits, ‘If I had totally thought it through, I might not have done it.’ But he did take the experiment seriously, so much so that he even brought the rubbish back in a suitcase from a romantic getaway with his wife in Mexico. Airport screeners baffled by the extra holdall of Mexican rubbish that went through the X-ray machine interrogated the couple. Soon after he began his experiment, Dave realized the obvious solution. The best way to reduce the amount of trash he produced was to cut back on the amount he consumed in the first place. By taking his own containers to the fishmonger to avoid the wrapping and paying a company to stop his junk mail, he limited his waste for a whole year to thirty pounds (after subtracting recyclable waste), roughly the amount the average American produces in six days.[45 - Ibid.] All the ‘good stuff’ we throw away represents just a small amount, given that for every rubbish bin of waste we put out on the pavement, seventy additional bins of waste were produced upstream in production and distribution to make the waste in your bin.[46 - Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff (Free Press, 2010). The transcript of the video can be found at www.storyofstuff.com/pdfs/annie_ leonard_footnoted_sript.pdf.] Annie Leonard explains in her book The Story of Stuff, ‘Guess what percentage of total material flow through this system is still in product or use 6 months after their sale in North America. Fifty percent? Twenty? NO. One percent. One! In other words. . 99 percent of the stuff we run through this system is trashed within 6 months.’[47 - Ibid.] And the stuff we throw away is just one half of the waste. The other half is all the stuff we buy and never or rarely use. Self-Storage Self Think, for a moment, about something you bought that you never ended up using. An item of clothing you never ended up wearing? A book you never read? Some piece of electronic equipment that never even made it out of the box? It is estimated that Australians alone spend on average $10.8 billion AUD (approximately $9.99 billion USD) every year on goods they do not use – more than the total government spending on universities and roads. That is an average of $1,250 AUD (approximately $1,156 USD) for each household.[48 - Clive Hamilton, ‘Why Consumer Capitalism Loves Waste’, quoted in his speech to the 6th Asia Pacific Roundtable for Sustainable Consumption and Production (October 2005), www.clivehamilton. net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/Consumer_Capitalism_ Loves_Waste.pdf.] All the things we buy that then just sit there gathering dust are waste – a waste of money, a waste of time, and waste in the sense of pure rubbish. As the author Clive Hamilton observes, ‘The difference between the stuff we buy and what we use is waste.’[49 - Ibid.] Rubbish and storage are just two different endgames of the same problem. We live in a world where our drawers, closets, walk-in wardrobes, attics, garages, sheds and cellars are bloated with mountains of objects we rarely use and forget we even have. By the early 1990s, American families had, on average, twice as many possessions as they did twenty-five years earlier.[50 - Jon Mooallem, ‘The Self-Storage Self’, The New York Times (2 September 2009), www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t. html?pagewanted=1&_r=1.] So much stuff has been bought that it doesn’t fit into our homes anymore, and so we rent storage to extend the capacity to own more things. Just as Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British civil servant, mused in The Economist in 1955 that ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for completion,’ many of us fall victim to Parkinson’s Law when it comes to storage: more space increases our tendency to acquire more stuff. Just as plastic migrates to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, these things get stored away, out-of-sight, out-of-mind. If you’ve ever travelled from an airport into a city, say London or New York, and noticed the abundance of self-storage warehouses along the route, you begin to see the extent of the problem. These buildings sit on the sides of orbital motorways, sprout from the landscape of suburbia or are wedged into commercial strips in a city’s central core. Regardless of their location, they look the same: grey, massive cinder blocks with halogen lamps glaring 24/7. In 1964, Russ Williams, a Texas oil industry businessman and avid fisherman, got the idea to open ‘mini-warehouses’ called the A–1 U-Store-It U-Lock-It U-Carry the Key from his own need to store boats and oil field equipment securely but accessibly. He designed the first facility based on the pattern of side-by-side garages often found in apartment complexes with block partitions and panel garage doors. It was just one hundred feet by thirty feet in size and was painted yellow and black to draw attention to it. Williams realized that his residential customers wanted to store not just boats but items they did not have room for in their homes. The idea caught on so fast that it was hard to keep up with the demand. Williams built more and more facilities until he eventually owned (with various partners) 2,500 across the United States. Today there are more than 53,000 personal storage facilities – more than seven times the number of Starbucks – in the United States. This amounts to a staggering 2.35 billion square feet or more than 38,000 football fields put together in America alone.[51 - Statistics on growth and size of the self-storage industry come from the Self Storage Association. Last checked on February 2010, www.selfstorageassociation.org.] If you put out your arms, you create about seven square feet around you. That is roughly how much self-storage space there is for every man, woman and child in America. It means every single person in the country could comfortably stand together inside self-storage units.[52 - Chris Arnold, ‘Americans Keeping More Possessions “Off-Site”’, for a segment on National Public Radio (20 May 20 2005), www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4660790.] And self-storage is now a $22 billion-per-year industry in the United States – surpassing domestic Hollywood box-office sales. On average we spend more on self-storage than milk, coffee and even beer. Rentable storage has increased by 740 percent in the past two decades.[53 - Martin John Brown, ‘Too Much Stuff! America’s New Love Affair with Self-Storage’, AlterNet (June 4, 2008), www.alternet.org/work place/86998.] As Chris Sonne, a storage expert at Cushman & Wakefield, comments, ‘That’s two or more self-storage facilities opening every day for fifty years. That beats McDonald’s.’ About 30 percent of the storage boom comes from use by businesses storing things such as payment records, office equipment, and inventory, but the rest of the expansion has come from people storing possessions that no longer fit in their homes.[54 - Ibid.] So what are we cramming into these storage units? Camping gear, lawn mowers, roller skates, pet cages, bread makers and other electronic gadgets, back issues of National Geographic magazine, old souvenirs, children’s bicycles, a computer monitor that just might work one day, a clarinet we played in primary school, years of bank receipts, an old sofa – the list goes on. But for the most part, it is ‘just stuff’ we no longer want cluttering our homes but pay to store anyway. Rich Ellmer is a self-storage veteran who has owned and operated more than two hundred Cypress Storage Units in Austin, Texas, since 1976. Over the past quarter of a century, Ellmer has seen the same storyline unfold many times. People rent a space and start off thinking they will rent it for a month or two. They end up keeping it a lot longer, for years, sometimes more than a decade, with some renters never clearing out their stuff. Every month, a fee is automatically debited from their bank account, on average ranging from $99 to $195 depending on the amount of storage. ‘Generally, after six to eight months, the money people pay for the storage exceeds the value of the items,’ Ellmer says. ‘It’s easier just to write a cheque for another month and pay. People just don’t want to be bothered.’ Gradually, however, some of his tenants realize that the stuff they are keeping is worth less than what they are paying to store it and one day just ask for it all to be thrown away.[55 - Story of Rich Ellmer comes from Rob D’Amico, ‘What’s in Store? Has Mini-Storage Become Mega-Storage’, Austin Chronicle (1 September 2000), http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A78464.] The phenomenal growth of the self-storage industry becomes even more disturbing when you think that the size of the average American home has more than doubled over the past half century, growing from 983 square feet in 1950 to 1,140 square feet in the 1970s to 2,434 square feet in 2005. In 1950, only 1 percent of homes built had four bedrooms or more, but 39 percent of new homes had at least four bedrooms in 2003. Garages have become almost obligatory, with only 8 percent of new homes built without a garage, as opposed to 53 percent built without one in 1950.[56 - Statistics on the changing size of American homes taken from surveys and research conducted by the National Association of Home Builders, www.nahb.org. Statistics last checked February 2010.] And when you consider that the average number of people per household has declined from about 4.5 in 1916 to 3.3 in 1970 to 2.6 today, this growth seems to be driven by our need to have more room to keep more stuff. As Tom Vanderbilt puts it in his article on self-storage in Slate, ‘So, let’s get this straight – houses got bigger, average family sizes got smaller, and yet we still need to tack on a billion-plus square feet to store our stuff?’ The Things You Own End Up Owning You There is something sad about all this stuff we work so hard to buy, can’t live with, but inevitably can’t bear to part with. In the same way that we focus on where to bury our waste, not where the waste came from, we also spend inordinate amounts of energy and money storing excess stuff rather than asking the hard truths of why we have so much in the first place. The comedian George Carlin riffed on this in his classic stand-up routine about stuff: ‘The whole meaning of life has become trying to find a place to put your stuff. . Have you ever noticed how other people’s shit is shit and your stuff is stuff?’[57 - George Carlin’s classic stand-up routine about the importance of ‘stuff’ in our lives from his appearance at Comic Relief (1986). It can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac.] The controversial David Fincher film Fight Club struck a painful chord with viewers who have ever experienced that addictive feeling of always wanting more, regardless of how much they have. Most people remember two lines from the movie: ‘The first rule of Fight Club – you do not talk about Fight Club’ and ‘The things you own end up owning you.’ Tyler and Jack, the two main characters in the film, seem to represent the stark choice that modern consumerism offers, best summarized by esteemed German social psychologist Erich Fromm as ‘To Have or to Be?’[58 - Eric Fromm, To Have or to Be? (1976). His thesis states that people exist in one of two states – the ‘having mode’ or the ‘being mode’. In the having mode, one concentrates on material possessions, acquisitiveness, power and aggression. The having mode is the basis of such ‘universal evils’ as greed, envy (jealousy) and violence. In the being mode, which is based in/on love, one concentrates on sharing and engages in meaningful, creative and productive activity. See www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-78564.html.] Jack (Ed Norton) is a stereotypical thirty-year-old insomniac yuppie who keeps trying to fill his emotional void and feel ‘complete’ with the things he acquires. ‘I flip through catalogues and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person.’ But no matter what Jack buys, he’s never satisfied. That’s before he meets Tyler (Brad Pitt), who throughout the film takes anticonsumerist jabs such as, ‘You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet. . You are not your grande latte. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.’ Tyler shows Jack that acquiring more and more stuff is a meaningless pursuit devoid of purpose and fulfilment. ‘God damn it. . Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.’ The main theme of Fight Club runs counter to much of what consumer advertising preys on; we won’t find happiness or the meaning of our lives in the shopping centre or in the click of a mouse. Research has proved that people who can afford to buy and hold on to more material goods are not necessarily more satisfied with their lives. Indeed, the reverse is often true. Economist Richard Layard has researched the relationship between growth, hyper-consumerism and happiness. His findings are illustrated by a graph on which one line represents per capita income and personal consumption since 1950 and shows a soaring increase (it has more than doubled) while the other line, marking Americans and Britons who describe themselves as ‘very happy’ in an annual Gallup survey, remains flat.[59 - Richard Layard, ‘Has Social Science Got a Clue?’ Part of the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures delivered at the London School of Economics, 2–5 March 2003, http://cep.lse.ac.uk/events/lectures/layard/RL030303.pdf.] In fact, the number of people describing themselves as ‘very happy’ peaked in 1957 just as the conspicuous cycle of ‘work and spend’, and a revolution of rising materialistic expectations, began. Happiness became an elusive moving target. Nothing was ever enough. Telling societal indicators paint a vivid picture of this decrease in well-being. Since 1960 teenage suicide rates have tripled in the United States; the prison population has quintupled; and the percentage of babies born to unmarried parents has sextupled. Not exactly indicators of a satisfied consumer society. And it is only getting worse, as indicated by the massive increase in depression, anxiety, insomnia, heart disease and obesity since the eighties.[60 - David Myers, The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in the Age of Plenty, as referenced in Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (HarperPerennial, 2004), 108.] As political scientist Robert Lane comments in The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, ‘The appetite of our present materialism depends upon stirring up our wants – but not satisfying them.’[61 - Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000). Quoted on p. 13 in a report produced by WWF, Anthony Kleanthous and Jules Peck, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’, www.wwf. org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/let_them_eat_cake_abridged.pdf.] Economists describe this emotional phenomenon as the ‘hedonic treadmill’. We work hard to acquire more stuff but feel unfulfilled because there is always something better, bigger and faster than in the present. The distance between what we have and what we want, the ‘margin of discontent’,[62 - ‘Margin of discontent’ was a term coined in E. J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth (Staples Press, 1967), 112.] widens as the number of things we own increases. In other words, the more we have, the more we want.[63 - The notion of ‘having driving up the wanting’ is discussed in Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (Allen & Unwin, 2003).] We are taught to dream and desire new things from an early age, as we are frequently asked, ‘What do you want for Christmas?’ or ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ Susan Fournier and Michael Guiry, former associate marketing professors at Harvard Business School, conducted a study called Consumption Dreaming Activity. They asked participants, ‘What things would you like to own or do someday?’ Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, the lists varied little regardless of sex, income, education or standard of living. Generally speaking, lists were full of desires for material possessions; almost half the sample (44 percent) mentioned new cars; more than one in four (29 percent) listed luxury items such as yachts, antiques, jewellery and designer clothes; and 16 percent just asked for the money – enough to buy anything they could possibly want. Where the study gets most interesting is not just the type of items respondents wrote down but the level of detail and elaboration they included; 42 percent of all things listed were described vividly. One participant wrote down wanting not just a car but ‘an emerald green Jaguar’. As the professors noted, ‘This level of detail and elaboration could reflect that consumers have “perfect things” in mind when they formulate wish lists.’[64 - Susan Fournier and Michael Guiry, ‘An Emerald Green Jaguar, a House on Nantucket and an African Safari: Wish Lists and Consumption Dreams in Materialist Society’, Advances in Consumer Research 20 (1993), 352–358.] Here we see the amount of time and headspace most of us give to future purchases. Not only do the things we own fill up our closets and our lives, but they also fill our minds. Chapter Two All-Consuming On Friday 28 November 2008, Jdimytai Damour, a thirty-four-year-old Wal-Mart temporary security guard, was trampled to death at 5:00 a.m. by a stampede of frenzied shoppers. The two-thousand-plus crowd had been gathering at the Valley Stream, New York, shop since 9:00 the night before by a sign that read ‘Blitz line starts here.’ By dawn they were chanting, ‘Push the doors in.’ According to witnesses, the doors shattered under the weight of the crowd rushing forward, mowing down Damour, a big man at 270 pounds, who was doing his best to keep the crowd under control. What was the crowd in such a craze for? The bargains promised inside included the latest fifty-inch plasma HDTV, on sale for a price of $798. The paramedics who came to help were also jostled and stepped on by the shoppers. Damour was pronounced dead of asphyxiation just after 6:00 a.m. Unbelievably, after the police declared that the shop was closed because it was now a crime scene, people kept shopping. Some even refused to leave, yelling, ‘I’ve been queuing since yesterday morning.’ The next day, when this same Wal-Mart reopened, crowds lined up again. The courts have not yet concluded the Damour manslaughter case, but reports indicate that there were ‘so many contributing causes to this tragedy’ that it will be difficult to assign individual blame. No matter who is to blame for the incident, Damour’s terrible end is a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large – a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down people simply to buy more stuff. Hyper-Consumption Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian economist and sociologist, first coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in 1899.[65 - Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (The Macmillan Company, 1899).] He used the term to describe the nouveau riche, a class emerging during the nineteenth century made up of people eager to display their wealth and social power. They spent lavishly on visible goods such as jewellery and clothing to show they were prosperous and to differentiate themselves from the masses. In this sense, the nouveau riche, just like their counterparts in earlier Roman, Greek and Egyptian civilizations, bought and consumed goods for self-advertisement as much as, if not more than, utility. What interests us the most is not the luxury status or elitist side of conspicuous consumption that Veblen referred to, but the excessive mass consumption binge kick-started in the 1920s that exploded in the mid-1950s. We refer to the endless acquisition of more stuff in ever greater amounts as ‘hyper-consumerism’, a force so strong that there are now more shopping centres than high schools in America.[66 - Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000), 176.] There is now more than sixteen square feet of shopping centre for every man, woman and child in the United States.[67 - Clive Hamilton, ‘The Social Roots of the Environmental Crisis’, www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%20-Ecology,%20 Economy,%20Society/Starkey_Micro_2e_c10.pdf.] Our challenge is not the fundamental consumer principle in itself but the blurred line between necessity and convenience; the intoxicating addiction of defining so much of our lives through ownership; and the never-ending list of things we ‘have to have’. And hyper-consumption has brought us to a place where the real cost of a bargain is that some consumers will trample over a man in the quest for a ‘good deal’. There are four big forces that have played a critical role in manipulating and feeding hyper-consumption: the power of persuasion; the buy now, pay later culture; the law of life cycles; and the ‘just one more’ factor. These forces offer some way of making sense of why we consume at the rate and in the way we do and help answer the question: How did we end up with so much stuff? Power of Persuasion In 1917, twenty-six-year-old Edward Bernays went to work for President Woodrow Wilson. His first job was to help form the Committee on Public Information alongside renowned political journalists Walter Lippmann and George Creel. By this time, the word ‘propaganda’ was gaining a sinister connotation in the West due to its association with communism, so Bernays coined the term ‘public relations’ as a positive alternative. The committee crafted the irresistibly patriotic slogan ‘Making the World Safe for Democracy’ to influence gun-shy America into an anti-German frenzy to go ‘over there’ and fight in World War I. They used newsprint, posters, radio, telegraph, cable and films to broadcast this message. After the war, Bernays, like many PR political gurus of that time, went to Madison Avenue, where he applied his talent for influencing the masses to the nascent advertising industry. He received a letter from his uncle Sigmund Freud asking for money. ‘I disdain to ask you for this favour, but times are hard in Austria and my research thus far has not been well received. Is there a way I might borrow from you a sum to help cover some recent expenses?’ Freud wrote. Bernays, knowing his uncle was fond of cigars, enclosed a box of Cubans along with the cheque. Grateful for the loan and the gift, Freud sent Bernays a copy of his unpublished book, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Within his uncle’s writing, Bernays found the scientific backing for his ideas about the power of emotions to persuade. The book reinforced his profound belief that you could manipulate consumers’ behaviour by connecting with them on a deep subconscious level, particularly their drives towards aggressiveness and sexuality. To get people to want stuff, desire should be linked to rudimentary human patterns – what we admire, what we despise, what we love, and what we hate and fear.[68 - Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Bloomsbury, 2008), 11.] He was so impressed, in fact, that he arranged for his uncle’s book to be published in America. Freud became famous, and to a lesser degree, so did Bernays as the father of spin. Bernays understood the power of psychology to design effective public marketing campaigns. ‘If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?’ Bernays wrote.[69 - Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Ig, first published 1928, quote taken from 2005 ed.), 71.] He reasoned that if he could tap into people’s desire to feel good, powerful and sexy, he could sell just about anything, and he proudly referred to this concept as the ‘engineering of consent’. We call it the power of persuasion. From soap to silk to bacon to even Wall Street stocks, Bernays got consumers to buy not what they needed but what they desired, connecting not just to who the consumer is but who he or she wanted to be. He realized that the power in this principle was that unmet desires have no fixed point. One of his favourite techniques for influencing consumer wants was to use indirect third-party endorsements. ‘If you can influence the leaders,’ he posited, ‘either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.’ Through techniques such as these, he didn’t just change what people bought; he transformed time-honoured social habits. In the mid-1920s, despite the widespread popularity of cigarettes, it was not considered acceptable for ladies to smoke in public. The American Tobacco Company hired Bernays to change this social norm. He realized that the real desire for women was not the cigarettes themselves but the liberty to pursue the same things as men. During the 1929 New York Easter Parade, he arranged for a group of attractive young debutantes, including his own secretary, Bertha Hunt, to march in their Sunday best. On Bernays’s signal, the women all lit up a Lucky Strike cigarette. Hunt’s press release described the march as ‘Lighting the Torches of Freedom’ in the interests of gender equality. And being the master of PR, Bernays saw to it that the media throughout the world covered the event. The idea was that anyone against the idea of women smoking would appear to be against their liberty and freedom. Although this did not completely do away with the taboo against women’s smoking, the number of women taking up smoking skyrocketed (American Tobacco’s revenues jumped by $32 million in 1928 alone).[70 - The story of Bernays and the ‘Freedom of the Torches’ is a featured article on ‘Culture Wars’, www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/torches.html.] In his memoirs, Bernays wrote, ‘It was on this day I learned that age-old customs could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of media.’[71 - Allan M Brandt, ‘Recruiting Women Smokers: The Engineering of Consent’, Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association 51, no. 1–2 (1996): 63–66, http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3372908/Brandt_Recruiting.pdf?sequence=1.] When you consider that the average person sees more than three thousand advertising messages per day, it is not surprising that we have become so seduced by the pull of the new and the desire for more.[72 - Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House, 2009), 113.] Influencers such as Bernays were part of a wider force, which engineered and reinforced a system that converted consumers’ wants into needs into everyday habits. The Diderot Effect In 1919, an advertisement from the department store Sears exhorted, ‘Use your electricity for more than light.’ Before World War I, the average household did not have an electric toaster, blender or dishwasher, or electronic waste disposal. Families used other means, even if it took a bit longer to toast a piece of bread or wash the dishes. The consumer revolution had barely begun, yet we learned to need and depend on these gadgets. Few people today will deny that these products make our lives easier, and most of us use them every day. But around the same time, superfluous gadgets also entered the kitchen, such as the spiral slicer and other garnishing tools as specific as melon ball scoopers. If you have ever created dramatic spiral strands, ribbons or thin slices from vegetables such as a cucumber, you have probably used a spiral slicer. Advertisers not only touted the slicer as the ‘clever, easy and sophisticated way’ to add colour to meat platters and to make bland one-colour vegetables such as carrots ‘more attractive’, but also pulled out the health card, attempting to convince mothers that fancy slicing was the way to get their children to eat more vegetables. Products such as these, which could never be considered a necessity, mark the crossing of a critical line, the line of needing a new invention for rational reasons including hygiene and safety to you-never-know-when-you-might-need-it reasons devised by advertisers. When you think that garnishing tools were introduced about ninety years ago, it starts to make more sense how kitchens today became stuffed with items such as ice cream machines, bread makers, mushroom brushes, chocolate fondue fountains, popcorn makers, iced tea brewers and strawberry slicers. Most of us buy these contraptions on impulse, possibly learn how they work, use them once, and spend time trying to find a good place to store them, until we admit that we are never going to make homemade ice cream and spend more time working out how to get rid them. In 2009, an average home in the UK contained twenty-five electrical appliances – an increase of 60 percent in just the last five years alone.[73 - Neal Lawson, All Consuming (Penguin, 2009), 41.] How did we lose sight of our real needs? In his essay ‘Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown’, eighteenth-century French writer Denis Diderot tells the story of how the gift from a friend of a beautiful scarlet dressing gown changed his home. Initially delighted by his gift, Diderot discarded his old gown that he had worn for as long as he could remember. But in a short time, his pleasure turned sour as he began to feel as though the rest of his possessions and surroundings were shabby in comparison with the new gown. One by one he replaced the familiar but well-worn furnishings of his study. He replaced his old chair, for example, with an armchair covered in Moroccan leather. And the rickety old desk? That was out, too. In came an expensive new writing table. Even the beloved prints that had hung on his walls for years were taken down to make way for newer, more costly prints that matched the elegance of the new robe. ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing gown,’ Diderot wrote, ‘but I have become a slave to my new one.’[74 - Grant Grand McCracken, Diderot Unities and the Diderot Effect in Culture and Consumption (Indiana University Press, 1988).] Today, consumer researchers call this kind of trading up the Diderot Effect. In the way that Diderot’s new smart gown had the unexpected effect of ‘forcing everything else to conform to its elegant tone’, we have been persuaded ever since the 1920s that we need complementary groups of possessions (colour, style or the up-to-dateness of an item). Ralph Lauren will take over an entire floor of Bloomingdale’s to market a self-contained universe to convince us of the need for a ‘total home environment’. Shoppers can purchase matching Ralph Lauren wallpaper, glasses, sheets, rugs, slippers and, yes, even a dressing gown.[75 - John Jervis, Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 108.] Similarly, when women were exposed to an advertisement in Good Housekeeping or Ladies’ Home Journal for, say, a Swan electric kettle, in the background was the ‘ideal’ kitchen with the perfect housewife surrounded by her Swan electric toaster, fridge, dishwasher and so on. It was not about buying the kettle per se, but about aspiring to the complete lifestyle conveyed in the picture. There is a line in the 1999 Oscar-winning film American Beauty when the main character Lester (played by Kevin Spacey) starts to rebel against his cookie-cutter life. In a voice-over, he mocks his wife Carolyn’s materialism. Carolyn works in her manicured rose garden. She is put together in a matching outfit. Lester remarks, ‘That’s my wife, Carolyn. See the way the handle on the pruning sheers matches her gardening clogs? That’s not an accident.’ This materialistic image of what life should be started to be embodied everywhere – films, radio, magazines, political speeches, advertising – and all was wrapped up in the famous idea of the American dream. The concept of the American dream, and the image of the perfect suburban home that went with it, became such an inherent part of the fabric of American culture and even a global advertisement to the rest of the world on the way to live that it became un-American to challenge it. Douglas Rushkoff comments in Life Inc., ‘It was less important for this life to provide actual satisfaction as for it to produce a class of people who behaved as if they were satisfied.’[76 - Rushkoff, Life Inc., 50.] This desire created a relentless pressure to buy more stuff. Now the barrier that companies needed to overcome was giving people an easy way to pay for it. Buy Now, Pay Later Richard Feinberg, a consumer psychology professor at Purdue University and a pioneer in consumer behavioural economics, has long studied the influence of credit cards on our spending decisions. One of the first experiments he conducted, with the help of a local restaurant, involved recording the size of the bill, the size of the tip, and the method of payment – cash or credit card – for 135 customers. He found that people who paid by credit card left tips 2 percent higher than those who paid by cash. To make sure this was not simply a case of credit card customers being wealthier than cash customers (or company expense-account diners), Feinberg followed up with a controlled experiment in a laboratory. He randomly assigned one group of undergraduate students to a lab with MasterCard signs and logos intentionally placed in the corner. He told the subjects this paraphernalia was for another experiment and to pay no attention to it. A second control group had no credit card-related materials. He showed both sets of participants identical pictures of various products, such as a dress, a tent and a typewriter. For each item he asked, ‘How much would you be willing to pay for it?’ Remarkably, Feinberg’s participants exposed to the red and yellow logo (even though they were told to ignore it) were willing to pay up to three times more for products relative to the control group. The study showed that mere image exposure to a credit card logo is sufficient to affect what people will pay. Feinberg also discovered that students answered the questions faster in the ‘MasterCard’ group room, an indicator that people think less or at least for shorter moments when they spend with plastic.[77 - Richard A. Feinberg, ‘Credit Cards as Spending Facilitating Stimuli: A Conditioning Interpretation’, Journal of Consumer Research 13, no. 3 (1986): 348–56.] Feinberg’s experiments, as revealing as they were, didn’t involve people making decisions about actual purchases. To follow up, MIT economists Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester conducted a study in 2001 based on real bids for real commodities (the study was later appropriately named Always Leave Home Without It).[78 - Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester, ‘Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit Card Effect on Willingness to Pay’, Springer Netherlands 12, no. 1 (February 2001).] MBA students from MIT participated in two real auctions, one for a pair of tickets to a Boston Celtics game, and the other for tickets to a Boston Red Sox game. The Celtics tickets were not just any tickets, mind you; they were for the last regular-season game with the Miami Heat, a game the Celtics had to win to clinch the division title. Tickets had been sold out well in advance and could be bought only from touts. The Red Sox tickets were for a regular-season baseball game with the Toronto Blue Jays.[79 - This experiment is well described in Stuart Vyse, Going Broke (Oxford University Press, 2008), 40.] The students who volunteered for the experiment reported to a classroom at lunchtime and were handed a sheet of paper that described the prizes and gave instructions on how to record their bids. No information on market values for any of the prizes was given, but descriptions read like this: ‘One pair of 3rd row balcony tickets for Celtics-Miami game, Sunday April 19’. The students were told not to discuss their answers or anything else about the bid sheet. Unbeknownst to the participants, two different versions were handed out at random. Half the sheets stated that payment was required by winners in cash, the ‘cash condition’ sheet. It included a note that they had to indicate whether they had ‘ready access to a local cash machine’. The other sheet stipulated that payment must be with a credit card. The results were clear. Students who agreed to pay with cash bid an average of $28.51 for the Celtics ticket, but the students who agreed to pay with plastic bid an average of $60.24 – an incredible 113 percent premium over the cash bids. The outcome for the Red Sox tickets showed the same pattern, but the price premium for credit card bids over cash was lower, at 76 percent, perhaps because these seats were not as desired or rare. Were the students who bid with credit cards less able to constrain their desire and more reckless with their bidding? And given that the bids were for items of an uncertain value, how much does this experiment apply to the world of goods with a price tag? Dilip Soman, a marketing professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, designed a study to look at this very point. Soman intercepted forty-one students after they had made purchases at the campus bookstore and asked them to recall the exact amount they had spent. Of the respondents who had paid by credit card, only 35 percent could recall the amount; the remainder either named a figure far lower than the true amount or confessed that they had no idea.[80 - Dilip Soman, ‘Effects of Payment Mechanism on Spending Behaviour: The Role of Rehearsal and Immediacy of Payments’, Journal of Consumer Research 27 (March 2001).] These experiments appear to demonstrate how credit cards – or even just credit card symbols – alter our perception of the value of a product. But they illustrate deeper clues into what is going on in our brains when we buy. When cash tangibly leaves our hands, we are more conscious that we are spending money than when we use a card.[81 - In The Decisive Moment, Jonah Lehrer made a similar observation: ‘When we pay for something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss – our wallet is literally lighter’ (Canongate, 2009), 89.] What economists such as Feinberg, Prelec and Simester have shown is that credit cards, in contrast, make the transaction less ‘real’, detaching the act of purchase from payment. The behavioural experts call this phenomenon ‘decoupling’. Perhaps it is this decoupling that explains why credit cards have become the ultimate enablers or, more accurately, tranquillizers of shopping.[82 - Mickey Butts talks about this idea in ‘Why We Charge: What Behavioural Economics Can Tell Us’ (19 August 2003). This is a working article written by Butts while on the Knight-Bagehot fellowship for business journalists at Columbia Journalism School and Columbia Business School, http://www.mickeybutts.com/wj_ business.html.] Indeed brain imaging experiments indicate that the insular cortex, the region of the brain often associated with addictions and negative feelings, experiences less activity when people pay with credit cards over cash. George Loewenstein, a neuroeconomist at Carnegie Mellon, points out that ‘the nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anaesthetized against the pain of payment.’[83 - Ibid.] It’s hard to imagine life before credit cards. In stark contrast to the shopping behaviour this plastic device has come to facilitate, the basic idea for the credit card was invented by an individual, not a corporation, and for a practical reason. In 1949, in Major’s Cabin Grill, New York City, Frank McNamara, head of Hamilton Credit Corporation, took his partners to dinner. Their conversation centred on the problems of a customer who had borrowed some money from Hamilton Credit, but was now unable to pay it back. When the bill arrived, it was Frank’s turn to pay, but he realized to his embarrassment that he’d left his wallet in another suit pocket at home. He called his wife and asked her to drive over and bring him money, vowing to himself that he would never let this mistake happen again. At this moment he thought about the troubled Hamilton customer who could not pay his debts and his own personal embarrassment. ‘What if there was some way to pay the bill without cash in hand?’ Frank mused. Thus inspired, Frank developed the first dual-party credit card, Diners Club, and the credit card was born. In the credit card industry, this dinner is often referred to as the ‘First Supper’. In just one year, twenty thousand people became card holders. Five years later, that number had increased tenfold. Other banks took note of the popularity of this new payment device, but the idea didn’t gain mass appeal until 1957. That was the year when the nation became obsessed with the story of Mr Harold Bortzfield and his wife from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who set off on an around-the-world thirty-day trip with nothing more than an airplane ticket and a Diners Club card. Shortly thereafter American Express introduced the first ‘general-purpose’ ‘Don’t Leave Home Without It’ credit card made of plastic, and then along came ‘Master the Moment’ from MasterCard, ‘It’s Everywhere You Want to Be’ from Visa, and so on. The critical turning point in the history of credit cards was when American Express introduced the option of maintaining a revolving balance in 1959. Cardholders no longer had to pay their bills in full but could carry a balance from one month to the next. Joe Nocera writes in his book A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, ‘Thus did Americans begin to spend money they didn’t yet have; thus did the unaffordable become affordable.’[84 - Joe Nocera, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, as quoted in Vanity Fair, ‘Rethinking the American Dream’, www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904.] Between 1989 and 2001, credit card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. In 2007, it was up to $937 billion. The equation is simple: the more credit we have, the more stuff we can afford to buy, the more resources are consumed and the more waste is created. The credit card (or more specifically, credit card debt) has become as much a symbol of American life as apple pie, with US citizens holding more than 1.3 billion cards. There are more than four credit cards for each American. In contrast, the Chinese have only a total of 5 million credit cards, for all 1.2 billion of the population.[85 - George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009), 128.] In Western Europe, there is only 0.23 credit card per person. Think about your own credit card statement for a second (that is if you are not the one in four who has never looked at his or her statement).[86 - Steve Rhode, founder of myvesta.org, found that 26 percent of his company’s clients say they never look at the statement. Quoted in Mickey Butts, ‘Why We Charge: What Behavioural Economics Can Tell Us’.] What are the four logical pieces of information missing from it? You probably guessed the first two: your statement of interest and fees paid. But what about the interest rate itself and the length of time it will take you to pay off your debt at your current minimum monthly payment? This missing information begins to explain why the average family carries, often ignorantly, $8,000 of debt (over eight cards) and pays $1,000 a year in interest and fees alone.[87 - Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Harper Collins, 1998), 72.] The nation’s credit card charges amount to more than $1.8 trillion a year.[88 - Demos, www.demos.org, April 2008.] So what have we spent all this credit on?[89 - While we were writing this book, President Obama signed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) act. By July 2010, credit card companies had to meet an array of new requirements for disclosing fees, rates and terms on monthly statements. For decades, these numbers have been ‘conveniently’ and intentionally left out because the credit card companies wanted debt to feel ‘free’ and guiltless.] Of course most of us benefit from credit cards at some point in time. As the credit card industry says, ‘We provide the credit, in many cases, for people to start businesses. . to buy more, to live a better life, to do things that they could never do any other way.’[90 - Interview with Elizabeth Warren from ‘The Secret History of the Credit Card’, produced by Frontline and The New York Times, www.pbs. org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/interviews/warren.html.] So what’s the problem? Looking at the buying habits of a spectrum of consumers, we can see that credit cards have fuelled different types of unhealthy spending habits: accelerated spending, mindless spending, and latest and greatest spending. By no means are these three types mutually exclusive. It is common for one consumer to get caught in the trap of all three. The result, though, is the same and obvious: consumers spend more than they can afford and buy new stuff faster, more easily and more often. Accelerated spending is the ‘I’ve got to have it right now’ shopping mentality that leads us to make purchases we can’t afford. David Laibson, an economist at Harvard, notes, ‘Our emotional brain wants to max out the credit card, order dessert, and smoke a cigarette. When it sees something it wants, it has difficulty waiting to get it.’[91 - Lehrer, The Decisive Moment, 91.] Most people’s brains are not wired to do the ‘buy now, pay later’ calculation, as we struggle to understand the principles of exponential growth (which is precisely what credit card interest is). Jonathan Zinman, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, uses an old puzzle to illustrate this point. Imagine a chessboard with $1 on the first square, $2 on the second, then $4, $8, $16 and so on. How many dollars on the final sixty-fourth square? Okay, so if you are like us, your brain does not even try to figure it out, but instinct would suggest it is somewhere around $100,000. Actually, the sixty-fourth square contains $9,000 quadrillion.[92 - Tim Harford, ‘Your Brain on Credit’, Forbes.com (March 2009), www.forbes.com/2009/03/19/credit-poor-judgement-markets-tim-harford.html.] When we borrow money to buy something now, we do not contemplate the interest hangover. Our brain can’t compute the cost of our actions, at least in the moment. Mindless spending is the ‘I don’t know what I spent my money on’ type of spending that can take the form of aimlessly wandering around the shopping centre or popping into shops during your lunch break and coming home with things you never intended to buy. The moment when a person shifts from being a conscious consumer shopping for a specific item to an impulse buyer has been named the Gruen Transfer, after architect Victor Gruen, who constructed the first shopping centre in 1956.[93 - This first shopping centre, called Southdale, was in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the Gruen Effect in ‘The Terrazzo Jungle’ in The New Yorker (March 2004), www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/15/040315fa_fact1.] Gruen’s original vision for the centre was to create an ‘idyllic shopping environment’ and a ‘kernel of the community’ – a grand plan far removed from the disorienting and sprawling maze we experience today. Latest and greatest spending translates into ‘I’ve got to get it because it is bigger (or smaller), better, faster or even just newer.’ In most instances the existing product still functions; nevertheless it cannot fulfil our desire to have the latest version available. We tend to value whatever is new and original over what is old, durable or used.[94 - Ibid.] This tendency is not so far removed from the ‘utopia’ described in Aldous Huxley’s classic fantasy Brave New World, where children are indoctrinated from birth to consume. Newness as a trait is something to be cherished.[95 - Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (David McKay, 1960), 35.] In Huxley’s imagined world, these children undergo conditioning from teachers who whisper in their ears as they sleep, ‘I do love having new clothes. Ending is better than mending. . old clothes are beastly. We always throw away old clothes. . The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches. .’[96 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Penguin, 1959), 49.] The philosophy of Mustapha Mond, the dictator of Brave New World, is ‘We don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.’ Law of Life Cycles Mobile phones have now achieved the dubious status of having the shortest life cycle of any electronic consumer product.[97 - Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2006), 263–264.] The average person in America and Britain discards his or her mobile phone within eighteen months of purchase, even though mobile phones will last for ten years on average. (In Japan, the time span from purchase to discard is merely a year.) Every year more than 130 million still-working mobile phones in the United States and 15 million in the UK are retired. Only a small fraction are reassembled for reuse.[98 - Ibid.] The iPod is not far behind the mobile phone in claiming the ‘shortest life cycle’ crown. For a product introduced in 2001, it is remarkable that by 2009 it had already gone through six ‘generations’ of the first ‘Classic’ model (and that does not even include the extensions of the family such as the Shuffle, Nano, Mini and Touch). If you were one of those consumers who ‘upgraded’ to every new iPod that had come onto the market from 2001 to 2009, you would now own eighteen iPods.[99 - Liveblog: ‘Rock and Roll’ Apple iPod Event. Ars Technica, 9 September 2009, http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/liveblog-rock-and-roll-apple-ipod-event.ars. Retrieved 9 August 2009.] We are addicted to new products. According to Colin Campbell, a professor of sociology at the University of York, we suffer from ‘neophilia’. Campbell argues that novelty seeking is a new phenomenon. ‘Pre-modern societies tend to be suspicious of the novel. It is a feature of modernity that we are addicted to novelty.’[100 - Heidi Dawley, ‘The Disorder of These Times: Neophilia’, blog post for Media Life (June 2006), www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_5439.asp.] Medieval period fashions changed slowly and slightly over the course of a thousand years. Clothing was primarily a matter of necessity rather than of ever-changing fashion. The stories of the founding fathers of the automobile industry, Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, illustrate a dividing line between comfort with the tried and true and the endless chase of the new. One believed in a hyperthyroid economy that could be sustained only through a constant consumer demand for new goods, while the other, the master of mass production, initially rejected force-fed repetitive consumption. Henry Ford learned the honest values of quiet country living on a small farm in Dearborn, a rural town just west of Detroit. He spent most of his childhood tending the fields and milking cows. But it was clear from a young age that Henry would not be a farmhand forever. Indeed, he had a gift for mathematics and loved tinkering with machines of all kinds, especially watches. When he founded the Ford Motor Company in 1901, Ford knew that he wanted to make owning a car possible for everyone. Ford, committed to social change, believed a ‘one size fits all’ approach to cars could be a great class leveller. He realized this dream with the introduction of the first Model T in 1908, a car that was simple to drive, cheap, easy to repair, and durable. Alfred Sloan, in contrast, had a wealthy and privileged upbringing in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied electrical engineering at MIT, where students were taught to focus on inventing the ‘next big thing’. After graduating at the top of his class, he joined Hyatt Rolling, a small ball bearings manufacturer, acquired by General Motors in 1916. At the age of twenty-six, he became president when his father, a prosperous businessman, bought the company. When Sloan became president of GM in the early 1920s, he faced the threat of an ever-expanding used-car market and an ever-lowering price tag of the Model T. It was around the same time that he brought the new Chevrolet to market. Observing how the fashion and textile industries were growing at a rapid rate by updating designs, he proposed that consumers would trade up for style as much as for technological improvements long before their old cars wore out. He convinced his team to restyle the body covering of what was essentially a nine-year-old piece of technology under the banner of ‘product innovation’. The Chevrolet was a remarkable success and the idea of ‘perceived obsolescence’ and ‘change for change’s sake’ was born. Obsolescence was now built not just into the product itself, but into our minds. GM went so far as to define its strategy as choreographed cosmetic ‘upgrades’ to ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied’. In 1929, Charles Kettering, director of research for Sloan, wrote an article declaring, ‘The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction. . If everyone were satisfied no one would want to buy the new thing.’[101 - Charles Kettering, ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied,’ Nation’s Business 17, no. 1 (January 1929): 30–31, 79.] This cry became an increasingly popular concept as companies realized they no longer had a production problem but rather had a demand problem. They needed to shift their attention to finding new ways to sell existing products. For fifteen years Ford showed a fanatical dedication to sticking with the Model T’s original design (with the exception of a few minor changes). In 1922, he proclaimed, ‘We have been told. . that the object of business ought to be to get people to buy frequently and that [it] is bad business to try to make anything that will last forever. . Our principle of business is precisely to the contrary. . We never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete.’ Ford maintained consumer demand by competing on costs, bringing the price of the Model T down from $950 in 1909 to $290 by 1924 through the efficiencies and scale made possible by the assembly line.[102 - Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Henry Holt, 1999), 193.] But by 1927, with most families who could afford one owning a car, the increasing competition of GM’s lavish and continual design ‘improvements’ and the rumblings of the Great Depression, this strategy faltered. After the 15 millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line, production halted, and cars such as the Model A and V-8 with multiple different styles of models were born. Henry Ford lost the battle to obsolescence. The efficiencies of mass production only grew during World War II. Goods rolled off assembly lines faster than they could be consumed, jamming warehouses. As Vance Packard writes in the The Waste Makers, ‘The challenge was to develop a public that would always have an appetite as voracious as its machines.’[103 - Packard, The Waste Makers, 20.] Advertisers called the time between when a product was made and when that product was purchased by the consumer ‘time lag’. To reduce that gap, manufacturers induced people to buy more and more products, faster, and to create desire even when customer needs were already met. Perceived obsolescence, making products feel out-of-date, less desirable, and in need of replacement, was a strategy mastered by the car makers, but it was not enough. Consumers still controlled their desires to update or upgrade. Manufacturers needed to take this decision out of their hands. Designing for the Dump In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, the aging salesman with an unwavering devotion to the American dream, laments, ‘Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it is broken! I am always in a race with the junkyard!’ His outburst continues, ‘The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddamn maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you’ve finally paid for them, they’re used up.’ Willy was experiencing the pains of ‘death dating’, the idea of deliberately building into the product different ways to shorten its life, carefully controlled by the manufacturer. Planned obsolescence was a concept first suggested not by an economist, a manufacturer or even an advertiser, but by a Manhattan real estate broker. In 1932, Bernard London wrote a twenty-page pamphlet called ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’. London proposed starting a government agency that would determine the ‘lease of life’ of every manufactured product, be it a car, a hair comb, a ship or even a building. After the allotted time expired, ‘these things would be legally dead.’ Consumers would have a choice: they could give up the item, and be paid part of the price of a new one, or use the product past its ‘expiration date’ and pay a penalty tax. While the regulatory details of London’s concept were not enforced, the principle of the proposal was adopted by product designers in the fifties who started to ‘design for the dump’. During the twentieth century, the average human life span in the United States increased by more than thirty years, twenty-five years of which are attributed to advances in medicine and public health.[104 - ‘Ten Great Public Health Achievements – United States, 1900–1999’, CDC (1999), Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report 48, no. 12: 241–243. PMID 10220250, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10220250.] In contrast, over the last fifty years, the life span of everyday ‘durable’ goods including refrigerators, toasters and washing machines has decreased anywhere between three and seven years. In 1901, Shelby Electric Company produced an incandescent ‘Centennial’ lightbulb. The original, more than one hundred years later, still lights up the fire station in Livermore, California, where it was first installed. In contrast, in 1932, a memo circulated at GE stating, ‘We should change the life of the 200-watt 110–120 volt PS 30 bulb lamp from 1,000 hours. . to 750 hours.’[105 - Packard, The Waste Makers, 25.] GE, like many other companies, shortened the life span of its products to increase sales. Just One More Factor For many families today, the idea of owning one television is as odd as having, say, just one pair of shoes. In 2004, both America and the UK crossed a telling threshold: the average home had more televisions in it than people (there are on average three sets in the typical home and 2.55 people).[106 - Television Audience Report by Nielsen. Retrieved August 2009, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/more-than-half-the-homes-in-us-have-three-or-more-tvs/.] As a person is unlikely to watch two televisions at once, how did we end up being convinced that we need more than one television per person in our homes? In the late 1950s, industrialists were worried. The Smiths had caught up with the Joneses. A degree of mass affluence meant that the average American family (and much of Europe) was satisfied with what it had, owning a home, new appliances and a car. Markets for goods were getting saturated while consumer demand was slowing. Social commentator Vance Packard summed up this phenomenon when he noted, ‘The way to end glut was to produce gluttons.’[107 - Packard, The Waste Makers, 25.] Manufacturers needed people not simply to want to keep up with the Joneses, but as Gregg Easterbrook wrote in The Progress Paradox, to have a desire to ‘call and raise the Joneses’.[108 - Progress Paradox, cited in David Camp, ‘Rethinking the American ADream’, Vanity Fair (April 2009), www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904.] Given that most people had one of everything, consumers needed a plausible excuse to buy ‘just one more’ of a product they already owned, and so the surplus doctrine of choice was born. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt conducted a simple experiment that we can re-create here. Pick a word from the following list most appealing to you: constraint, limit, barrier, choice. Odds are that, like the participants in the research, you picked ‘choice’, as the first three have negative associations.[109 - Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2006), 101.] We often believe as consumers that the more choice the better, even if it is more of the same. And this feeling relates not just to the hundreds of thousands of brands we have to choose from every day, but also to which car to drive, television to watch and phone to call on, and even which bathroom to use. As psychologists such as Barry Schwartz have shown in books such as the The Paradox of Choice, choice confuses us not only about how to satisfy our wants, but about what those wants are. This uncertain disorienting effect is what manufacturers wanted to create. If we don’t feel satisfied, satisfaction may be just one more purchase away. By 2005, according to Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and half days.[110 - Jon Mooallem, ‘The Self-Storage Self’, The New York Times (2 September 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t.html?pagewanted=1.] The more our houses and lives bloat with stuff, the heavier and more trapped we feel. As Neal Lawson wrote in All Consuming, ‘The more we consume the less space we have to be anything other than consumers.’[111 - Lawson, All Consuming, 11.] Similarly, the more space and time we spend dedicated to accumulating stuff in our lives, the less room we have for other people. Our drive for material wealth entailed the exclusion of our most basic social needs, such as family and community bonds, personal passions and social responsibility. We thought we could fill these needs through shopping and buying and accumulating more and more stuff. Some critics describe our era of hyper-consumerism as ‘autistic capitalism’. Regardless of nomenclature, we know two things about this disorder of hyper-consumption. First, it was driven by a belief that money – and the almost instinctual accumulation of what money can buy – equalled happiness. The second thing we know is that this disorder is fixable. The system of consumerism may seem like an immovable fact of modern life. But it is not. That the system was manufactured suggests that we can reshape those forces to create a healthier, more sustainable system with a more fulfilling goal than ‘more stuff’. Chapter Three From Generation Me to Generation We Anyone who has travelled in rural Africa knows that one adjective describes its economy: ‘more.’ The people there need more. They need more water, food, infrastructure, education, health and governance. This lack of the most basic resources and the consequent poverty also confronted Adam Smith more than two hundred years ago. Smith, the great Scottish economist, sought a way out of the agrarian squalor of the eighteenth century. He believed a more productive society would lead to a wealthier society. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that humans are motivated by self-interest and ‘self-love’, and that the exploitation of this trait leads to greater wealth for all and a more effective distribution of labour.[112 - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776).] Looking back, one can understand why Adam Smith wanted to work out how to get the economy to produce more. Britain in the 1700s was not a nice place to live. The average life expectancy was just thirty-five years. Dead dogs, cats, rats and even horses decayed on the cobblestone streets, and raw waste spilled everywhere, creating a breeding ground for diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and smallpox. Medicine was still so primitive that in 1775 more than eight hundred deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality were attributed simply to ‘Teeth’.[113 - ‘18th Century London – Its Daily Life and Hazards’, http://forums. canadiancontent.net/history/48176-18th-century-london-its-daily. html.] Most people lived in just one room in buildings made of crumbling bricks. It was not unusual for such buildings to collapse. But today, in a rampant consumer economy, ‘more’ has lost its meaning. Smith would probably be mystified by how his simple goals of increasing productivity and achieving market efficiency have become an ideological threat to our economy, society and planet. In When Corporations Rule the World, David C. Korten writes, ‘Smith did not advocate a market system based on unrestrained greed. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest – but it is not greed.’[114 - David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995), http://deoxy.org/korten_betrayal.htm.] Adam Smith and later Milton Friedman both believed that an individual pursuing his own self-interest promotes the good of society as a whole. In Chapter Two, we saw how in just a few generations, this concept was transformed from a relatively healthy narrative of technological ingenuity to a frenetic quest for personal identity through brands, products and services, before finally becoming an extreme system of insatiable consumerism. So much so that by the 1950s, the dawn of hyper-consumerism, we started to perceive ourselves first and foremost as a society of individual consumers, and as a group of citizens second. We ended up believing that we were better off relying on corporations rather than cooperating with each other. Collective- and community-based values were shunned in favour of consumer independence and a mind-set of ‘me, me, me’. The promises of individuality and independence were wrapped up in the falsehood that ‘what’s mine is mine’ and that complete self-reliance was the ultimate goal. Douglas Rushkoff writes in his book Life Inc., ‘Each home was to be its own fiefdom. Self-sufficiency was part of the myth of the self-made man with his private estate, so community property, carpools, or sharing of almost any kind became anathema to the suburban aesthetic.’[115 - Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House, 2009), 51.] And that neighbour on the other side of the fence, do we even know him well enough to borrow his ladder? Sadly, neighbours being ‘total strangers’ is more the norm these days than the exception. A recent survey shows that three-quarters of Americans confess that they don’t know their next-door neighbours.[116 - Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007), 117.] In the UK, six out of ten people don’t know their neighbours’ names.[117 - ‘Who Needs Neighbours?’ BBC report (July 2006), http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/programmes/breakfast/5163976.stm.] It would seem that the consumer culture of ‘more’ helped businesses get bigger while prizing us further and further apart. Through the fifties and sixties, manufacturers and marketers encouraged American workers to give up their hobbies and free time for the choice of bigger cars, better homes and more technology. The result was a dramatic decline in ‘social capital’. Robert Putnam, a political science professor at Harvard University, was responsible for popularizing the concept of social capital, defining it as ‘the trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’.[118 - The notion of social capital including Putnam’s definition is discussed in Gene A. Brewer, ‘Building Social Capital: Civic Attitudes and Behaviour of Public Servants’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 3 (2003).] In his book Bowling Alone, he traced the decline in social capital through a study of American membership in bowling leagues. Putnam found that between 1980 and 1993, while the total number of people who bowled in America increased by 10 percent, the number of bowling leagues decreased by 40 percent. And as Putnam notes, ‘Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once during 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections.’[119 - Robert Putnam, ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Capitalism’. The article was published in Journal of Democracy in 1995 and later turned into a book published by Simon and Schuster in 2000. See http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/bowling.html.] In short, the more people who bowl alone, the fewer conversations over beer and pizza, and the greater the overall decline in human interaction. The less time people spent socializing, the more time they spent in the office or shopping. The irony is that while Americans tripled their capacity to consume between 1980 and 2000, they found themselves with far less time to enjoy the fruits of their labour.[120 - Statistics taken from the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TablePrint.asp? FirstYear=1939&LastYear=2000&Freq=Year&SelectedTable=5&View Series=NO&Java=no&MaxValue=14546.7&MaxChars=8&Request3 Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Legal=&Land=.] As former president Bill Clinton said in a 1993 speech, ‘Most Americans are working harder for less.’[121 - ‘NAFTA: Embracing Change – North American Free Trade Agreement’, a speech given by President Bill Clinton on 13 September 1993. Transcript, US Department of State Dispatch, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1584/is_n37_v4/ai_14276333/.] Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman, philosopher, and – as one might now call him – futurist, was ahead of his time when he wrote in 1757, ‘The great error of our nature is not to know where to stop; not to be satisfied with any reasonable requirement. . but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit of more.’ It is this ‘insatiable pursuit of more’ that we must now address. Adam Smith remarked that Burke was ‘The only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do.’[122 - E. G. West, Adam Smith: The Man and His Works (Liberty Fund Inc., 1969).] They both wanted to create a better society through competition but with a healthy balance between pursuit of self-interest and pursuit of the greater good. Over two centuries later, their vision might be taking shape. We may be coming out of the consumer trance we have been living in for the past fifty or so years. At the heart of this transformation are two interlocking phenomena. The first is a values shift. There is a growing consumer consciousness that infinite growth and consumption based on finite resources are not a viable combination. Consequently, we are finding ways to get more out of what we buy, and more importantly, out of what we don’t buy. At the same time, we are starting to recognize that the constant quest for material things has come at the expense of impoverishing relationships with friends, family, neighbours and the planet. This realization is causing a desire to re-create stronger communities. We are experiencing a tipping point from the pursuit of ‘what’s in it for me?’ towards the mind-set of ‘what’s in it for us?’ But more than that, we are beginning to see that self-interest and collective good depend on each other. It is in my self-interest to stop global warming; it is in my self-interest to participate in elections; it is in my interest to correct an online entry on Wikipedia. Reclaiming Old Virtues Our awareness of the false promises of our consumer economy is not new. Just as mass consumerism was taking hold, a visionary tried to halt the emerging culture of materialism. Cereal giant Kellogg Company founder W. K. Kellogg decided in 1930, right around the start of the Great Depression, that most of his fifteen hundred employees would go from a traditional eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown championed the initiative, announcing at the time, ‘Four six-hour shifts. . instead of three eight-hour shifts, will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.’[123 - Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day (Temple University Press, 1996), www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1155_reg.html.] The existing workforce took a slight pay cut, but Kellogg raised the hourly rate to offset the loss and promised production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. But Kellogg wanted to do more than provide and save jobs. He recognized that rather than passing time, like previous generations, people were spending it, getting lost in the ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption. This mania was leaving them disconnected from their communities. Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day that Brown and Kellogg hoped to show that the ‘Free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.’[124 - Ibid.] It was a bold vision, and it worked – for a while. The workers in Battle Creek embraced the extra two hours. Beyond the time spent at home with their family and friends, the time also created a sense of freedom to pursue leisure interests. Women sewed, gardened, visited neighbours and cooked together. Men exercised, hunted, visited libraries and explored other hobbies. As Hunnicutt writes, ‘Those extra two hours were precious and offered an opportunity to craft the employee’s sense of family, community, and citizenship. . The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older. . more convivial kind of working together.’[125 - Ibid.] Kellogg’s six-hour workday produced not just a qualitative social benefit by creating ‘happier’ employees with more leisure time. There were quantitative results for the company, too. The shorter workday influenced employees to work harder. On average, ninety-six boxes of shredded wholewheat biscuits were packed per hour instead of eighty-three.[126 - Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1993).] Overhead costs, labour costs and the number of work-related accidents also decreased. The company polled workers in 1946 (after the programme had been temporarily suspended) and found that 77 percent of men and 87 percent of women would choose a thirty-hour week even if it meant lower wages.[127 - Don Fitz, ‘What’s Wrong with a 30-Hour Work Week?’ posted on his blog ‘Climate and Capitalism’ (May 2009), http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=691.] Despite its success and popularity, Kellogg stopped its experiment in 1943. The labour shortage and product demand from World War II pushed the company back to an eight-hour workday. President Roosevelt launched a series of policy initiatives that led to the standard forty-hour working week that for the large part we still adhere to today. These political forces were impossible for even Kellogg to resist. As one employee later commented, ‘Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn’t make a big difference. . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn’t gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had.’[128 - As quoted in Jeff Kaplan, ‘The Gospel of Consumption’, Orion (6 May 2008), www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/.] Today there is a conscious movement to return to the same intentions that motivated the six-hour Kellogg working week. Across America, and much of Europe and Australasia, we are seeing a drive to reclaim leisure time to self-educate, self-relate and revive neglected forms of social capital. The urge to regain meaning and community in our lives is popping up everywhere – and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in our kitchens. Roo used to visit his Grandma Dada in her middle-class home in Wimbledon every Saturday. When Roo walked in the door, he would run to the fridge. Everything you needed to know about Dada could be understood in the way she cooked. She had a routine. The first Saturday would be a roast chicken, the leftover bones would be turned into stock for the following Saturday’s risotto, the leftover risotto would be used for the following Saturday’s stuffed tomatoes, and the leftover stuffed tomatoes would be turned into pasta sauce. Roo and his brothers would joke that when there was something that she couldn’t reuse she’d turn it into the soap she made them wash their hands with. There is more to this process than resourcefulness. For Dada, making lunch was about finding balance through a value system that integrated her history, as well as her sense of responsibility to her family and community. Roo thought of his grandmother in June 2009 when he, his wife and their fourteen-month-old daughter took a trip to China to visit distant relatives. They stayed on the fifty-seventh floor of the JW Marriott in Shanghai. As they walked around the breakfast buffet, he was struck with an intense feeling that what lay before him wasn’t rational. Smoked salmon from Scotland, lobster from Maine, French croissants, Italian spring water and Costa Rican coffee. The sense of globalized freedom that the buffet offered felt overwhelming and oppressive. But most of all, the choices were without meaning. He was in Shanghai, and he wanted a Chinese breakfast and something that made him feel his fourteen-hour flight had transported him somewhere new. And here is where his grandmother’s old world and his own new world values meet, in the desire to find purpose and an authentic story behind what we buy, make, do and create. Return of the Local Marketplace In high school, Rob Kalin would skip classes to shoot and develop his photographs. He graduated with a D-minus average but won admission to a studio programme at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Over the next six years, Kalin attended half a dozen colleges before finally finishing his degree, with a major in classics, from New York University in 2004. He was twenty-five years old at the time and pessimistic about how his degree would help him in the job market. The son of a carpenter, he grew up with a ‘hands-on’ approach to life. He started to make furniture in his Brooklyn apartment, turning IKEA kitchen work surfaces into stereo speakers and reclaimed wood into desks. But Kalin discovered it was hard to sell his stuff, even online. There was a lot of ‘advice and hand-holding’ for artisans but no viable marketplace to exhibit and sell their creations. At the same time, he was not a fan of brick-and-mortar chain stores. He would just walk around and see shelves upon shelves of ‘anonymous mass-produced products’ – and think that he wanted to create the opposite experience. In early April the following year, Kalin was sitting in a big orange chair facing his apartment window. He started to sketch the initial ideas for his vision – a vibrant community of people across the globe connecting with and helping one another, and ultimately buying and selling unique handmade goods direct, with no big middleman. Working with three friends and fellow NYU graduates – Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik and Jared Tarbell – Kalin transformed his initial scribbles into a live website in just two months. Etsy was born. In just three years, Etsy has attracted 200,000 sellers, a million registered users and more than $27 million in funding.[129 - Donna Fenn, ‘Cool, Determined & Under 30’, Inc. (1 October 2008), www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/cool-determined-amp-under-30_pagen_3.html?.] Etsy connects buyers with independent creators of all things handmade, the result being that you pay less and the seller makes more. In 150 countries, from Australia to England to South America, more than 3 million people are buying and selling everything from ‘myrtle wood electric guitars’ to ‘crocheted bath puffs’ to ‘bookcases handcrafted from canoes’. At the same time, through forums and live chats, as well as via offline crafts events and workshops known as Etsy labs, the Etsy community provides these artists not just with the platform but with the information and support they need to earn a living. ‘This human-to-human relationship of the person who’s making it with the person who’s buying it is at the core of what Etsy is,’ Kalin explained.[130 - ‘Etsy Lets Artists Create a Living’, article posted 1 July 2008, on www.rarebirdinc.com/news/articles/etsy.html.] Kalin posits that handmade ‘isn’t a fad, it’s a resurgence’, and indeed the growth and sales of Etsy have been phenomenal. In November 2008, when much of the consumer world was in a panic, Etsy had twelve record sales volume days in the month; $10.8 million of goods were sold – a 27 percent increase over October; and 135,165 new members joined the community. In the first six months of 2009, more than $70 million worth of goods were sold and more than 1 million new sellers and buyers joined. Etsy is a throwback to the way consumerism used to be, individuals buying from individuals, and re-creating old forms of virtual market bazaars. It is a part – or you could say a pioneer – of the resurgence in the popularity of older craft industries – knitting, printmaking, crochet, ceramics, quilting, woodworking and so on. More and more people are looking to reconnect with the ties and variety of local and custom-made goods that got lost in mass production. Chain-store culture and shopping centre-fuelled conformity have created extraordinarily impersonal experiences with products that have no history, story or person behind them. In his book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis observed, ‘Everything’s the same; nothing’s unique; and that takes the fun out of making, buying and owning. But the small-is-the-new-big world could bring variety back. The craftsman lives again on Etsy.’[131 - Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do? (HarperBusiness, 2009), 57.] In 2009, Kalin travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to talk to world leaders about Etsy’s vision to ‘create millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again’. In a prepared video message made for the Forum, sitting on an old sofa covered in a pink and red quilt, and surrounded by patchwork cushions, a brightly coloured oversize toy octopus and two teddy bears (obviously all made by Etsy sellers), Kalin explained that ‘these millions of local living economies around the world are more sustainable for the planet than a small number of huge conglomerate companies.’ Kalin is a realist as well as an idealist. He admits that ‘there can’t be no mass production altogether’ but is equally ‘flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save twelve cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer’.[132 - Rob Walker, ‘Handmade 2.0’, The New York Times (12 December 2007), http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16Crafts-t.html.] These days it seems more and more people agree with him. There are currently more than 5,750 local farmers’ markets in the United States, compared with 1,700 in 1994, making them the fastest-growing part of our food economy.[133 - ‘Farmers Markets and Local Food Marketing: Farmers Market Growth: 1994–2009’, USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/FarmersMarkets.] To put that in perspective, there are more than a thousand more farmers’ markets in the United States than there are Wal-Marts – one out of every three of them started since 2000. There are now 550 farmers’ markets in the UK, compared to one in Bath in 1997. Significantly, 9 out of 10 people in the UK would shop at a farmers’ market if they had the choice. There is a newfound interest in being self-reliant and eating reasonably priced fresh produce that is not being carted all around the country and back again. Something deeper and more poignant is happening here. We are seeking to restore the missing link between producer and consumer. The experience of going into a supermarket to walk through aisle upon aisle stacked high with boxed, bagged or canned food is, for many consumers, starting to feel empty and even wrong. Sociologists studying shopping behaviour report that shoppers have ten times more conversations at farmers’ markets than at supermarkets.[134 - Quoted in Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007), 105. The research is from Brian Halweil, Eat Here: Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, Worldwatch Institute (W. W. Norton, 2004), 11–12.] As it turns out, many of us would rather stroll around a farmers’ market and chat with the people who have grown our food and find out what’s tasty and in season. The recent resurgence in the desire to ‘eat local’ was symbolically celebrated when a 1,100-square-foot patch of the manicured South Lawn of the Obama White House was dug up and turned into a vegetable garden for the first time since World War II. It would seem that the Obamas have inspired thousands to follow suit. In 2009, seed sales were up by 19 percent and the number of homes growing their own vegetables increased by a staggering 40 percent.[135 - Pablo Paster, ‘Sowing the Seeds of Sustainability: Victory Gardens Are Back!’ Treehugger.com (August 2009), www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/victory-gardens-are-back.php.],[136 - Bruce Horowitz, ‘Recession Grows Interest in Seeds, Vegetable Gardening’, USA Today (20 February 2009), www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-02-19-recession-vegetable-seeds_N. htm.] Etsy and the local food movement are part of a mass re-evaluation of what and how we consume. They are also a part of a deep shift around three core values that lay the groundwork for a new consumer mind-set. The first is simplicity; consumers are yearning to go back to a time when markets meant community-based, traditional relationships with strong ties. When you purchase an item from Etsy or pick up a piece of homemade cheese from a farm stand, there is a history or story behind it. There’s a person behind it. The second is traceability and transparency – the notion that ‘local is good again’ and that consumers want to know whom they are buying from and learn more about the product than just its immediate purpose. As Michael Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, ‘Instead of looking at labels, the local food customer will look at the farm for himself, or look the farmer in the eye and ask him about how he grows his crops or treats his animals.’[137 - Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press, 2006), 258.] And the last is participation; people are increasingly seeking to be active participants more in control of their world – rather than passive ‘victims’ of hyper-consumption. Today there is an unprecedented degree of interconnectivity as well as an infrastructure for participation. Our immersion in innovative information, communication and technology (ICT) platforms, specifically online social networks and handheld mobile devices, is the second phenomenon driving us towards a ‘we’ mind-set. The ‘We’ Generation Chris Hughes co-created one of the defining businesses of the past decade, Facebook. Unlike his partners and Harvard roommates, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, Hughes was not interested in the software itself. Instead, he wanted to work out the ways that people would want to connect and share stuff with one another and how an online community could enrich the lives of its users – a passion that led to his nickname ‘the Empath’ among Facebook insiders. Hughes left Facebook in February 2007 just when it was taking off, with more than 10 million active users. His new calling was not another business start-up but to head the online organizing campaign for Barack Obama, who at the time was the underdog junior senator from Illinois. It was Obama’s belief in the collective power of citizens that drew Hughes away from Facebook. He admits, ‘I wouldn’t have left Facebook for any other person or at any other time.’[138 - Ellen McGirt, ‘How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign’, Fast Company (April 2009), www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/boy-wonder.html.] The Obama campaign recruited Hughes because he knew perhaps better than anyone else how to use the Internet to coordinate and inspire supporters. Within a couple of months, Hughes led the launch of My.BarackObama.com (which became known as MyBO) and the Vote for Change sites. Hughes created a multitude of tools, such as the ‘MyBO Activity Tracker’. It gave people control of their campaign experience, but, also important, it turned the process of political canvassing into an interactive game, one with a serious prize – the presidential election. In this game, the users got 15 points for every event hosted, 15 points for every donation made to their personal fund-raising page, 3 points for every event attended and 3 points for a blog post. The site’s scoring system was weighted to give more points for offline activity than online activity. A single score was aggregated and posted on the user’s profile, and then scores were ranked to reward only the recent activities so that users would be encouraged to keep up participation. As Hughes puts it, ‘The more work you’ve done recently, the higher the number will be.’[139 - Rahaf Harfoush, Yes We Did! An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand (New Riders Press, 2009). Sample chapter can be seen at http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321631534/samplechapter/0321631536_ch6_yeswedid.pdf.] A system of work and reward creates a market-like mechanism and appeals to our self-interest. MyBO hit the sweet spot of collaboration and healthy competition. By the time of the presidential election in November 2008, $30 million had been generated on more than 70,000 personal fund-raising pages and at more than 200,000 grassroots community events. And more young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five participated and voted in an election than ever before. Hughes’s role was so critical that Fast Company dubbed him ‘The Kid Who Made Obama President’[140 - McGirt, ‘How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign’.] – a designation he achieved before he even celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. In the same year that Hughes was driving My.BarackObama, Rainer N?lvak, an Internet entrepreneur; twenty-six-year-old Tiina Urm; and Ahti Heinla, one of the founders of Skype, masterminded a national grassroots cleanup day in Estonia called Let’s Do It. Ahead of the day, they got 720 volunteers to scour the country and photograph sites using mobile phones to pinpoint more than 10,500 locations where rubbish had been illegally dumped. These sites were plotted using custom-made rubbish-mapping software to create what they called the ‘the ugliest map ever’. Then, on 3 May 2008, they rallied 50,000 Estonians (many of them Millennials) – 4 percent of the population – to arrive at the sites with spades and bags to clean up the mess. An operation that otherwise would have taken the Estonian government three years and cost an estimated 22.5 million euros took just five hours (give or take a few months of planning) and cost only half a million euros.[141 - Anjana Ahuja, ‘Estonia’s Bank of Happiness: Trading Goods and Deeds’, The Times online (April 2008), http://women.timesonline. co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6053885. ece.] Let’s Do It is just one example of thousands that show the power of the ‘we mind-set’ combined with technology to produce collective action. The participants as well as the entrepreneurs are often Millennials, just like Chris Hughes, who admits that he can work only on projects that will have ‘far-reaching social and life-changing impact but that are also fun, modern, and smart’. ‘Smart’ is a word Hughes uses a lot. When we had the chance to ask Hughes if he thinks his generation is more responsible, he answered in his calm yet astute way, ‘It’s not that we’re more responsible, it’s that we make smarter choices. We know, and I mean really know, that money doesn’t equal happiness. We know what’s important and not important. We still buy a lot, but we don’t buy needlessly.’ In March 2010, Hughes launched his third social venture, called ‘Jumo’ – a word in the African language that Yoruba translates as ‘together in concert’. It’s a site designed to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world. For Hughes and other Millennial entrepreneurs, the idea behind Jumo is philanthropy, social networking and volunteerism all rolled into one. The Millennials are not a generation of Mother Teresas. They are not all do-gooders shunning well-paid jobs and luxuries for a utopian dream. Statistics show that they are as competitive, commercial and ambitious as any other generation in history. But they are abandoning the prevailing ethos of their parents’ generation of baby boomers and adhering more to the values of their grandparents, the war generation. In a 2006 USA Today poll, 61 percent of thirteen- to twenty-five-year-olds felt personally responsible for making a difference in the world; 81 percent have volunteered in the past year; 69 percent consider a company’s social and environmental commitment when deciding where to shop; and 83 percent trusted a company more if it was socially/environmentally responsible.[142 - Sharon Jayson, ‘Generation Y Gets Involved’, USA Today (24 October 2006), www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-23-gen-next-cover_x.htm.] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/rachel-botsman/what-s-mine-is-yours-how-collaborative-consumption-is-chang/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. notes Примечания 1 Statistics on online networks taken from ‘A Day on the Internet’, www.onlineeducation.net/internet. 2 Abha Bhattarai, ‘Bike-Sharing: Cycling to a City Near You’, Fast Company (26 June 2009), www.fastcompany.com/blog/abha-bhattarai/abha-bhattarai/bike-sharing-cycling-city-near-you. 3 Statistics on Zilok taken from Reuters release, ‘Rent Your Way Out of the Credit Crunch Online’ (5 December 2008), http://www.reuters. com/article/idUSTRE4B44DE20081205. 4 Statistics on bartering taken from William Lee Adams, ‘Bartering: Have Hotel, Need Haircut’, Time (2 November 2009), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1931665,00.html. 5 Statistics on Freecyle taken from Freecycle press release, ‘Largest Environmental Web Community in the World’ (9 September 2008), www.freecycle.org/pressreleases/08-09-09_Freecycle_press_release. pdf?. 6 Statistics on CouchSurfing: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=900&h =500&r=3m&y=p&u=CouchSurfing.org/&u=hospitalityclub. org&u=globalfreeloaders.com&u=place2stay.net&u=servas.org and www.CouchSurfing.org/statistics.html. 7 Statistics on allotment waiting lists were widely reported in the British media in August 2009, such as ‘Forty-Year Wait for Allotments’, BBC coverage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8193100.stm. 8 Joseph Pisani, ‘Car Sharing Takes Off’, CNBC (4 December 2009), http://76.12.4.249/artman2/uploads/1/Car_Sharing_Takes_Off_-_ CNBC.pdf. 9 David Zhao, ‘Carsharing: A Sustainable and Innovative Personal Transport Solution’, Frost & Sullivan Automotive Practice (28 January 2010), www.frost.com/prod/servlet/market-insight-top. pag?Src=RSS&docid=190795176. 10 Statistics from Gartner Research (5 January 2010). Retrieved January 2010, www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1272313. 11 Value of the market sector of used children’s clothing provided by James Reinhart, founder of thredUP. 12 L.S., ‘Collaborative Consumption’, posted on the Economist blog (22 April 2010), http://www5.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/04/peer_to_peer_car_rentals. 13 Charles Leadbeater, We-Think: Mass Innovation Not Mass Production (Profile Books, 2008), 26. 14 Mark Levine, ‘Share My Ride’, The New York Times (5 March 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08Zipcar-t.html. 15 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (Macmillan, 1871), 205. 16 This idea was raised in the blog post ‘Socialism or Not: Lessig Responds to Kelly’, Adrian J. Ivakhiv (31 May 2009), http://aivakhiv. blog.uvm.edu/2009/05/socialism_or_not_lessig_responds_to_kelly. html. 17 Michael Spence, ‘Markets Aren’t Everything’, Forbes.com (12 October 2009), www.forbes.com/2009/10/12/economics-nobel-elinor-ostrom-oliver-williamson-opinions-contributors-michael-spence. html. 18 Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Basic Books, 1998). 19 Susan Casey, ‘Our Oceans Are Turning into Plastic . . . Are We?’ Best Life Magazine (20 February 2007). 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 This section was heavily influenced by Richard Grant’s, ‘Drowning in Plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Twice the Size of France’, Daily Telegraph (24 April 2009), www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/5208645/Drowning-in-plastic-The-Great-Pacific-Garbage-Patch-is-twice-the-size-of-France.html. 23 Statistics on annual consumption of plastic materials come from ‘Plastics Recycling Information’. Retrieved August 2009, www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/Plastics.htm. 24 Thomas M. Kostigen, ‘The World’s Largest Dump: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, Discover Magazine (10 July 10 2008), http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/10-the-worlds-largest-dump. 25 Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Rocky Mountain Institute, 1999), 4, www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid5.php. 26 Tim Radford, ‘Two-Thirds of World’s Resources “Used Up”,’ Guardian (30 March 30 2005), www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/mar/30/environment.research. 27 Ervin Laszlo, The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads (Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2006), 17. 28 Global Footprint Network and WWF’s Living Planet Report (September 2009), www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/EO_Day_Media_Backgrounder.pdf. 29 Victor Lebow, ‘Price Competition in 1955’, Journal of Retailing (Spring 1955), www.scribd.com/doc/965920/LebowArticle. 30 Tim Jackson, ‘Motivating Sustainable Consumption: A Review of Evidence on Consumer Behaviour and Behavioural Change’, published in a paper by the Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey (2005), www.epa.gov/sustainability/Workshop0505/5d_Jackson_Tim.pdf. 31 Statistics on PC energy usage are from the 2009 P.C. US Energy Report, www.1e.com/EnergyCampaign/downloads/PC_ EnergyReport 2009-US.pdf. 32 The artist Chris Jordan talked about this idea during his talk at the TED conference (June 2008). The video can be viewed at www.ted. com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html. 33 ‘Dixie Cup Company History’, Lafayette College Libraries (August 1995), www.lafayette.edu/~library/special/dixie/company.html. 34 Jordan, TED talk. 35 Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2006), 25. 36 Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Henry Holt and Company, 1999). Strasser talks at length about the connections between disposability and woman’s liberation. 37 Kay Bushnell, ‘Plastic Bags: Smothered by Plastic’, a paper produced by the Sierra Club, www.sierraclub.org/sustainable_consumption/articles/bags1.asp. 38 Hawken et al., Natural Capitalism. 39 Sarah Graham, ‘Making Microchips Takes Mountains of Materials’, Scientific American (6 November 2002). 40 Slade, Made to Break, 5. 41 ‘The E Waste Problem’, posted on the Greenpeace website, www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics/the-e-waste-problem. 42 John Thackara, Inside the Bubble (MIT Press, 2006), 22. 43 Neal Lawson, All Consuming (Penguin, 2009), 41. 44 Brian Walsh, ‘Meet Dave, the Man Who Never Takes Out the Trash’, Time (22 September 2008), www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1843163,00.html. 45 Ibid. 46 Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff (Free Press, 2010). The transcript of the video can be found at www.storyofstuff.com/pdfs/annie_ leonard_footnoted_sript.pdf. 47 Ibid. 48 Clive Hamilton, ‘Why Consumer Capitalism Loves Waste’, quoted in his speech to the 6th Asia Pacific Roundtable for Sustainable Consumption and Production (October 2005), www.clivehamilton. net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/Consumer_Capitalism_ Loves_Waste.pdf. 49 Ibid. 50 Jon Mooallem, ‘The Self-Storage Self’, The New York Times (2 September 2009), www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t. html?pagewanted=1&_r=1. 51 Statistics on growth and size of the self-storage industry come from the Self Storage Association. Last checked on February 2010, www.selfstorageassociation.org. 52 Chris Arnold, ‘Americans Keeping More Possessions “Off-Site”’, for a segment on National Public Radio (20 May 20 2005), www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4660790. 53 Martin John Brown, ‘Too Much Stuff! America’s New Love Affair with Self-Storage’, AlterNet (June 4, 2008), www.alternet.org/work place/86998. 54 Ibid. 55 Story of Rich Ellmer comes from Rob D’Amico, ‘What’s in Store? Has Mini-Storage Become Mega-Storage’, Austin Chronicle (1 September 2000), http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A78464. 56 Statistics on the changing size of American homes taken from surveys and research conducted by the National Association of Home Builders, www.nahb.org. Statistics last checked February 2010. 57 George Carlin’s classic stand-up routine about the importance of ‘stuff’ in our lives from his appearance at Comic Relief (1986). It can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac. 58 Eric Fromm, To Have or to Be? (1976). His thesis states that people exist in one of two states – the ‘having mode’ or the ‘being mode’. In the having mode, one concentrates on material possessions, acquisitiveness, power and aggression. The having mode is the basis of such ‘universal evils’ as greed, envy (jealousy) and violence. In the being mode, which is based in/on love, one concentrates on sharing and engages in meaningful, creative and productive activity. See www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-78564.html. 59 Richard Layard, ‘Has Social Science Got a Clue?’ Part of the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures delivered at the London School of Economics, 2–5 March 2003, http://cep.lse.ac.uk/events/lectures/layard/RL030303.pdf. 60 David Myers, The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in the Age of Plenty, as referenced in Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (HarperPerennial, 2004), 108. 61 Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000). Quoted on p. 13 in a report produced by WWF, Anthony Kleanthous and Jules Peck, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’, www.wwf. org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/let_them_eat_cake_abridged.pdf. 62 ‘Margin of discontent’ was a term coined in E. J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth (Staples Press, 1967), 112. 63 The notion of ‘having driving up the wanting’ is discussed in Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (Allen & Unwin, 2003). 64 Susan Fournier and Michael Guiry, ‘An Emerald Green Jaguar, a House on Nantucket and an African Safari: Wish Lists and Consumption Dreams in Materialist Society’, Advances in Consumer Research 20 (1993), 352–358. 65 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (The Macmillan Company, 1899). 66 Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000), 176. 67 Clive Hamilton, ‘The Social Roots of the Environmental Crisis’, www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%20-Ecology,%20 Economy,%20Society/Starkey_Micro_2e_c10.pdf. 68 Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Bloomsbury, 2008), 11. 69 Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Ig, first published 1928, quote taken from 2005 ed.), 71. 70 The story of Bernays and the ‘Freedom of the Torches’ is a featured article on ‘Culture Wars’, www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/torches.html. 71 Allan M Brandt, ‘Recruiting Women Smokers: The Engineering of Consent’, Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association 51, no. 1–2 (1996): 63–66, http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3372908/Brandt_Recruiting.pdf?sequence=1. 72 Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House, 2009), 113. 73 Neal Lawson, All Consuming (Penguin, 2009), 41. 74 Grant Grand McCracken, Diderot Unities and the Diderot Effect in Culture and Consumption (Indiana University Press, 1988). 75 John Jervis, Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 108. 76 Rushkoff, Life Inc., 50. 77 Richard A. Feinberg, ‘Credit Cards as Spending Facilitating Stimuli: A Conditioning Interpretation’, Journal of Consumer Research 13, no. 3 (1986): 348–56. 78 Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester, ‘Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit Card Effect on Willingness to Pay’, Springer Netherlands 12, no. 1 (February 2001). 79 This experiment is well described in Stuart Vyse, Going Broke (Oxford University Press, 2008), 40. 80 Dilip Soman, ‘Effects of Payment Mechanism on Spending Behaviour: The Role of Rehearsal and Immediacy of Payments’, Journal of Consumer Research 27 (March 2001). 81 In The Decisive Moment, Jonah Lehrer made a similar observation: ‘When we pay for something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss – our wallet is literally lighter’ (Canongate, 2009), 89. 82 Mickey Butts talks about this idea in ‘Why We Charge: What Behavioural Economics Can Tell Us’ (19 August 2003). This is a working article written by Butts while on the Knight-Bagehot fellowship for business journalists at Columbia Journalism School and Columbia Business School, http://www.mickeybutts.com/wj_ business.html. 83 Ibid. 84 Joe Nocera, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, as quoted in Vanity Fair, ‘Rethinking the American Dream’, www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904. 85 George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009), 128. 86 Steve Rhode, founder of myvesta.org, found that 26 percent of his company’s clients say they never look at the statement. Quoted in Mickey Butts, ‘Why We Charge: What Behavioural Economics Can Tell Us’. 87 Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Harper Collins, 1998), 72. 88 Demos, www.demos.org, April 2008. 89 While we were writing this book, President Obama signed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) act. By July 2010, credit card companies had to meet an array of new requirements for disclosing fees, rates and terms on monthly statements. For decades, these numbers have been ‘conveniently’ and intentionally left out because the credit card companies wanted debt to feel ‘free’ and guiltless. 90 Interview with Elizabeth Warren from ‘The Secret History of the Credit Card’, produced by Frontline and The New York Times, www.pbs. org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/interviews/warren.html. 91 Lehrer, The Decisive Moment, 91. 92 Tim Harford, ‘Your Brain on Credit’, Forbes.com (March 2009), www.forbes.com/2009/03/19/credit-poor-judgement-markets-tim-harford.html. 93 This first shopping centre, called Southdale, was in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the Gruen Effect in ‘The Terrazzo Jungle’ in The New Yorker (March 2004), www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/15/040315fa_fact1. 94 Ibid. 95 Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (David McKay, 1960), 35. 96 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Penguin, 1959), 49. 97 Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2006), 263–264. 98 Ibid. 99 Liveblog: ‘Rock and Roll’ Apple iPod Event. Ars Technica, 9 September 2009, http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/liveblog-rock-and-roll-apple-ipod-event.ars. Retrieved 9 August 2009. 100 Heidi Dawley, ‘The Disorder of These Times: Neophilia’, blog post for Media Life (June 2006), www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_5439.asp. 101 Charles Kettering, ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied,’ Nation’s Business 17, no. 1 (January 1929): 30–31, 79. 102 Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Henry Holt, 1999), 193. 103 Packard, The Waste Makers, 20. 104 ‘Ten Great Public Health Achievements – United States, 1900–1999’, CDC (1999), Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report 48, no. 12: 241–243. PMID 10220250, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10220250. 105 Packard, The Waste Makers, 25. 106 Television Audience Report by Nielsen. Retrieved August 2009, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/more-than-half-the-homes-in-us-have-three-or-more-tvs/. 107 Packard, The Waste Makers, 25. 108 Progress Paradox, cited in David Camp, ‘Rethinking the American ADream’, Vanity Fair (April 2009), www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904. 109 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2006), 101. 110 Jon Mooallem, ‘The Self-Storage Self’, The New York Times (2 September 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t.html?pagewanted=1. 111 Lawson, All Consuming, 11. 112 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776). 113 ‘18th Century London – Its Daily Life and Hazards’, http://forums. canadiancontent.net/history/48176-18th-century-london-its-daily. html. 114 David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995), http://deoxy.org/korten_betrayal.htm. 115 Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House, 2009), 51. 116 Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007), 117. 117 ‘Who Needs Neighbours?’ BBC report (July 2006), http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/programmes/breakfast/5163976.stm. 118 The notion of social capital including Putnam’s definition is discussed in Gene A. Brewer, ‘Building Social Capital: Civic Attitudes and Behaviour of Public Servants’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 3 (2003). 119 Robert Putnam, ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Capitalism’. The article was published in Journal of Democracy in 1995 and later turned into a book published by Simon and Schuster in 2000. See http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/bowling.html. 120 Statistics taken from the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TablePrint.asp? FirstYear=1939&LastYear=2000&Freq=Year&SelectedTable=5&View Series=NO&Java=no&MaxValue=14546.7&MaxChars=8&Request3 Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Legal=&Land=. 121 ‘NAFTA: Embracing Change – North American Free Trade Agreement’, a speech given by President Bill Clinton on 13 September 1993. Transcript, US Department of State Dispatch, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1584/is_n37_v4/ai_14276333/. 122 E. G. West, Adam Smith: The Man and His Works (Liberty Fund Inc., 1969). 123 Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day (Temple University Press, 1996), www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1155_reg.html. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1993). 127 Don Fitz, ‘What’s Wrong with a 30-Hour Work Week?’ posted on his blog ‘Climate and Capitalism’ (May 2009), http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=691. 128 As quoted in Jeff Kaplan, ‘The Gospel of Consumption’, Orion (6 May 2008), www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/. 129 Donna Fenn, ‘Cool, Determined & Under 30’, Inc. (1 October 2008), www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/cool-determined-amp-under-30_pagen_3.html?. 130 ‘Etsy Lets Artists Create a Living’, article posted 1 July 2008, on www.rarebirdinc.com/news/articles/etsy.html. 131 Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do? (HarperBusiness, 2009), 57. 132 Rob Walker, ‘Handmade 2.0’, The New York Times (12 December 2007), http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16Crafts-t.html. 133 ‘Farmers Markets and Local Food Marketing: Farmers Market Growth: 1994–2009’, USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/FarmersMarkets. 134 Quoted in Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007), 105. The research is from Brian Halweil, Eat Here: Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, Worldwatch Institute (W. W. Norton, 2004), 11–12. 135 Pablo Paster, ‘Sowing the Seeds of Sustainability: Victory Gardens Are Back!’ Treehugger.com (August 2009), www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/victory-gardens-are-back.php. 136 Bruce Horowitz, ‘Recession Grows Interest in Seeds, Vegetable Gardening’, USA Today (20 February 2009), www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-02-19-recession-vegetable-seeds_N. htm. 137 Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press, 2006), 258. 138 Ellen McGirt, ‘How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign’, Fast Company (April 2009), www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/boy-wonder.html. 139 Rahaf Harfoush, Yes We Did! An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand (New Riders Press, 2009). Sample chapter can be seen at http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321631534/samplechapter/0321631536_ch6_yeswedid.pdf. 140 McGirt, ‘How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign’. 141 Anjana Ahuja, ‘Estonia’s Bank of Happiness: Trading Goods and Deeds’, The Times online (April 2008), http://women.timesonline. co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6053885. ece. 142 Sharon Jayson, ‘Generation Y Gets Involved’, USA Today (24 October 2006), www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-23-gen-next-cover_x.htm.