Effects of Material Culture

Great Debates
61

How much more value did that car in 1960 provide than one in 1903? It cost nearly the average American household’s yearly income.

Yup. Stuff is better now. The price point of a car has stayed roughly the same fraction of average annual income but you get much much more for the money.

I have in my pocket something that provides more gaming power than was available in the complete video arcade of my college, can show me more movies than my complete collection of VHS tapes ever did, plays an unending variety of music, can do complex calculations that my first HP calculator with reverse Polish notation (!) never could do, can monitor my heart rate, calculate my vagal tone, count my steps, locate me in time and space, give me directions for a safe but short path to where I want to go on my bike … and also happens to work as a phone. And I might just toss it out for a new model in a bit.

In my early childhood, before our household got a washer and a drier, my mom used a clothes mangle, which wasn’t cheap itself in relative terms, and then put the clothes out to dry on a line. Do you have any idea how dangerous those mangles were?

How about experiences? Air travel- in 1965 80% of Americans had never flown in a plane and in “1974, it was illegal for an airline to charge less than $1,442 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a flight between New York City and Los Angeles” … now flying across the country and across the ocean is taken for granted and that cross country flight can be had for a fraction of the cost. Fatal accidents per million flights were an order of magnitude greater in 1977 than now.

How to estimate how much better and huger a host of today’s stuff is?

I agree with you TriPolar, the fact that we now have things and experiences that no amount of money could have gotten before and that some of that which previously would have been considered priceless is now relatively dirt cheap, is fun to appreciate but is not really of importance to what we spend on and how little we save.

Exapno Mapcase make up your mind. Do you want to talk about personal savings and expenditures or the combination of the public and the personal? If the latter then you have to count “spending” by way of the government doing it for us via taxation along with “savings” by way of the government forcing us to by way of SSI. Count with consistency.

Your provided cites (good stuff if actually read) are the sources that state that the needs for savings in retirement are up nine-fold with private plus savings for retirement up (thanks to SSI taxation counting) but not at all close to that level and that even counting SSI “savings” aggregate savings are mostly flat, and that state that not even counting healthcare we have at best shifted from spending on food and clothes to transportation and housing, and that the healthcare costs paid by our employers and via taxation really are us spending and should count, even if they do not show up n their color wheels.

If you want to dispute what your cites say, well bring something that disproves them.

The fact that I am often purchasing goods and services in each bucket that never existed before at any price and that of those that did previously exist are often much better for less money is irrelevant. Today’s big buckets of transportation and housing and healthcare are as much “necessities” as the food and clothing bucket was, and take up as much to substantially more (if we count “public spending” by way compensation in the form of insurance and government taxation being sent for us, just as much as we count SSI as “pubic savings”) of the total than food and clothing did. Counting that “public savings” the “average American” has shifted savings into a retirement bucket (not counting that is saving little at all), is spending more on status items, and is living with little buffer. In terms of wealth fewer have as much (albeit a very few have a lot more).

So again to the op, yes in recent decades the historically marginalized and becoming marginalized are spending to signify “not poor” more, at the expense of economic security, not only making themselves even less wealthy but sometimes leaving them with housing and even food insecurity. If that is what is meant by “consumer culture” in the op then indeed something is not as it has always been. That status signifying makes a bad circumstance even worse as psychologically understandable as it is. And I think that TriPolar’s suspicion that income inequality has something to do with driving that is on to something, but more so the visibility of the conspicuous consumption of others.

More buying of emotional attachment though? No. More low cost, not status-laden time spent interacting to gain attachment if anything.

62

Are we talking past one another or it is just mutual incomprehension? I will admit I didn’t understand what point you trying to make in your post, and I am annoyed that you accused me of confusing personal and public spending when I specifically made the point that “additional spending is done by government and so from taxes does raise that [percentage]”.

History remains instructive. The better off have always hated the reality that the poor want to live like everybody else rather than groveling in rags. Don’t you remember how Reagan won middle-class support by inventing stories about welfare queens riding in Cadillacs? During the Depression, the desire of the poor for entertainment was taken as proof that the poor didn’t need assistance because they should be home counting their lumps of coal or something. The beerhalls of the German and Irish were used as a club to support Prohibition, partially to be sure because they did encourage drunkenness, but also because the poor were supposed to be pious and invisible and humble to their superiors. Do we really have hard evidence that the poor today are blowing their money on frivolous ephemeral luxuries? I haven’t seen any.

The flip side of that coin is the difference in market baskets, which is what the government includes when it tries to compare costs of living between periods. Considerable criticism has convinced me that the attempts to quantify factors like computers becoming negligible in price and sound systems improving by orders of magnitude and fresh fruit available all year long - and at nearly the same price - doesn’t capture the real world. The simple multiplier of CPI fails at its essential task of converting prices in past times to modern equivalents.

Of course we - including the poor - have at our fingertips goods, services, and technologies that no one, however rich, had available a century ago. Even so, the rich lived spectacularly well from the perspective of the poor. The interesting fact is that such a huge percentage of the population can include comforts and luxuries as a daily part of ordinary lives. That’s new, indeed unprecedented.

That many people today, in all income levels, don’t handle the cornucopia well and with foresight many decades into the future is not surprising. It may indeed be true that this failing is a fundamental change. I doubt that. I need much more evidence and historical perspective to be convinced.

Just don’t tell me that we have fallen from some Golden Age. Nobody in any past year ever thought they were living in a Golden Age. (To quote a sadly resigned Carly Simon from 1971: "These are the good old days.) They always looked back to some earlier time and longed for those highs. It’s always the worst time ever. Read old newspapers and magazines and books. People complained loudly about everything every minute. That led to a corresponding stream of predictions about how fantastic the Future would be. If you look around, you’ll see plenty of those today as well.

Or, to use a merely 37-year-old lyric: “Same as it ever was.”

63

Not sure.

My position in this thread very much was initially in the “It has always been like this” vein, but if researching for data shows me otherwise, well then my position changes.

There is more of average income being spent on status signifying nonessentials than there used to be. Increased group wealth and income inequality with visible consumption seems to be part of the reason why.

You have claimed that the decrease in the cost of food and the retirement savings forced by paying SSI means that there is more available for non-essentials and that such is why spending on those items has increased. But the cites you provided clearly document that there is not more left over for non-essentials, that spending on essentials has shifted from food and clothing to other essential buckets. That retirement savings SSI included are inadequate to provide for expected retirement needs given extended expected lifespans, and that the share of average income available for non-essentials has not increased even as spending on them has.

Let’s backtrack and see if we can comprehend each other better.

Background item: there are groups in this country that have been historically marginalized (often minorities) and there are groups that are losing status, along with income and wealth, as the economy changes (many blue collar Whites). The root cause for that is NOT based on their spending frivolously.

However there is solid evidence that when a group is marginalized and sees significant visible consumption by others, individuals of the group are more likely to spend a larger fraction of their income on consumption that shows strangers they aren’t poor. I wouldn’t define those things as “frivolous ephemeral luxuries” but they are items whose function is to demonstrate wealth that are spent on more as a fraction of income when wealth is more lacking for your regional peer group. As that article explains discussing how it works in different White groups;

I most certainly do not think there was some past Golden Age and indeed we fail to appreciate the difference of having healthcare that was unimaginable 50 years ago along with having to worry about paying for a longer life expectancy as essentials and having to worry about enough to eat as one. One of your cites put it well:

But we also cannot deny that increasing income and wealth inequality along with more effective means of signaling your visible consumption begets more being spent on visible consumption which in turn makes wealth inequality even worse.

ETA this interesting link about decreased materialistic spending by the top 1%

64

The argument being made here is *not *about whether “individuals of the group are more likely to spend a larger fraction of their income on consumption that shows strangers they aren’t poor.” At least that’s not my argument and one I don’t care about.

The argument is whether our consumerist culture has lead people into a hole where contemporary spending leaves them penniless for the long years of retirement or unable to meet current crises, and whether that is a new thing, and old thing, or an old thing that has become exacerbated over time. My opinion is the last.

65

So indeed to no small degree we were interested in different questions. I was still trying to address the op and its fist presumption that there is indeed a change in how much “we” spend on non-essential consumption. It seems that in fact there is but that it is, no surprise, not completely straightforward. But there is still no evidence that that spending is motivated by a desire to use such spending to gain emotional attachment (to any greater degree than ever anyway).

I agree with you that spending on non-essential consumption to the degree that security in retirement and ability to handle current crises is at risk is “an old thing that has become exacerbated over time.” I do think that increased income and wealth inequality with broadcasted visible consumption is part of what has exacerbated that trend for the middle and below.

66

Concerns about the effect of material culture have been a feature of eastern philosophical thought for thousands of years, as reflected in religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. In traditional Hinduism, for example, there is a life stage of renunciation called Sannyasa during which an adherent will “renounce worldly and materialistic pursuits and dedicate their lives to spiritual pursuits”. It is a form of asceticism “marked by renunciation of material desires and prejudices, represented by a state of disinterest and detachment from material life, and has the purpose of spending one’s life in peaceful, love-inspired, simple spiritual life.”

67

AKA “broke”.