How can we stop buying so much stuff? “Everything is facilitated for you to consume.”

Connecting business research with policy, practice and public debate Connecting business research with policy, practice and public debate In an edited extract from an interview with the LSE iQ podcast,Fred Bassoexplains the psychology of buying things and his belief in a model of economic democracy. Fred was talking toSue Windebank. There is this assumption that we find in mainstream economics that we have unlimited wants. But that hasn’t been that much tested. It’s taken for granted. And if you ask people how much they want, it turns out that people don’t have unlimited wants. They don’t want to be happy all the time, they don’t want to live forever and they don’t want to be billionaires. So people don’t have unlimited wants. That’s a very important thing to keep in mind. At least two main pillars maintain wants. The first is to increase the extent to which people need to change a product. So you make sure that the life cycle of a product is shorter. That is called “planned obsolescence”. The product is meant to break down. And it could be done in subtle ways. Your computer needs updating and that uses more memory and more battery. Or the company has made it harder to replace the battery. The other pillar is fashion. So you have a trend, let’s say it’s to wear pink and next year it’s going to be to wear orange. And so you want to buy it. But its not only because there is a new collection that you want to buy it. It’s also because we are in a society where there is an increase of individualism. And this individualism is associated with our development of multiple selves, which means that we have different ways of being according to the different settings we are in. And these settings are associated with different forms of consumption. But one thing that is important here is that this is a narrative at individual level. So you could feel that consumption is very good for you at individual level. But you could also be critical of consumption at the societal level. Meaning is fundamental. In psychology, social psychology, sociology and “critical sociology” there is a sense that we cannot find meaning at work anymore because our work is standardised and we don’t have that much control over what we do. For example, the way the labour is organised within an organisation is generally decided at the upper level, not by the people who are on the ground. And this is something that is the byproduct of what we call scientific management. We divide labour to maximise the output. And when we do that, we ask people to accept that they are cog in the machine. And so the meaning of your economic activity is not that rich. So you are looking for meaning outside of your work, through your consumption or through your leisure. But leisure takes a bit more time than consumption. And everything is facilitated for you to consume. Everything is meant for you to consume as easily as possible. We make it easy for you to buy. This is something that should be a collective endeavor. At some point I believe we should have a collective discussion about this. And it’s interesting to see what happens in citizens’ assemblies. These happen in Europe where people gather as a collective to reflect on the policies that they would like to see implemented. And they are presented with information from experts and then people discuss and suggest policies they would like to see. When people are gathering as a citizen assembly they end up with solutions that are very well aligned with sufficiency policies. They want to curtail consumption and meat production. They want to see more electric vehicles and public transport. And the support is extremely strong. But that sentiment is not converted into policies because the politicians say it’s not possible. And that’s something we should really have a look at very closely. Because the people who are in power are people who have been, for a large part, trained and schooled with models that come from economics or business and that are generally pervaded with the idea that we need to grow forever. So it doesn’t look obvious to politicians that we should do what people suggest. It’s so easy to buy today. Everything is meant for you to buy. So we can’t blame people because they buy. It’s just how this is meant to be. So of course we could try to “control” ourselves. But we are always given reasons to buy. We are looking for meaning for our consumption because we lost meaning at work. But we could find meaning again if we start thinking of the organisation as a place that is a collective, where we work together. And one of the solutions is economic democracy. Today the economic system is not democratic. Those who really embrace the system don’t like democracy because they worry that people are going to start pushing regulations and for interventions within the market. And I think that if we wanted to ring-fence part of the economy, we should actually put democracy – not as something that is surrounding the market to create regulations – but something that is inside the market that is infusing the market. And so this is what is called economic democracy. Imagine that you are at your workplace and the orders are given by a managerial class, or the shareholders of this big company, that are very far away from you and just happen to run it because they inherited money. And they just want to make more money. If these people have the power to influence the organisation, they are not going to do it for the wellbeing of the workers or the local communities. They are doing it to make money. It’s called profit. And we know that it’s not protecting the planet. Economic democracy thinks completely differently. In economic democracy it’s the people who work in an organisation that are the owners of the organisation. And it’s one person, one vote. And when production belongs to communities, then we are going to start creating products that may be very different to what we have now. These might benefit the needs of the community and not be generated just to raise money and to make profit. So there could be a very different way of approaching economic life. And if we do it that way, then it becomes more meaningful because you start thinking of what you do in connection with your community. And that is called purpose. That is called meaning. This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics. You are agreeing with our comment policy when you leave a comment. Image credit:Natalya Kosarevichprovided by Shutterstock. Frédéric Basso is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, and Advisory Board Member of the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the London School of Economics. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.Learn how your comment data is processed.