The Future of Work, Leisure, and Consumption...In an Age of Economic and Ecological Crisis

[marmar]

from Dollars & Sense:


The Future of Work, Leisure, and Consumption...
...In an Age of Economic and Ecological Crisis

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIET SCHOR | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014

Economist Juliet Schor is known worldwide for her research on the interrelated issues of work, leisure, and consumption. Her books on these themes include The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, and Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (retitled True Wealth for its paperback edition). She is also a professor of sociology at Boston College. —Eds.

Dollars & Sense: We wouldn’t expect patterns of work, leisure, and consumption to change overnight, but now we’re into more than half a decade of a profound crisis. Obviously it’s had a big impact on employment, incomes, and so forth, but do you see any lasting changes emerging?

Juliet Schor: Some of the trends that were pretty significant before the crash have abated. I’m thinking most particularly about what I’ve called the “fast fashion model” of consumption—cheap imports of manufactured goods that people were acquiring at accelerating rates, the acceleration of the fashion cycle, and the cycle of acquisition and discard. The trend was people buying things, holding them for shorter and shorter periods of time and then discarding them either into some kind of household storage, into a waste stream, or into secondary markets. You had an amazing period of acquisition of consumer goods. I first started looking at this in the realm of apparel, but it was also in consumer electronics, ordinary household appliances, and pretty much across the board in consumer goods.

Of course, a lot of it was financed by debt or longer working hours, but manufactured goods just became so cheap. The idea that you could buy a DVD player for $19—and yes, people were trampling each other in the stores on Black Friday to get them—but that’s just an extraordinary period. So that has changed, because the economics of that have changed. Going forward, I don’t think we’re going to see that level of availability of cheap goods that we saw before. So I think that cycle has slowed down.

The other big thing has been the bifurcation of the consumer market. That’s something that’s been going on for a long time—the falling out of the middle as a result of the decline of the middle class, the growth of a really low-end in the consumer market with dollar stores and a retail sector where even Walmart is considered expensive. The other side was the expansion of the hyper-luxury market.

Trends in income and wealth are reflected in the consumer sphere. There’s more reluctance to take on debt, so debt-fueled consumer buying is lessened. There’s also less availability of consumer credit for households now. The other big thing that I’ve been looking at is the rise of “alternative cultures” of consumption; that is, people moving out of the branded, advertised goods and the mass- produced lifestyles that dominated in the last couple of decades, into both more ecologically aware lifestyles with more artisanal and self-production. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2014/0914schor.html

[pscot]

1. Highly recommended

Well, I have a hard time thinking about the future without orienting all of my thinking about climate, because I just don’t see much of a positive future unless we can address climate change very significantly. And that means, for wealthy countries, pretty radical emissions cuts in a pretty short period of time. It actually means that for most countries. So, as I think about the future, I think about what we could do that both addresses climate change through radical emissions reductions and also increase social justice, reduces inequality, and starts solving the enormous problems that we have in this country. My most recent book, True Wealth, is about how to do that. Obviously we need to get onto a renewable energy system, there’s no question about that. We need a carbon tax or carbon regulation, and that’s stuff that is very well known. What is not understood, I don’t think, is that we can’t successfully address climate change with a model in which we continue to try to expand the size of the economy.