Consumerism and social status keep our noses to the grindstone

What better time to think about whether we’re working too hard than while we’re enjoying a Monday off, thanks to a public holiday? Wouldn’t it be nice if every weekend could be a long weekend?

Actually, almost 100 years ago, the greatest economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, pretty much predicted that’s the way we’d be living by now.

In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, he envisaged that by now, we’d be able to live comfortably while having to work only 15 hours a week. We could work just three hours each weekday, or clock up our 15 hours in just a few days – say, three five-hour days.

Really? What a duffer. How could anyone so smart be so disastrously wrong?

Well, not quite. What Keynes was saying was that, technological advance – the invention of ever-better labour-saving machines – would increase the productivity of our labour to such an extent that, by now, we wouldn’t need to work very hard to be able to live comfortably.

His point was that, as we’re able to produce more goods and services per hour of work, we become better off. We can take that benefit either as enjoying an unchanged material standard of living while working fewer hours a week, or as higher monetary income – thus allowing us to buy more stuff – while working the same number of hours.

As Jan Behringer and other economists from Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen have written, in the years since Keynes made that prediction the productivity of labour in the developed economies has improved by more than he expected.

So, we could have been working a 15-hour week had we chosen to but, in fact, we chose to take the money and the extra stuff rather than the extra leisure. Working hours have fallen since the 1930s, but not by all that much.

Behringer and colleagues say the “obstacles to more leisure time are primarily sociopolitical in nature” – by which they mean it’s not purely economic reasons, the shortage of resources, that require us to work more.

I’ve no doubt it has suited the rich and powerful to have us working and spending rather than devoting four days a week to developing our hobbies. That way, the rich and powerful get more so.

But, by the same token, I think the rest of us have been easily seduced by the lure of the materialist, consumer culture. We love buying things that are new, shinier and do better tricks.

In Australia – and in Europe, but less so in America – pretty much all the reductions in working hours, the increases in annual leave and sick leave, and the introduction of that strange animal, long service leave, have happened because union-backed governments have imposed them on unwilling employers.

And every time they have, the employers and their political parties have predicted the death and destruction of the economy.

But, even so, how long since you’ve seen a union telling its bosses they should go easy on the pay rise, but cut working hours? No, I have no doubt that the workers have preferred more bangles and baubles.

Behringer and colleagues, however, have a different take. Their study of developments in the US and Europe over the decades leads them to two conclusions.

First, since the 1980s, average working hours have fallen more slowly as inequality – the gap between high and low incomes – has increased.

Second, in countries with high inequality, employees earning higher hourly wage rates tend to work longer hours than those on lower hourly wage rates.

Both these findings are striking because they contradict economists’ earlier finding that people with higher incomes chose to increase their leisure time.

So, what’s going on? The authors’ explanation is that rising inequality of incomes leads to more “upward status comparisons”. Like most social animals, we are conscious of our social status – where we fit in the pecking order.

And, particularly where there’s a big difference between the top and the bottom, we seek to improve our position.

“The upper middle class emulates the consumption norms of the rich, and sacrifices leisure time to do so. Because the rich also increase their spending on status goods such as housing, education, etc as their incomes rise, the middle class feels pressure to keep up,” they say.

“After all, what constitutes ‘a good place to live’ or ‘a good education’ is essentially defined in comparison to the standards that the upper income groups largely determine.”

Another of their findings is that working hours are more likely to be shorter when wage bargaining is centralised and government social benefits in kind (but not in cash) are more adequate.

One possible explanation, they say, is that centralised wage bargaining reduces status conflict because workers can decide collectively to avoid a “positional arms race” to allow shorter working hours and more leisure.

They find that social benefits in kind rather than cash are associated with lower hours of work. This may be because the direct provision of goods and services by governments reduces the need for status-oriented private spending on goods and services.

Education has many dimensions. It broadens the mind, it helps you get a better-paying job, and it’s a “positional good” – it helps people judge your social status.

"The extent to which the education sector is organised through private markets is found to be associated with longer working hours among workers who themselves have high levels of education,” the authors say.

Get it? If governments provided better healthcare and public schools, more people would be content to use the publicly provided services along with everyone else, and fewer people would feel the need to work longer to afford private hospitals and schools.

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How to get more bang from your bucks

They say people who think money doesn’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop. Sorry to have left it so late in your preparations for Christmas and summer, but on this score I have breaking news.

It’s a funny thing that, though economists hold consumption to be the “sole end and purpose” of all economic activity, it’s not a subject that greatly interests them. They’ll help you maximise how much you’ve got to spend, but they’ll give you no help in deciding how to spend it in a way that yields the most happiness – or, as they prefer to say, “satisfaction”.

No, for advice on how to get the biggest bang from your bucks, the experts are social psychologists.

For the past 15 years, their prevailing wisdom has been that spending on experiences – from an overseas holiday to a trip to the movies – yields more happiness than buying more stuff.

The pleasure you get from buying a new CD or pair of shoes or car or even a new home falls off surprisingly quickly, whereas the enjoyment you get from what the US psychologist Tom Gilovich has dubbed “experiential consumption” tends to be longer-lasting.

Subsequent research has found three reasons why experiences provide greater happiness. First, experiential purchases enhance our social relationships more readily and effectively than do material goods.

That is, a lot of the enjoyment comes from our interaction with the people we share the experience with. (This, BTW, gets closer to what I really believe about all this: deep satisfaction comes from our human relationships, not from what we buy.)

Second, experiential purchases form a bigger part of a person’s identity. We are the sum of our life’s experiences – pleasant and otherwise – much more than the sum of our material possessions.

Third, experiential purchases are evaluated more on their own terms and evoke fewer social comparisons than material purchases.

Good point. A lot of our spending goes on keeping up with the Joneses or on buying “positional goods” – goods that demonstrate to the world how well we’re doing in the battle for social status. Trouble is, my delight in my new Volvo is punctured when the chap next door arrives home with his new Beemer.

We make sure our house is as well-appointed as the others in the street, the lawn’s always mown, the car in our driveway is late-model European, and the kids go to private schools. But the one thing the neighbours can never see is how your total debt compares with everyone else’s.

If keeping up with the neighbours has required you to rack up a crippling debt, you’re unlikely to be enjoying a care-free life. Ditto if your financial commitments keep you chained to a well-paying job you hate.

But, as the researchers say, when you’re spending money on experiences, you do it much more for your enjoyment of that experience than to impress the neighbours – unless, of course, you’re into matching their skiing trip to the Snowies with yours to Aspen.

Actually, I think there’s more to it even than those three points. Major experiences such as overseas touring holidays yield pleasure in expectation of them, pleasure while you’re doing it, and pleasure while you’re reliving them and recounting your adventures to family and friends.

And the great beauty of thinking about past holidays is that you remember the highlights, laugh about the bad bits, and forget the boring bits – such as the trouble you had trying to find a public toilet.

Sorry, I promised you breaking news on the experiential front. Research out this year, by Lee, Hall and Wood, finds it’s not as simple as experiences good, stuff bad.

Turns out, which of the two yields the higher happiness count depends on your social class, with class being measured according to income, education or self-assessment.

Dividing people into two categories – higher or lower – the researchers found that “experiential advantage” held for the top half, whereas the bottom half either rated experiences and material purchases equally or rated goods more highly than experiences.

It seems people of higher social class have an abundance of resources, meaning they can afford to focus more on their internal growth and self-development.

In contrast, people who have fewer resources are likely to be more concerned about making wise purchases of the stuff they still needed.

I think it’s probably a gradient: as your material affluence rises you pass through the point where experiences and things deliver roughly equal satisfaction, until eventually your material needs are pretty much satisfied and its experiences that do most to make you happy.

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What we can do to cure affluenza

If our grandparents could see us now, what would they think? They'd be amazed by our affluence, but shocked by our wastefulness.

You'd never know it to hear us grousing about the cost of living, but most of us are living more prosperous, comfortable, even opulent lives than Australians have ever lived.

We live in a consumer society, surrounded by our possessions. We're always buying more stuff, more gadgets, an extra car, more TVs for other rooms, more laptops, iPads and smartphones.

We update to the latest model, even though the old one's working fine, and make sure our car is never more than a few years old.

We buy new clothes all the time – a lot on impulse – filling our wardrobes with stuff we wear rarely, if ever.

We buy more food than we can eat, chucking it out when it's no longer fresh so we can buy another lot.

Why do we keep buying and buying? Short answer: because we can afford to. Long answer: because, for a host of reasons, we've become addicted to consumption, whether or not it provides lasting satisfaction. We suffer from "affluenza".

Many of us engage in "conspicuous consumption" so as to impress other people with our wealth – with how well we're doing in the materialist race. Can't have the neighbours thinking we can't afford the latest model.

Other people use their hairstyles or the clothes they wear to express their individuality or, paradoxically, to signal their membership of a particular tribe.

I heard about a partner in a law firm remarking with disapproval that whenever any young person was made a partner they immediately went out and bought a black Volvo. But, someone asked, don't you have a black Volvo yourself? Oh, no, he said, mine's blue.

In his new book Curing Affluenza, Richard Denniss, chief economist of The Australia Institute, observes that, these days, much consumption is done for symbolic, signalling reasons, not because we actually need the stuff.

And then there's retail therapy – stuff we buy purely for the fleeting thrill we get from buying some new thing.

If something's telling you all this needless consumption can't be a good thing, you're not wrong. What's less obvious is why: because of the damage it does to the natural environment.

Not only the extra emissions of greenhouse gasses, but also excessive use of natural resources – both non-renewable and renewable, when usage exceeds the rate at which they can be renewed (think fish in the sea).

The richest 15 per cent of the globe's 7.6 billion population can continue living the high life only for as long as we have the wealth to commandeer more and more of the other 85 per cent's share of the world's natural resources.

But as the world's poor, led by India and China, succeed in raising their material living standards towards ours, this will get ever harder. It is not physically possible for all the world's population to live the wasteful lives we do. Nothing like all the world's population.

How can we stop using more than our fair share of the globe's natural resources? Denniss says we can start by distinguishing between consumerism, which is bad, and materialism, which isn't. Huh?

He defines consumerism as the love of buying things, whereas materialism is just the love of things. Meaning the latter is a cure for the former. The more we love and care for the stuff we've already got, repairing it when it breaks, the less we're tempted to buy things we don't need.

It's true the capitalist system invests heavily in marketing and advertising to con us into believing we need to buy more and more stuff.

But we're free to resist the system's blandishments. Indeed, I often think the people most successful in the system are those who most resist.

Unusually for an economist, Denniss argues that much of what we do – and buy – we do for cultural reasons. Because it's the normal, accepted thing to do.

But, just as our grandparents weren't as spendthrift as we are, culture can change. And you need less than a majority of people changing their behaviour to reach the critical mass that prompts most other people to join them and, by doing so, cause an improvement in the culture.

If we all stopped buying stuff we don't need, however, wouldn't that cause economic growth to falter and unemployment to shoot up?

Yes it would – if that's all we did. The trick is that every dollar we spend helps to create jobs. So we need to keep spending, but we don't need to keep spending wastefully.

There are a host of things we could spend on – better health, better education, better public infrastructure, better lives for the disabled and the elderly, less congestion, less pollution – that would yield us more satisfaction while doing less damage to the environment.

I have a feeling, however, that the cure to affluenza will require more than just changed behaviour by enough individuals. We replace rather than repair many things because the cost of repairers' labour greatly exceeds the cost of the material parts we throw away.

We need to rejig the tax system so we reduce the tax on "goods" – labour income – and increase the tax on "bads" – use of natural resources.

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Someone has to give if we’re to fix the budget

The nation's budget problem still won't be solved when, one day in the distant future, we get the federal budget back into surplus. Only a change in strategy is likely to produce a sustained solution.

As successive intergenerational reports demonstrate, on present policies government spending will just grow and grow, requiring ever-higher taxes.

If we don't like that idea – or politicians regard it as an impossible sell – we need to think a lot harder about what we're spending on, why it's growing so fast, what things we should stop spending on, and how we can make our spending more effective, in the process slowing the rate at which it's growing.

The five biggest areas of spending include welfare benefits, health, education and infrastructure. Infrastructure's too important to share a column, so we'll return to it.

But it, plus health and education, are even bigger when you remember how they dominate the states' budgets – a reminder that federal and state budgets need to be considered together, and that cutting federal grants to the states, and cost-shifting by the states back to the feds, aren't genuine solutions.

Of three categories – welfare benefits, health and education – the intergenerational reports make it clear health will be by far the fastest growing.

That's not so much because of ageing as because advances in medical technology are hugely expensive, and it's quite unrealistic to imagine that Australian voters will settle for anything less than gaining subsidised access to the latest and best technology ASAP.

Since this is the political reality, the problem (and much of the pressure on budgets) is easily solved.

Our politicians simply need to be brave and tell voters the truth: if they want ever more and better healthcare then, as with everything else, they'll have to pay more for it – in the form of, say, regular increases in the Medicare levy.

That's the fundamental solution, but we could also do more to slow the rate of growth in healthcare spending by removing at least some of the waste and inefficiency that everyone in the system tells us exists.

Much could be done to make education spending more effective. Instead, however, since the national knockback of the 2014 federal budget, the government's done little but crack down on the previous year's crackdown on the welfare cheats the Liberal hard right has convinced itself are ripping off billions every year.

Sorry, not nearly good enough. Nor is preaching the evils of tax increases while you wait for bracket creep to claw back the eight successive tax cuts we were awarded when Peter Costello thought the resources boom would run forever.

The trouble with many professed supporters of Smaller Government is that they want to have their cake and eat it.

They want to reduce government spending so they can pay less tax, but they don't want to give up the middle-class welfare they enjoy – much of it awarded to them by the great man who didn't believe in smaller government, John Howard.

Much of Howard's handouts to the comfortable came in the fifth big spending area, tax expenditures – which have the same cost to the budget as ordinary expenditures, but are hidden away on the tax side where they aren't noticed.

These include various new benefits for supposedly self-funded retirees, the private health insurance tax rebate, big increases in grants to non-government schools and Costello's unsustainably generous increase in superannuation tax concessions for high income earners.

To be fair, Malcolm Turnbull has made a good start to cutting back the super concessions – over the vociferous opposition of his hard right backbench.

More must be done to cut back rapidly growing tax expenditures.

But if we're genuine about achieving fiscal sustainability while restraining the rise in tax rates, we need to embrace a new principle to sit beside our heavily means-tested welfare system (which is the main reason Australia's overall level of taxation is so much lower than almost every other developed economy).

The companion principle should be: we're no longer prepared to subsidise positional goods in the name of encouraging "choice".

We'll put all our effort into providing a good public health system and a good public education system, and that's it.

Of course, it's a free country and if you think you can do better than the public system by making private arrangements, feel free.

But don't expect other taxpayers to subsidise your efforts to get better than they're getting.

In any case, the easier you make it for punters to enjoy positional goods, the less positional you make them, cheating the better-off of their feeling of superiority.

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