Review: Consumed: How Markets Corrupt…

Simplicity, Reviews

Last night I skimmed over Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber.

Barber argues that consumerism works to keep adults childlike — always wanting something new, bigger, better, faster, now — while encouraging children to grow up — stop playing and start shopping, seek to consume expensive “adult” fashions, electronics, and cosmetic products earlier, etc. He says that affiliated ideologies like privatization, branding, and total marketing strengthen the consumerist ethos and contribute to this infantilization. Privatization diminishes citizens’ sense of public responsibility; branding encourages people to replace ethnic and cultural identities with identities defined by and revolving around what they consume; and totalizing market strategies homogenizes taste with a false offer of variety. He argues that the consumer market is ubiquitous, omnipresent, addictive, self-replicating, and omnilegitimate, and that while consumerism isn’t as dangerous a totalitarianism, it’s harder to resist and overcome.

This book is something a rant, although a well-considered, point-by-point rant. But there’s no question that Barber isn’t a fan of what’s going on in the U.S. and around the globe. His quarrel isn’t with capitalism, mind you, and he doesn’t argue that there aren’t some advantages to consumerism — but he objects to the way consumerism has become a totalizing, globalizing ideology and encourages adults to act like brats rather than the reasonable, moderate thinking citizens touted by the Enlightenment.

I’m a fan of anti-consumerists books, even though I acknowledge that I’m as enmeshed in and vulnerable to the consumerist ideology as anyone else. Still, I pick them up regularly to give myself a reality check. Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole wasn’t quite as fun as books like Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, de Graaf et al’s Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (Bk Currents), Scurlock’s Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders, Boss’s Green With Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (Un)Happiness, or Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Most of those books interleaved anecdotes and stories with statistics and arguments, which made them more accessible and amusing. Consumed is more scholarly in tone, heavier on history and analysis.

Does it add much to the discussion? Honestly, I don’t think so. Barber expresses his infantilization hypothesis more clearly and thoroughly than it’s been expressed before, but it has been expressed before. He makes few points about consumerism that an avid reader of anti-consumerist books like myself hasn’t run across before. On the other hand, his approach is more academic and well-planted in history, political theory, and psychology than most of the other books I’ve read (if I recall correctly, Schwartz’s book was also a bit more scholarly than popular). I did copy out the dozen or so of his book that refer to Hollywood movies and their occasional flashes of resistance to the dominant ideology because I happen to be on “ideological critique” in my Film Theory course, however, and he made some points worth bringing up in discussion.

My ultimate recommendation is that if this subject interests you and you want a more theoretical than statistical & anecdotal approach, Consumed is worth your attention. If you’re just dipping your feet into the water, though, try Schor’s The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need and Scurlock’s Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders. They’re both more easily accessible and immediately applicable to your life and habits.

drupagliassotti @ November 7, 2007