Consumption and Its Consequences E-Book

Daniel Miller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 385

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is a book for those looking for different answers to some of today's most fundamental questions. What is a consumer society? Does being a consumer make us less authentic or more materialistic? How and why do we shop? How should we understand the economy? Is our seemingly insatiable desire for goods destroying the planet? Can we reconcile curbs on consumption with goals such as reducing poverty and social inequality?

Miller responds to these questions by proposing feasible and, where possible, currently available alternatives, drawn mainly from his own original ethnographic research. Here you will find shopping analysed as a technology of love, clothing that sidesteps politics in tackling issues of immigration. There is an alternative theory of value that does not assume the economy is intelligent, scientific, moral or immoral. We see Coca-Cola as an example of localization, not globalization. We learn why the response to climate change will work only when we reverse our assumptions about the impact of consumption on citizens. Given the evidence that consumption is now central to the way we create and maintain our core values and relationships, the conclusions differ dramatically from conventional and accepted views as to its consequences for humanity and the planet.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Prologue

1 What’s Wrong with Consumption?

The scene

2 A Consumer Society

Anyone for a Coke?

The drive to consumption

Is consumption capitalist?

Whose side is Santa Claus on?

Conclusion

3 Why We Shop

A first theory of shopping – peanut butter

A second theory of shopping – sacrifice

It’s hard to be good

4 Why Denim?

The Global Denim Project

How jeans became ordinary

5 It’s the Stupid Economy

Why advertising?

Beliefs, epistemology and economics

‘Stuff happens’ in aggregate

Best value?

How the virtual came to create the real

Value: from problem to solution

6 How Not to Save a Planet

Postscript

Index

Copyright © Daniel Miller 2012

The right of Daniel Miller to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6107-0

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6150-6 (Multi-user ebook)

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Prologue

This book is the sequel to the volume Stuff.1 While Stuff summarised my previous writings on material culture, this companion volume summarises my research on consumption, but then proceeds to discuss the consequences of consumption. The core of the book is addressed to the question of what consumption is and why we consume. But three of the chapters look more to the consequences of consumption, with particular reference to rethinking the nature of political economy and questioning current proposals for achieving environmental sustainability. Many of the issues of politics and economics that were absent from Stuff are central here. It follows that this is a much more opinionated book, where I feel it is important to take a stance on a wide variety of current concerns.

The problem is that this requires a rather different kind of volume from one that summarises the outcome of research. I don’t have just one simple stance on what are mainly highly complex issues. I can see the merits in a variety of equally powerful and persuasive positions, and trying to wish away that diversity of argument and pretend to stand for only one position would be false. For this reason I have written the first and final chapters of this book, those which are most replete with opinions and political comment, as a dialogue between three fictional characters called Mike, Chris and Grace. Each of them represents a different version of my views which remain in argument with each other. As you shall soon discover, Mike represents a largely green perspective, Chris represents a mainly red perspective, while Grace represents the many years I have spent as an anthropological fieldworker living with people in poverty. I am not quite sure what it says about me, that two aspects of my own personality appear here as married to each other, but let’s not go there.

But, having adopted this ruse, I think in compensation I should also say a few words about what I see as the core of my political and academic grounding. I am a qualitative fieldworker who relies on interpretation and harbours a suspicion of quantitative and experimental research when applied to human and social behaviour. I see most pseudo-scientific work within psychology, economics and sociology as highly problematic because the data is often removed from its original context, simplified and distorted in order to fit within quantification and experiment. I appreciate that these same scientists may in turn consider my own work to be entirely without merit, since from their stance my data do not equate to scientific proof. On the other hand, I am no post-modern relativist when it comes to knowledge. Anthropology depends on the hard slog of at least a year’s fieldwork, patiently accumulating information. I wouldn’t bother doing this if I didn’t intend that all my work should correspond to what could be called evidence-based scholarship. But I have found that trying to prove something is usually what prevents us from managing to understand something. There is more extensive discussion of these epistemological issues within this book.

I was educated into politics mainly through discussions of Marxism. But forget the image of revolutionary cabals in smoke-filled rooms. One of the three A-level textbooks in politics assigned by my – anything but revolutionary – school was The Communist Manifesto. I then became interested in the background to these writings, and today I would regard the philosopher Hegel along with the anthropologists Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu as my three principal academic mentors. I also came to see many problems with the variety of socialist ideals in which I initially believed as a student. The first was that pure critique was almost inevitably self-indulgent and regressive. The second was that this was equally true of the advocacy of utopian alternatives to the status quo. Instead, I have come to believe that the best way of insisting that some things in the modern world are not only thoroughly unjust but also unacceptable is by pointing out that there already exist entirely feasible alternatives which, while not perfect, are demonstrably better.

So when I teach about consumption I always start by asking students to think of their prime example of a consumer society as not the US but Norway – for the simple reason that, when it comes to politics over the last few decades, I just can’t think of a preferable example that actually exists. Norway is just as wealthy and capitalist as the UK or the US. Yet it has become and remains one of the wealthiest countries today, in combination with perhaps the strongest commitment to social egalitarianism and social welfare anywhere in the world. Its political intelligence in storing the legacy of its oil wealth, rather than squandering it in political advantage, leaves me close to awestruck. It defies textbook economics, since it shows how a society can be hugely successful in wealth creation while having comparatively limited investment in either individualism or competition. If the rest of the world could come closer to Norway, it would not be utopia, but we would be hugely improved. And my point is that Norway already exists. So, in reading this book, you can assume that I aspire to a variant of social democracy looking for the best and most pragmatic combination of the following: much more tightly regulated capitalist commerce, an egalitarian and humanistic social welfare system, and an ethical concern for the future of the planet and a sustainable environment. I have no problem repeating the cliché that I have children and a concern with the legacy the present bequeaths to the future. Finally, I am an inveterate optimist. I will argue in this book that the world has consistently improved in terms of the welfare of most of its populations and there are good reasons for thinking it will continue to do so. I assume this last may be a thoroughly unpopular and irritating stance.

I should also point out that the core of this book is very different from the frame that surrounds it. The device of the first and last chapters is intended to deal with the diversity of political and other opinions that are commonly expressed regarding the consequences of consumption, the problems it causes and the proffered solutions. But the middle chapters are there for quite another purpose. They comprise a summary of research I have been engaged in for over two decades. One of my principal ambitions has been to rescue the study of consumption from being reduced to such matters of moral adjudication or political stance. These chapters are much more to do with trying to provide a scholarly foundation to what I think most consumption actually is rather than what we would like to project upon it. The core concern is with everyday household provisioning. I want to bring this back to the level of buying toilet rolls and cans of soup or replacing worn blue jeans – also to being able to possess a car, a computer and a mobile phone, which seems foundational to our new, but quickly taken for granted, capacities in the world. This book addresses directly the consequences of consumption such as the impact on climate change and in legitimating the political economy. But consequences are not necessarily causes. When it comes to understanding why people consume, I will focus much more on how goods work within our core relationships to the people with whom we live and most care about. There is a chapter that is concerned primarily with how shopping is used as a technology for the expression and establishment of love within households. One of the main reasons we may consume a huge range of quite similar goods such as clothes and food is that these become a kind of vocabulary that allow us richly to express these core relationships – for example, with our children. If you consider the hundreds of pages a novelist might expend in describing a single relationship, it is not surprising that we feel that there cannot ever be enough variety of goods actually to reach the level of nuance to which we would aspire in our engagement with another person we care about – or indeed with ourselves.

A further chapter is concerned more with how cosmological ideas to do with time are expressed through the order of things, ranging from car upholstery to the celebration of Christmas. I will explore local symbolic systems based on the divisions of ethnicity, class and gender. The focus is not, however, on difference, not even on status differences or emulation, which have dominated past theories of consumption. In fact, my discussion ends with a chapter on why and how people struggle to become merely ordinary. This is why I prefer to separate out these middle chapters, with their ethnographic research and conclusions as to what consumption actually is, from the opinions and debates about its consequences.

I will not repeat the extensive two pages of acknowledgments provided in Stuff, since they pertain to both books equally. They include all the PhD students I have supervised, my work colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, and especially my co-researchers on various past projects, most of which have been conducted in collaboration with others, as well as the very considerable number of people who have been generous with their time and information as informants on these projects.

To the names listed in Stuff I would add those whom I have come to know since. In the last two years I have gained some new colleagues in material culture studies: Lane DeNicola and Ludovic Coupeye, as well as Rebecca Empson in social anthropology; some new PhD students, Nick Gadsby and Tiziana Traldi; and the students in our new degree course of digital anthropology. Julie Botticello has been of particular help in day-to-day matters. Finally, there are those people who have made comments or helped edit this particular manuscript: the anonymous readers found by my publisher, Rebecca Empson, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Tom McDonald, Roxana Morosco, Razvan Nicolescu, John Thompson, Hal Wilhite, Richard Wilk and, especially, Cynthia Isenhour and Tania Lewis. Special thanks to Rickie Burman for her support and considerable help in copy-editing.

Note

1 At the time of writing Stuff, my working title for this second volume was Consumed by Doubt, which has been replaced by this new title.

1

What’s Wrong with Consumption?

The scene

The conversation takes place in the kitchen of Mike’s comfortable North London home.

MIKE is in his late fifties. You can see his hair was once chestnut, though now what’s left is mainly grey. A quick glance at the labels of organic and other products on the shelves tells you he sits clearly in the green corner, but also that he is something of a hobbyist with respect to technologies and gadgets. He is a professor of environmental studies.

CHRIS is in his mid-forties, not well favoured in looks, but possessing a face that makes him appear quick and lively, always ready to argue and expecting to win. Within a few sentences it is clear that he sits firmly in the red corner. He is a senior lecturer in sociology.

GRACE is in her late thirties – slim, with long hair, and attractive. Born in the Philippines, she is married to Chris. She is a lecturer in anthropology. She smiles a lot, sometimes wryly, especially when Chris is talking.

MIKE met Chris and Grace recently at a conference on consumption and the environment. When he realised that all three teach courses about consumption within their respective disciplines, he decided to invite them over for what he hoped would be the first of many discussions. Being professional academics, they agreed that they would each come ready to discuss some books, ideally something classic they use in teaching and also something new, that would illustrate their respective approaches to consumption. This first meeting takes place at Mike’s house.

MIKE: That is so purple, it’s beyond purple. Are you really telling me there is no artificial colour in it? But it’s also delicious. What did you say it’s called?GRACE: Ube, and, given that I made it with my own fair hands, I think I can vouch for the contents. Ube is simply our word for purple yam, but for this dessert, which is one of the most common in the Philippines, you add condensed milk, butter and sugar. Some people also add coconut milk. Glad you like it. When a friend of mine, who lives in Manila, has visitors from abroad she always takes them first to one of our fast food outlets, where the most common dessert is ice cream made with ube topped by grated cheese. It certainly satisfies their desire for the exotic.MIKE: OK, well, I think I’d better start our conversation, if only to stop myself devouring the lot. So, when we met I recall we hoped for three initial meetings: today’s would be generally about consumption, the second devoted to practical solutions to problems arising from consumption and climate change, and the third a comparison of our course contents for our teaching on consumption. So perhaps we should start off by outlining our positions on consumption. I should be upfront and confess that I simply can’t help but feel that those of us in environmental studies occupy a kind of higher ground in the arguments about consumption. The simple point is that you can discuss all you like about the causes, the meaning and the nature of consumption, and obviously I work on these issues. But today you have to see this primarily as a contribution to an imperative which cuts straight through all such debates, and it emanates from the green position to which I have devoted my academic life. Actually, more than my academic life. I was only a teenager in 1972 when I first heard about something called The Limits to Growth that had been issued by an organisation called the Club of Rome.1 I was quite proud of the fact that I managed to get hold of a copy. It was really the first time the general public had any indication at all of what was to become the core of the green movement. It set out the proposition that our planet’s resources are finite and irreplaceable. Of course, at that time, whenever I tried to convince my family and friends that this was a kind of global wake-up call, they dismissed me like I was some kind of freak. I suppose my purple flared trousers and flowered shirts didn’t help.GRACE: Sorry, I just need a second to get myself into the flower shirt image. Do you have any photographs? Hair length?MIKE: That’s why you really don’t want to see the photos. My hair just didn’t suit long. It just gave me that drugged up and dozy look. Have you read Linda Grant’s new novel, We Had it So Good?2 It took me back to those days. Anyway, being an incipient green at that time was taken simply as further sign of my stupidity, not my prescience; they thought I was on another planet rather than trying to save this one. The blessing of hair loss is that I now seem to be taken quite seriously. It’s amazing how things have gone into reverse. When we are told Republican politicians in the US don’t believe in climate change, we see this as a sign that they are either buffoons or liars.CHRIS: Why do you think that is?MIKE: Well partly, I guess, this reflects the shift away from the main point made in The Limits to Growth about natural resources. That was a complex position because the consideration of each resource led to a specific argument as to how much of it actually exists. It probably hasn’t helped that estimates for oil and other natural elements kept being underestimated, and soon we sounded like we were crying wolf. Again, we have problems when people realise that what we call rare earths include some substances that are not at all rare. Today we tend to have a single focus upon climate change, which makes it rather simpler to put the case for being green. It is much easier to focus upon the overwhelming evidence for this one trajectory, with potentially even more catastrophic consequences than the depletion of each particular resource.GRACE: So you’re saying that it’s just easier and simpler to convince people about one thing, which is global warming.MIKE: Precisely. As it happens, the fourth report of the IPCC in 2007 and the Stern Report3 of around the same time brought the economists out firmly on our side, and my sense is that, once you have the economists, you find that both the politicians and the media these days tend to follow slavishly whatever they say. As a result, at least in the UK, it feels like the issue of evidence has been largely won.GRACE: So what are the implications for our discussion of consumption?MIKE: Well, for me, the question ‘What is consumption?’ is no longer just some rarefied academic debate of only esoteric or commercial interest. It becomes the single most pressing point of academic enquiry, since we urgently need to commit unequivocally to an immediate and sustained reduction in consumption. We are at a particularly dangerous moment when the vast populations of China and South Asia seem poised to launch an assault intended to reach our levels of consumption in the shortest possible time. Given that they represent the majority of the world’s population, and that even current levels of consumption are unsustainable, this will be environmentally catastrophic. It means that our children and grandchildren will inherit less of a planet – or at least less of its landmass – and face vast changes in agriculture to which they may find it impossible to adapt. So we can’t duck this one. If we gather here today to talk about consumption, it is surely with the essential aim of reducing it. OK so this explains the two books I have brought for discussion today. One is called Why We Disagree about Climate Change, by Mike Hulme, and the other is Heat, by George Monbiot.4 You may find the first an odd choice, since it makes almost no mention of consumption. So let me start with the more straightforward position, which is that of Monbiot.GRACE: Oh, I am a huge fan of Monbiot. I read The Guardian daily and I always reckon that Jonathan Freedland helps me understand the reasons why I think what I think, Monbiot gives me the critical ammunition that other journalists won’t, and I practically stalk Hadley Freeman.MIKE: Hadley Freeman?CHRIS: She writes mainly on fashion, but hilarious. She also helps men avoid inadvertent crimes, like double denim.MIKE: Well, I am sticking with Monbiot for now – he deals with crimes of a slightly larger scale than double denim. What I love about his work is the sheer relentlessness. His style of argument creates a clear road from knowledge to necessary action as an absolute logic of common sense – a sort of ‘given that, we must surely do this’ style. And there are always twists in the tail of consequence. So we might just think we need to reduce energy use in the home. But then he predicts that those energy savings will actually lead to greater energy expenditure, as we will put any time and money gained into some other energy-inefficient activity. So each trajectory of effects has to be followed through until there is a demonstrable payoff in the overall saving of energy, a plausible solution that will work. He also shares my love of sorting such plausible science from science fiction. One of my friends constantly derides the way I keep coming up with what he calls my ‘small boy dreams big idea that saves the planet’ stuff, which he blames on my reading too many Superman comics as a kid.CHRIS: You mean that poster on the wall is your doing, not your kids’?MIKE: Absolutely. Anyway, in 2006 Monbiot was talking about turning cement, whose production at that time created more carbon dioxide, into a new kind of cement that would absorb carbon dioxide. Now, in 2011, this is starting to look like a serious possibility with companies such as Novacem. In fact he is very useful for our discussion of consumption because a lot of his concerns relate to home and transport in these – pun alert – very concrete ways.CHRIS: Oh, good, puns are allowed then!MIKE: Of course. Monbiot is also great at exposing the hypocrisies common among all of us who want to appear visibly green, such as flying across the world for eco-holidays which create unnecessary carbon miles.GRACE: Oh, and of course we had to go there because we were due to give a paper at an academic conference, and the one in Vietnam was so much more relevant than the one in Loughborough. And, once you were there, the fact that there was a resort nearby … CHRIS: Before you go on, Mike, to be honest, we have both read Monbiot, but not this other one, Mike Hulme?MIKE: Oh, OK. Well, I rather like the juxtaposition of Monbiot and Hulme, which is a bit of a ‘ships passing in the night’ comparison. Monbiot, as I understand it, was not trained in science, but his book is in thrall to science and replete with statistics. By contrast, Hulme reads like a scientist on a journey to somewhere else. He’s actually one of the leading figures in the science of climate change, but recently he has steered his course to a land of radical doubt, against the presumption of some pure science decontextualised from cultural life.CHRIS: Are we talking Bruno Latour?5MIKE: Yes, that would be fair. Hulme notes that climate change involves a complex set of variables only some of which could ever be subject to the kind of testable quantitative analysis that we imagine as science. But his point is that most climate scientists are perfectly sensible to a situation where they can provide estimates of risk only within wide parameters. They have just as much a problem with media that think, because they are called scientists, they must be purveyors of certainty through clear, repeatable, testable and definitive results.GRACE: The waves will start lapping at Buckingham Palace on the first of June 2023.MIKE: That sort of thing. Hulme then suggests that the results of climate science are better regarded as a kind of discourse that we only ever see through the lens of some or other interested group. Economists turn it into measures of value and create a carbon market to trade with. Activists turn it into a condemnation of the capitalist system and grounds for revolution. Governments turn it into a security risk to be treated as a global threat on a par with terrorism. Everyone sees it in their own light because, in the end, it is a form of risk, and people assess risks differently. To add further complexity, the problem of climate change is always relative to people’s particular situation. It’s an urgent priority for people who live on low-lying Pacific atolls, less for an inland nation protected from sea-level rises. It may conflict with another priority such as poverty reduction.CHRIS: Too right. Biofuels may look attractive from a green perspective but take vast amounts of land from food production and thereby decrease food security. There are things your lot are doing which clearly increase poverty.MIKE: Acknowledged. And Hulme sees this clearly. His aim is not ultimately to weaken the green case. He clearly feels that, actually to have the requisite impact, climate science needs to work with this plurality and messiness rather than wish it away. So that’s really why I brought both books. I always start by giving Monbiot to the students. He works brilliantly for the kind of shock and awe impact that helps create green activists. But I am a bit long in the tooth, and since The Limits to Growth I have seen both the statistics and the main green arguments change again and again. So I like to temper Monbiot with Hulme, and cook up a dish of science flavoured with doubt.GRACE: That’s quite funny, because that exactly describes your response to my ube; you ate it, but it was like you couldn’t quite believe it.CHRIS OK, but it’s a pretty hard dish to reject.(laughs): MIKE: I am not quite sure if you’re referring to ube or to my metaphorical dish. But I guess it’s true of both. OK then, Chris, since you see yourself as the more political animal, let me move things in that direction a bit. For me, the climate change clouds have a silver lining. They give us the ammunition to deal with those desperate problems of modern life, materialism and over-consumption. I speak from the heart because I can’t help thinking, maybe obsessing, about my own sixteen-year-old son. He only ever seems interested in the most mindless materialism – a life devoted to computer games, hair styles created with some revolting gel, the latest smart phone. His only aspirations are towards whatever job might make him so rich that he can immediately gratify every whim, from the jacuzzi in the garden to the flashy car. He has become devoted to unbelievably expensive male perfumes that only suggest to me how gullible he has become, and undermine the basic respect I would like to have in my own son. I don’t want to pre-empt your stance, Chris, but I suspect that, like me, you believe that under a market system we can never say that the success of a product is evidence that it serves the welfare of consumers. We can only assume it has thereby served the profits of commerce.CHRIS: I think I can live with that characterisation, though I’m not sure I always want to be seen as so predictable.MIKE: I don’t know anything about that fashion reporter you seem to follow, but it seems to me we are flooded with the most ridiculous amounts of new fashions which serve only the makers of walk-in wardrobes. And to be able to afford all this consumption we create an ever more heartless system of employment that in turn results in unprecedented levels of stress and overwork. The green connection is partly that I think we fail to prevent the imminent destruction of the planet partly because we are losing our ability to appreciate nature. And partly because I think we can kill these two vultures that plague our world with the same stone. I am not a religious man, but I have to believe there is something transcendent in life itself that we see in nature. I go hiking at weekends just to find places some distance from this deluge of commodities. There I breathe in more than fresh air. I regain some sort of connection with nature, an appreciation of bird sound and the profusion of wild flowers, of landscapes and seabirds soaring above cliffs. So, whatever the difference between Monbiot and Hulme, all green thinking involves a much bigger system of basic values and ethics. We can’t but regard the environmental crisis as also something of a saviour, a means to resurrect some form of morality, to rethink basic human values. It’s a once-only opportunity to retract this ugly and facile consumerism and actually end up with not just a happier planet but a happier population. I guess you have also read Layard’s book Happiness6 and the Easterlin Paradox.CHRIS: I have read Layard, but the other thing? Sounds like science fiction.MIKE: I suppose it does a bit. Actually it comes from a 1970s paper7 by the economist Richard Easterlin, who was the first to demonstrate that, in comparing countries (though not within countries), there was no clear statistical association between higher incomes and levels of reported happiness. He paved the way for Layard and the other economists who are trying to make happiness the measure of economic success rather than simply income.8 I think this just confirms what we already know from our own experience about wealth not bringing happiness. So let me conclude my ‘where I am coming from’ bit. I am essentially interested in understanding consumption in order to create an effective means of curbing excessive consumption – firstly for the sake of the planet but also for the sake of our souls.GRACE: Thanks for that, Mike. Well, we needn’t have worried about whether we would find ourselves a good argument, because, as the saying is, I couldn’t agree with you less. But if you ended on a personal note, to explain your stance, perhaps I should start on one. I want to tell you something of my history. One hears about Asian tigers, but the Philippines, I am afraid, is an Asian sloth.9 Nothing we have tried to do to get our economy moving seems to have worked. The rest of South-East Asia leaps ahead and we are left behind. Most families traditionally worked, as mine did, as tenant farmers. This meant we had to be able to afford to rent the very land we farmed. One year my parents invested in a new crop, a kind of maize that had a sweeter taste. But the trouble was that everyone in our area had the same idea, and the price collapsed. So the next year my family didn’t even have the money to rent land and couldn’t farm. But they had started to invest in me. I had managed to win pretty much every scholarship to better education open to me. Being in state schools, I started with very limited prospects, but I was seen as a swot and a star. I loved school. In such cases most kids learn nursing, but even with those scholarships the cost of such training was beyond our means. So I got as far as nursing assistant. My family couldn’t afford the next step, which was to send me abroad, but, as is often the case, the more extended family joined in. One uncle even sold some land. Twice we gave money to agencies who kept it and turned out to be running scams. Even more family members had to be drawn in, and finally the third agency was genuine and got me to London. This is my story, but it’s also a national one. More than a tenth of our population works abroad, and our government has adopted this as a formal economic strategy because, to be honest, remittances sent back by workers such as myself are the only thing that keeps the economy afloat. Stereotypes are generally derogatory, but if one of them happens to be positive then you can make money off it. Women from the Philippines have a reputation for caring, patience, sensitivity and also docility. If you have an elderly parent whom you love, but really can’t give up your job to look after, and yet you don’t want to send to a home for the elderly, then hiring a Filipina carer seems like an act of care in itself. You have carefully selected the person you think is most likely to possess the care and consideration that you would have liked to have given to your parent yet don’t have time for yourself. In the Philippines we know that we now have this reputation as premium carers, and that means we can charge a higher fee than carers from other countries. So, if the push factor was poverty, the pull factor was this stereotype we could sell. I was one of the lucky ones … and then became one of the very luckiest ones. It wasn’t that long before I met Chris, got married, and was able to go back into education, and seven years later I too became a lecturer. That’s hardly a common trajectory. During those years in care work, I met with hundreds of migrant labourers, from South India, West Africa and elsewhere. I know the sacrifices they make, struggles most Londoners can hardly begin to imagine. Filipina carers rarely get directly to the UK; most start in places such as Saudi and Hong Kong. Believe me, you don’t want to be there when they tell stories of having been beaten and even raped. Unlike me, most of them have children they also have to leave behind in the Philippines. I don’t think a week goes by without the British press covering some story about migrants drowning at sea or dying inside sealed trucks in their desperation to get into Europe. Why do we all do this? You may think we represent the world’s poorest. We don’t. The really impoverished people in the Philippines simply don’t have the money to invest in an individual migrant such as me. In fact I was unusual, since the key to my education was the scholarships. Most of my fellow migrants came from lower-middle-class groups who can invest in private education, nursing college and the agency fees for finding work abroad, or a scam student visa. So this is not an escape from starvation or an absolute lack of goods. But if you travel today to India or West Africa, to the family homes of any of these migrants, then it starts to make sense. Mostly, they may not have cars, but today they have motorbikes; they may not all have computers, but they all have mobile phones; a few have marble, but all can now afford decent houses with bathrooms. Migrants rarely represent just themselves. Ask Chris about how often I continue to get requests from my family. The extended family that gave money to help you get here soon becomes the ever more extended family that demands the money you earn once you have settled. They all want to replace the motorbike with a car, to add a computer to the mobile phone, to eat out in restaurants, to take holidays, to have wide-screen televisions, big double fridges, and more fashionable clothes. I heard just yesterday that my father’s brother, the one who sold that land to help me, has a nephew who wants a jeepney – a sort of extended taxi – to earn a living. When you accept a precarious passage on a leaky boat, suffer humiliation, take several simultaneous jobs, you are mindful not just of your own aspirations but often those of dozens of relatives – which I could meet thanks to a racist stereotype for compassion and patient care.CHRIS: Well deserved in her case. We met when she was looking after my best friend’s elderly parents, and I had never been in the presence of that kind of selfless dedication. I fell in love because I preached about such values, but Grace actually possessed them. Plus she was and still is gorgeous.GRACE: I can now admit that I fell in love with the promise of an EU passport. Well, at first, but then subsequently with the man. But the real point is that most of my Filipino friends do domestic work inside houses just like this one, and we all come to the same conclusion. If you want to know what the English really think about consumption, ignore what they say, but look at what they do. Married to Chris, I now live in exactly that milieu which endlessly spins the story you just told about the urgent need to reduce consumption and waste. But the fact is I don’t know a single, not one single individual who actually downsizes. Not one who doesn’t live in a decent house – well, in your case, Mike, an actually delightful house, but also a fabulous garden in which I can see you take great pleasure – with vast numbers of books, ethnic furnishings and, yes, what people might well call conspicuous green consumer goods, organic goods and eco-labels, that we all know cost more than the non-green variety. They discuss carbon footprints on flights to holidays in Australia. You complain about your son’s aspirations, Mike, but from where most people in this world stand you are fabulously, unimaginably, wealthy.MIKE: Well, yes, it’s easy to accuse me of hypocrisy. But I never said I was living at the level we should be at. I agree it’s not easy to downsize in practice, but I am quite sincere when I say I think this is unsustainable and everybody, including myself, needs to change.GRACE: I wasn’t about to accuse you of hypocrisy. But I do want to argue that the main change we need today is in the very opposite direction of what you have just argued for. I see an absolute need for that vast increase in consumption that you so fear. Because where we most part company is in terms of what we think consumption fundamentally is. The reason people don’t want to go back to the Philippines is that, even if they can afford the house and the car and the clothes, what they would really miss from London are the basic services: the health system – it’s the NHS above all that keeps migrant after migrant from going home – along with the education system they want to bequeath to their children, the transport system, the availability of leisure pursuits so that you can take your weekend hikes on protected pathways or stay with the unrivalled urban parks of London. There is the Indie music scene and the theatre. It is the public arena as much as private consumption. And, yes, the Philippines along with India and China want to build, need to build, hospitals, schools, road systems, heating and lighting and media systems, just the basic provisions you don’t think about as consumption because you take them for granted. But it takes a hell of a lot of energy consumption to build a hospital. The point I am making is that most of that extra consumption you fear will destroy the planet is not actually going to come from what you can claim to be surplus consumption, the hair gel and the jacuzzis. It will come from the provision of basic services that no one can call over-consumption. And we need to confront those, since they are a lot harder to curb. Even at British levels of consumption, who doesn’t want to support the drive to have a local MRI scanner, a new drug for skin cancer that costs £73,000 per person per year, getting the bad schools up to the levels of the good ones, or retaining money for the arts and museums. It is no good taking advertising as your easy target. Not one of the demands I have just listed has anything to do with advertising or even with business. They are all governmental expenditures. You can attack ad men and capitalists and still feel good about your values. But the real energy consumption is going to come from the fact that every town in China and India wants a bus station and a hospital, and sooner or later they will get them. But even if I come over to your agenda and what you consider over-consumption in the private domain, what do my family in the Philippines really, really want for themselves? Obvious things, actually: a well-built house with its bathrooms and garden, maybe not central heating, given the tropics, but the even more energy-consuming air conditioning. They want at least a single family car, a fridge-freezer and a washing machine. Would you do without a freezer – and you don’t live in the tropics? You have a car even when your public transport system is infinitely better than ours. More subtle is the international spread in basic norms of comfort. There is the excellent work of the sociologist Elizabeth Shove10 on how we come to regard as normal the number of times to wash in a week, or the right temperature of the water we wash with, or how we decide to set the thermostat for the cooling system of the building in which we work. These are at the heart of contemporary consumption statistics. But then it goes beyond even these so-called basic functional items. Why should my family not have as much right as yours to an annual holiday and a small range of household goods such as clothes, books, and access to the media – not just television, but increasingly mobile phones and computers that allow them to keep in touch with family living abroad, such as myself? Today, apart from a small fraction, pretty much the entire world population has come to see these not as basic goods, but as basic human rights, also as basic justice and equality. Each time I go home on a visit I become more convinced that people who sacrifice their lives to gain remittances know what they are doing. I see families who never had hot water or a TV, whose children are the first in their family to get to university. These children want to discuss the same changes in Facebook or mobile phone apps that we talk about in London. They know more about Lady Gaga and Armani than most Londoners, but sometimes they also know more about Charles Dickens and human rights in Malaysia than I do. And I see the joy this brings their parents, who never ever dreamt this could possibly happen in one generation. I sit with these elderly parents and we cry – for joy. For those fortunate enough to gather what here seem the mere crumbs fallen from the tables of affluence, these are miracles. But this process has only begun. My problem is not at all that these children are becoming consumers. My problem is the hundreds of millions who still live without that access, who come to your TV screens as the parade of poverty.CHRIS: Yes, but … GRACE: I haven’t finished yet. In fact, I now want to turn from Mike to you. In preparation for this meeting I spent the last two weeks (without telling you) monitoring every time you expressed what could be called a consumer desire. This is what I came up with: a better reclining chair for your back; some new kind of fan without blades; more affordable cashmere; less conspicuous fillings for your teeth next time you go to the dentist; a device that can automatically decide when headlights should come on, of the kind you spotted in Richard and Jean’s car; an Android phone with a bigger screen; rice that cooks in two minutes in the microwave, for when I am out; more and better home insulation. And when you get some new gadget, does it disappoint you or show that you were a fool to desire it? Very rarely. I think you migrated from USB sticks to Dropbox and cloud computing nearly two years ago, and you still haven’t stopped boring the world with its advantages – how your life is better because you were always losing those USB thingees.CHRIS: Not having to carry a thumb drive is a real boon to us both. Remember the time we thought you had vacuumed one up and we had to … GRACE: That’s my point. I don’t have your conservatism. I sometimes think the more radical you people claim to be in politics, the more conservative you are in practice. Of course cloud computing is better than a USB stick. But all these things are better. There was not a word of implicit criticism in that list (and, believe me, Mike, my husband gets plenty of criticism otherwise). I very occasionally do forget to switch on the car headlights, and that’s dangerous. Why shouldn’t you be able to afford cashmere? I suppose it might be safer for kids to have fans without blades – and of course that’s the only reason you wanted one, wasn’t it? We can live comfortably without all these things, but that doesn’t make any of them bad. Other things being equal, new technologies are generally better than old ones.MIKE: OK, but what about all that frankly totally useless extra crap that people buy, from electric pepper grinders to all those ornaments and silly bits of clothing that just seem waste? There is no way anyone will use them or needs them. Surely an anthropologist would at least condemn these?GRACE: It’s funny how green thinkers really don’t get anthropology. You all seem to assume that buying useless stuff is a sign of how distant we are from the kinds of societies anthropologists traditionally study. Exactly the opposite is true. The whole point about non-capitalist societies is that they are not governed by mere utility. Material culture tends to be symbolic before it is functional. I teach about very long yams, decorated canoe prows, ear lobe extensions, temple architecture. One of our links to that aura of authentic society is that we remain interested in totally useless stuff, because useless stuff generally has a social and symbolic role. I remember a paper Alison Clarke11