Monbiot - The Madness of Neoliberalism

The Guardian's George Monbiot contends that today's hyper-neoliberalism is fueling mental illness.

What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world. The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.

There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

...Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do.

As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented, girls and young women routinely alter the photos they post to make themselves look smoother and slimmer. Some phones, using their “beauty” settings, do it for you without asking; now you can become your own thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia: a war of everyone against themselves.

...If social rupture is not treated as seriously as broken limbs, it is because we cannot see it. But neuroscientists can. A series of fascinating papers suggest that social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural circuits. This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the words we use to denote physical pain and injury. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain. This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic. Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction.

...It’s unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It’s more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it enhances production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system.


...This does not require a policy response. It requires something much bigger: the reappraisal of an entire worldview. Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.

Coming Soon - 3-Billion More "Big Mouths" to Feed

The world's middle class is on the verge of a population explosion.   Sorry, Earth.  Of the 7+ billion people on the planet today, about 1.8-billion are considered middle-class or make that consumer class.  By 2030 that sub-2 billion is expected to burgeon to just under 5-billion strong, churning away on their computers to order crap from Amazon.

Middle-class consumers will increase to 4.8 billion by 2030 and 95 per cent of them will be from developing countries, said United Kingdom Foreign Secretary's special representative on climate change, Prof Sir David King.

He said, currently the world has 1.8 billion middle-class consumers and that three billion more were expected by 2030.

"Ninety per cent of that growth will be from the Asia-Pacific region as cities in the developing world face the steepest challenge," King said at the Low Carbon Cities (Opportunities and Challenges) forum held at British High Commissioner Simon Featherstone's residence in the capital, Monday.
King said due to the increasing middle class consumers, several challenges included the fact that 95 per cent of food production was highly dependent on oil, 80 per cent of the world's population live in areas with high threat to water security.

He said 60 per cent of the world's ecosystem was already either degraded or unsustainably used and 11 per cent of remaining natural areas could be lost by 2050.

"Based on climate change such as rising sea levels and temperatures, it is clear we must radically change our behaviour soon," he said.

Could this really happen?  Could the planet stand up under the weight of five billion mega-consumers?  Can we do this without triggering collapse?  The answer is pretty obviously, "no." 

Around the world we're  running a huge ecological deficit.  We're already consuming renewable resources - mainly water and biomass - at 1.5 times our planet's replenishment rates.  The evidence is inescapable from rivers that no longer flow to the sea, aquifers so severely drained it can be measured by satellites, the collapse of global fisheries, deforestation and desertification, plus air, soil and water contamination of all forms. 

And then there's this crushing reality - world population density.

Ninety per cent of this massive, new middle class growth is expected to come from the Asia Pacific region which already struggles under the highest population density on the planet.  That's also the region tagged to be hardest hit by climate change.  Can anybody say "street scene from Blade Runner"? 

To try to put this in perspective, a study came out several years ago that examined America's 100-million post-war population increase.  It concluded that those 100-million, by virtue of their formidable middle class footprint, were the equivalent of a billion Indians.   So this report claims we're going to be adding not just a hundred million but three billion new mega-consumers. 

Here's something else to bear in mind.   In a world running out of stuff, especially renewable resources essential to production of goods and services, this new 3-billion will be looking for a bigger share of what you probably already consider your pie.  There's only so much stuff to go around and you're going to have to give up some of your stuff so that they can have their share.  Don't worry, the market will see to it if we haven't already gone for our guns by then.

Spain Pushes the Consumer "Reset" Button

Spain, like Italy, and especially Greece and Ireland, is in the throes of an austerity purge.  Some 64% of working Spaniards now take home about a thousand Euros per month.   For a country that was riding high for the past two decades, that's a big hit.

Spanish consumers have responded by embracing what's called "low-cost shopping."   And some observers claim that, if and when Spain's economy bounces back (don't count on it), the lessons being learned today will live on.


“Compulsive and disproportionate shopping is a pathological condition that we frequently encounter. On the other hand, saving, even in a compulsive way, doesn’t figure in any medical handbook,” says Guillermo Fouce, Doctor of Psychology and professor at the Universidad Carlos III (Madrid). No one is pathologically thrifty. This is not a trivial remark, since any pattern of consumption taken to the extreme can lead to problems.


No doubt, the consumer in the post low-cost shopping era will differ from the consumer of today. First, he will have learned some lessons. “The buyer is finding that low-cost shopping helps him purchase similar articles at lower prices. And anyone who wants to sell things more expensively these days may as well close up the shop,” declares Javier Vello, responsible for Distribution and Consumption at the PricewaterhouseCoopers. Secondly, “after the crisis the client will look more closely at their money and will be more aware of what is behind each item,” Vello anticipates.

Which will have consequences. Little by little, it will be harder to build up a profile of the consumer, and business strategies will be greatly influenced by the trend. Some consumers, for example, may buy cheaply for certain products, but when it comes to other products the very same people, with the same purchasing power, may go for the most expensive items.

Whether things work out this way remains to be seen, however. In the meantime, the low-cost concept is spreading fast and wide. “The consumer has gone from looking for what I call a 'superior functionality' to looking for the 'good enough functionality', which is cheaper. In other words, why should I buy a car with all the extras if I don't really need them?” asks Javier Rovira, a professor at the ESIC Business and Marketing School.

What I find interesting in this EuroPress report is that it reveals how adaptable Western consumers are in the face of necessity.  Much of the suffering underway in Western Europe resulted in large part from governmental mismanagement but other forces will cause a much broader, perhaps even global, shrinkage in per capita production during this century.  We're running out of stuff, especially food and water, and we face the sort of global stability threats that may disrupt supply lines that we're utterly dependent upon and so it's likely we may all be required to live smaller, more frugally.   What the Spanish seem to be demonstrating is that it's not too hard to learn those habits and the market does respond.

Curbing Asian Appetites - A Stark Look at the Future

Billions of Asians want one thing - to live pretty much like you or me.  The fact is, they can't.   There isn't nearly enough of anything to go around for that to happen.  The UN Secretary General has warned it would take two and a half Earths to come up with the resources to make those aspirations a reality.

India and China haven't come to grips with the West's economic exceptionalism but some, such as Chandran Nair, are speaking out to warn that the western model of consumption-led economic growth would be disastrous for Asia.

"It's a matter of numbers," Nair said on a visit to London to speak at the Royal Society of Arts. "What Europe and America does about restricting its impact on the environment is pretty irrelevant. The future will be determined by what happens in Asia. Three billion Asians want what you and I have, but there is not enough to go round. By 2050, there will be 5 billion Asians," says Nair, who grew up in Malaysia and now lives in Hong Kong.

"If Asia continues like the west, the game is over; as people in Asia get richer, they eat further up the food chain. If 500 million Chinese want to eat just one seafood meal a week, it will empty all the seas of Asia. If Asians ate as much chicken as Americans, by 2050 that would amount to 120 billion birds a year instead of today's 16 billion. To aspire to the western model in Asia is a deadly lie.

"If China and India had the levels of car ownership evident across the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], that would amount to 1.5bn more cars – and it would take the entire oil production of Saudi Arabia to run them," says Nair, whose book Consumptionomics: Asia's Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet has just been published.

...Nair reserves most scorn for the west's mythology about Asian growth. Yes, millions have been lifted out of poverty but rather than putting this down as a triumph of liberal market capitalism, Nair argues that the model of development has consigned many millions more to continuing abject poverty. Trickle down doesn't work. Consumption-led growth creates a comparatively small middle class floating nervously in a sea of poverty. Its a cruel illusion to claim that the poor can all one day join the middle classes.

 ..."This is my key point. The majority of Asians are being left behind by the current model of growth, and governments will have to change tack or risk losing legitimacy," argues Nair. He challenges the development model of rapid urbanisation and calls instead for investment in rural areas to improve sustainable farming methods and raise farming incomes. A policy that the Chinese have already adopted.

He uses a telling fact: 2.2 billion Asians now have mobile phones, but far fewer have access to drinking water or toilets. The problem is not about needing more technology but about restructuring an economic system to meet human needs. How is it that TVs, playstations and mobile phones are more easily accessible in some of the cities of Asia than a glass of drinking water from a tap?

"We live in a world whose values are set by an economic system that incentivises and rewards those who can generate growth for a select group of mostly western institutions," states Nair in Consumptionomics.

It is in the meeting of genuine human need that the future of Asian capitalism must lie: food production, environmental stewardship, and health and education. "It's harsh for Asians to be told that as latecomers to the capitalist party they will never be able to attain that way of life taken for granted in developing countries," he admits.

What's needed is a strong interventionist state that can take these difficult long-term decisions – Nair talks of "benign authoritarianism" and insists that the key issue is good governance, not whether it meets democratic criteria.

Benign authoritarianism may well be Asia's fate, perhaps even its best hope.  That, however, begs the question of what lies in store for us, for the West?  The Asians may be running into a wall but it would be absurd for us to smugly assume it won't be felt in our homelands, that we will be able to maintain business as usual.  Absurd and dangerous.

Our model of consumption-led economic growth is not only unsuitable for Asia but it's unsustainable for the West.   Unlimited, perpetual growth is not capable on a finite planet with finite resources.   And once you reach the wall where consumption exhausts supply you inevitably must (if you're to survive peacefully) transition from a growth-based economic model to an allocation-based model.  Inequality and disparities in wealth and well being are far more tolerable in a growth-based world than in an allocation-based civilization.   Allocation is another term for rationing which begets a measure of collective sacrifice and in an environment of sacrifice, inequality is far less tolerable than it is under 18th century capitalism.

I suspect that globalization itself will falter and then collapse with the demise of growth-based economics.   The preservation of prosperity in the more affluent and self-sufficient nations will depend on restoring trade, tariff and currency controls to arrest the outflow of national wealth.

Will we be able to escape the "benign authoritarianism" that seems to lie in store for Asia?  If we do it won't be without a good deal of vigilance and resistance to the authoritarianism already creeping into our societies.  Democracy will have to be defended and that effort begins by recognizing those among us who would gladly relieve us of our democratic rights and freedoms.  That includes a segment of the Left and of the Right.  It the political centre doesn't hold we may be in for a very rough ride.

The Story of Stuff, Revisited

Here's Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff. You may have watched it already, it's been out since 2007, but we all need to watch it again

Touch Wood - Canadian Consumer Confidence Climbs

CBC News reports that the latest Harris-Decima poll shows Canadian consumer confidence in an upswing.

27 per cent of respondents said they expect to be better off in 2010 compared to just 13 per cent who expect 2010 to be worse. 41% said now is a good time for major purchases.

With Canada among the countries least impacted by the global meltdown, it seems logical that our people would be more optimistic about the future. Our optimism may be misplaced but it's a welcome break from the fiscal gloom and doom anyway.