Anyone who has travelled in rural Africa knows that one adjective describes its economy: ‘more.’ The people there need more. They need more water, food, infrastructure, education, health and governance. This lack of the most basic resources and the consequent poverty also confronted Adam Smith more than two hundred years ago. Smith, the great Scottish economist, sought a way out of the agrarian squalor of the eighteenth century. He believed a more productive society would lead to a wealthier society. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that humans are motivated by self-interest and ‘self-love’, and that the exploitation of this trait leads to greater wealth for all and a more effective distribution of labour.1
Looking back, one can understand why Adam Smith wanted to work out how to get the economy to produce more. Britain in the 1700s was not a nice place to live. The average life expectancy was just thirty-five years. Dead dogs, cats, rats and even horses decayed on the cobblestone streets, and raw waste spilled everywhere, creating a breeding ground for diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and smallpox. Medicine was still so primitive that in 1775 more than eight hundred deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality were attributed simply to ‘Teeth’.2 Most people lived in just one room in buildings made of crumbling bricks. It was not unusual for such buildings to collapse.
But today, in a rampant consumer economy, ‘more’ has lost its meaning. Smith would probably be mystified by how his simple goals of increasing productivity and achieving market efficiency have become an ideological threat to our economy, society and planet. In When Corporations Rule the World, David C. Korten writes, ‘Smith did not advocate a market system based on unrestrained greed. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest – but it is not greed.’3
Adam Smith and later Milton Friedman both believed that an individual pursuing his own self-interest promotes the good of society as a whole. In Chapter Two, we saw how in just a few generations, this concept was transformed from a relatively healthy narrative of technological ingenuity to a frenetic quest for personal identity through brands, products and services, before finally becoming an extreme system of insatiable consumerism. So much so that by the 1950s, the dawn of hyper-consumerism, we started to perceive ourselves first and foremost as a society of individual consumers, and as a group of citizens second. We ended up believing that we were better off relying on corporations rather than cooperating with each other. Collective- and community-based values were shunned in favour of consumer independence and a mind-set of ‘me, me, me’.
The promises of individuality and independence were wrapped up in the falsehood that ‘what’s mine is mine’ and that complete self-reliance was the ultimate goal. Douglas Rushkoff writes in his book Life Inc., ‘Each home was to be its own fiefdom. Self-sufficiency was part of the myth of the self-made man with his private estate, so community property, carpools, or sharing of almost any kind became anathema to the suburban aesthetic.’4 And that neighbour on the other side of the fence, do we even know him well enough to borrow his ladder? Sadly, neighbours being ‘total strangers’ is more the norm these days than the exception. A recent survey shows that three-quarters of Americans confess that they don’t know their next-door neighbours.5 In the UK, six out of ten people don’t know their neighbours’ names.6 It would seem that the consumer culture of ‘more’ helped businesses get bigger while prizing us further and further apart.
Through the fifties and sixties, manufacturers and marketers encouraged American workers to give up their hobbies and free time for the choice of bigger cars, better homes and more technology. The result was a dramatic decline in ‘social capital’. Robert Putnam, a political science professor at Harvard University, was responsible for popularizing the concept of social capital, defining it as ‘the trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’.7 In his book Bowling Alone, he traced the decline in social capital through a study of American membership in bowling leagues. Putnam found that between 1980 and 1993, while the total number of people who bowled in America increased by 10 percent, the number of bowling leagues decreased by 40 percent. And as Putnam notes, ‘Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once during 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections.’8 In short, the more people who bowl alone, the fewer conversations over beer and pizza, and the greater the overall decline in human interaction. The less time people spent socializing, the more time they spent in the office or shopping. The irony is that while Americans tripled their capacity to consume between 1980 and 2000, they found themselves with far less time to enjoy the fruits of their labour.9 As former president Bill Clinton said in a 1993 speech, ‘Most Americans are working harder for less.’10
Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman, philosopher, and – as one might now call him – futurist, was ahead of his time when he wrote in 1757, ‘The great error of our nature is not to know where to stop; not to be satisfied with any reasonable requirement . . . but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit of more.’ It is this ‘insatiable pursuit of more’ that we must now address. Adam Smith remarked that Burke was ‘The only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do.’11 They both wanted to create a better society through competition but with a healthy balance between pursuit of self-interest and pursuit of the greater good. Over two centuries later, their vision might be taking shape.
We may be coming out of the consumer trance we have been living in for the past fifty or so years. At the heart of this transformation are two interlocking phenomena. The first is a values shift. There is a growing consumer consciousness that infinite growth and consumption based on finite resources are not a viable combination. Consequently, we are finding ways to get more out of what we buy, and more importantly, out of what we don’t buy. At the same time, we are starting to recognize that the constant quest for material things has come at the expense of impoverishing relationships with friends, family, neighbours and the planet. This realization is causing a desire to re-create stronger communities. We are experiencing a tipping point from the pursuit of ‘what’s in it for me?’ towards the mind-set of ‘what’s in it for us?’ But more than that, we are beginning to see that self-interest and collective good depend on each other. It is in my self-interest to stop global warming; it is in my self-interest to participate in elections; it is in my interest to correct an online entry on Wikipedia.
Reclaiming Old Virtues
Our awareness of the false promises of our consumer economy is not new. Just as mass consumerism was taking hold, a visionary tried to halt the emerging culture of materialism. Cereal giant Kellogg Company founder W. K. Kellogg decided in 1930, right around the start of the Great Depression, that most of his fifteen hundred employees would go from a traditional eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown championed the initiative, announcing at the time, ‘Four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.’12 The existing workforce took a slight pay cut, but Kellogg raised the hourly rate to offset the loss and promised production bonuses to encourage people to work hard.
But Kellogg wanted to do more than provide and save jobs. He recognized that rather than passing time, like previous generations, people were spending it, getting lost in the ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption. This mania was leaving them disconnected from their communities. Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day that Brown and Kellogg hoped to show that the ‘Free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.’13 It was a bold vision, and it worked – for a while.
The workers in Battle Creek embraced the extra two hours. Beyond the time spent at home with their family and friends, the time also created a sense of freedom to pursue leisure interests. Women sewed, gardened, visited neighbours and cooked together. Men exercised, hunted, visited libraries and explored other hobbies. As Hunnicutt writes, ‘Those extra two hours were precious and offered an opportunity to craft the