"Competitive Spending" Is for Losers

by Renee Kjartan, Free Press Contributor

he Overspent American by Harvard economist Juliet B. Schor (Basic Books, 1998), is yet another in a growing category of books calling on Americans to spend less and live more simply, to preserve the environment and to live better. Your Money or Your Life by Seattle authors Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (Penguin Books, 1992) tells how to track every penny, start saving, work less, and live a life doing something more meaningful than getting and spending. Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin (William Morrow, 1993) outlines the philosophical and spiritual basis for living more simply. Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things by Seattle-based John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning (Northwest Environment Watch, 1997) details the crushing effect on the environment of activities we take for granted, such as producing a newspaper or driving a car.

Schor's book adds statistical underpinning to these books. Her mass of statistics and studies will stand as enduring proof of the awesome fin de siecle spending follies we are witnessing today. Like most simplicity authors, she is also an activist in the cause. She is a founding board member of the Maryland-based Center for a New American Dream, which helps individuals and institutions reduce their consumption. Her previous book, The Overworked American, showed how the 40-hour week is obsolete for many workers.

Her latest book shows the heavy economic cost behind the present spate of recreational or "competitive" spending. Indeed, Schor says Americans have moved from "keeping up with the Joneses," of past generations, to striving to leapfrog beyond the Joneses. It's a world where the brand name must be displayed, whether on one's purse, lipstick, car, or shoes.

The current binge--a recent issue of U.S. News and World Report called it a veritable "arms race" of consumption--has led to crushing debt for millions of people, who continually ratchet upward the expense and number of their purchases. While many people can pay for their luxury house [or houses], cars, and vacations up front, most pay by borrowing, Schor says, adding that household debt was about $5.5 trillion in late 1997.

Credit cards make going into debt extremely easy. Schor quotes one former big spender, now a "downshifter," who explained: People "want to look richer than they are. If you have five credit cards, that actually makes it very easy to look richer than you are." This $20,000-a-year cook worked near an expensive health club. When he joined the club he felt compelled to spend more than his income for "lessons, rackets, tournaments, and the restaurant after games" in an attempt to keep up with members whose incomes far outstripped his. He "aspired to upscale consuming but couldn't afford it. That's one hallmark of the new situation," Schor concludes. Another hallmark is that so many people interviewed said they "always" had something in mind that they wanted to buy.

Is hyper-consumption typical of the less educated? No. "Apparently people with more education are more status-oriented, more tuned in to identity and positional consumption, and more concerned about keeping up with the upscale groups to which they aspire to belong," Schor states.

Also keeping "the consumer escalator moving ever upward" are present-day gift-buying customs, in which people "ratchet up the spending" and "end up spending more than they should." Here Schor includes all the "self-gifts" that people buy in their "retail therapy" rituals.

With so much buying, Americans "increasingly resent paying taxes to buy public goods like parks, schools, the arts, or support for the poor because taxes are perceived as subtracting from the private consumption they deem absolutely necessary," Schor notes.

She adds that the heavy consumption is affecting the environment, "whether it's the rain forests cleared to graze cattle which become Big Macs, to toxins collecting in our bodies from the plastic that dominates our material environment, or the pesticides used to grow the cotton for our T-shirts."

But a backlash against the spending is occurring. Schor says between 1990-1996, nearly one fifth of Americans had voluntarily made a lifestyle change that entailed earning less money. The downshifters, as she calls them, said they wanted more balance and simplicity in their lives.

Schor says this group is different from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s because they are "not dropping out of society, few are living communally, and most are not ideologically motivated." In fact, she says, the downshifters come from all walks of life.

Schor provides nine "principles" to help people get off the "consumer escalator:"

1) Control desire: Stay away from malls, get off the catalog mailing lists, socialize less with "shopaholic friends."

2) Make exclusivity [e.g. professional-quality "cookware"] uncool.

3) Control yourself: PTA groups, families, friends, can discuss and agree on spending limits for clothes, gym shoes, gifts.

4) Learn to share-lawnmowers, books, CDs, etc.

5) Deconstruct commercials: Does the Jeep ad really show freedom on the open road, or does the reality behind it include payments that enslave people and contamination of the environment?

6) Avoid "retail therapy" in which you buy something for yourself to make yourself "feel better."

7) Decommercialize rituals: Instead of marking occasions with gifts and spending, find alternatives.

8) Think about working less, earning less, spending less-and having more time for yourself and your family.

9) Push for taxes on luxuries like SUVs.

Schor concludes that a "find[ing] our way out of the mall" could lead to a "civic reengagement" that would be more fulfilling than leafing through catalogs looking for things to buy. The Center for a New American Dream discusses theses questions on its Web site [www.newdream.org], and in its quarterly newsletter, Enough! The Center's motto is "More Fun! Less Stuff!" After reading about the dreary, mindless greediness in The Overspent American, one would be convinced that less would certainly be more--and, more fun.