Taking Responsibility for Consumption
by Will Wilkinson
The Conversation
October 26th, 2009
In her most recent post, Elizabeth Anderson writes:
Wilkinson blames the poor for their self-destructive spending on status goods, while commending the market for making their access to such goods cheaper. They can even get the castoffs of the rich from Goodwill!
I think I must have stated my point badly, since I’m sure Anderson wouldn’t otherwise give my argument such an uncharitable gloss. My point was that all of us, rich or poor, are capable of taking responsibility for our consumption decisions. For example, I don’t believe that environmentalists are asking too much of us when they encourage us to consume in ways that conserve resources and minimize the environmental spillover effects of our consumption choices. Our priorities are our priorities; they are to a significant degree up to us. We can change them. I wonder if Anderson believes that the mother in her story made the right decision. If not, I wonder if she thinks that it was within the mother’s power to explain to her that her daughter why paying the utility bill must take priority over fashion and that, indeed, taking responsibility in this is something to be proud of. I don’t think that straitened economic circumstances strip people of their agency or deny them the dignity of wisely exercising it, and I doubt Anderson does either, which is why I found her reply puzzling.
Also, I did not commend the market for making access to status goods cheaper. I commended the market for making quality clothes cheaper, a development that has diminished their usefulness as status goods. Dana Thomas’ book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster bemoans at length the democratization of what were once exclusive goods. I claimed that it has never been easier for low-income individuals and households to dress themselves in manner that does not signal poverty, that is, in a manner that enables even the very poor to appear in public without shame. There is a vast middle ground between the prestige of the latest fashion and the humiliation of shabby, dirty, out-of-date, ill-fitting clothes. It’s not clear to me why Anderson wants to deny this.
Anderson’s discussion of the relationship between positional consumption and inequality does not seem plausible. She says:
[Will] naively underestimates the cruel discernment of those higher up, who taunt and humiliate those wearing out-of-fashion castaways and cheap knockoffs. He also wonders how “lopping off the top decile of the income distribution” could possibly help the poor, given that people compete for status with those just above them, not with those completely out of their league. Conspicuous consumption is a form of spiteful competition, which cascades down the rungs of the income ladder. What those once-fashionable castaways yield for the poor is not a chance to save face before those just above them (since those just above know better), but rather a chance to lord it over those just below them. This is some consolation prize that economic inequality is giving them! Only it’s coming out of the hide of those even less advantaged than they are. Compress the distance between the top and bottom rungs, and there is considerably less scope for such spiteful competition, so it seems pointless and absurd.
Perhaps if I were an academic, this vision of spiteful positional competition would look more familiar to me. But off campus here in Iowa City, there’s just not a lot of furious clothes-based status-signaling going on. I don’t think that’s unusual. There is, for sure, a standard for adequacy. Evidently a pair of jeans, a Hawkeyes sweatshirt, and a pair of running shoes meets it. It is not a hard standard to meet. I think Anderson wildly overestimates the extent to which people are concerned with signaling much more than socially acceptable adequacy with their clothes, and to be puzzlingly dismissive of the fact that this has become easier to do.
Also, Anderson’s argument strikes me as a complaint against mathematics more than anything else. If we lop off the top decile of the income distribution, it just shifts the deciles. There’s still a top and a bottom half, still a top and bottom ten percent. If Anderson is right about the “cruel discernment of those higher up,” it’s hard to see how compressing the scale will stymie what she sees as the practically undefeatable human capacity to make distinctions.
October 29th, 2009 at 11:46 am
[...] Will Wilkinson: all of us, rich or poor, are capable of taking responsibility for our consumption decisions…Our priorities are our priorities; they are to a significant degree up to us. We can change them. I wonder if Anderson believes that the mother in her story made the right decision. If not, I wonder if she thinks that it was within the mother’s power to explain to her that her daughter why paying the utility bill must take priority over fashion and that, indeed, taking responsibility in this is something to be proud of. I don’t think that straitened economic circumstances strip people of their agency or deny them the dignity of wisely exercising it, [...]