Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  This kind of diagnosis appeals to our sense of injustice but has serious flaws. There is, first of all, little in these accounts that is unique to recent decades of inequality and luxury. Fromm, after all, was already bemoaning a surge of possessiveness in the 1950s–’60s, which, importantly, was an era of growing equality. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing two centuries earlier, luxury fever was a constant of commercial society across time. In his great work On the Origin of Inequality (1754), he put it forcefully: the ‘savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself’.99 Appearance and the opinion of others meant everything for the latter. Luxury, inequality – and, Rousseau would have added, slavery – drove each other forward. Today’s luxury critics write under the long shadow of these ideas, making it difficult to see today’s luxury except through the eyes of this older morality. More specifically, it is unclear how the super-rich can inform the lifestyle of the rest while living on a separate planet. Most people would be hard pressed to name a handful of the super-rich and we know very little about how they live. By comparison, 250 million viewers followed the Spanish/Portuguese hit video ‘Danza Kuduro’ in 2011, in which Don Omar picks up Lucenzo in a BMW Z4 and enjoys a cruise on a Viking Sport Cruiser V52 (a ‘mere’ fifty-six-foot motor yacht).100 In a media society, celebrity culture has a larger pull on material aspirations than a banker or CEO.

  The shift in cultural gravity from the wealthy to the movie star and tabloid beauty was already under way in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills pointedly noted that the cover of Life magazine featured not a single debutante ‘but no less than 178 movie queens, professional models, and the like . . . ’ 101 Significantly, it was the post-war decades of rising equality (1950s–’70s) that were also the years of the big consumer boom, in the USA and Western Europe alike. Tail-fins were getting longer in the 1950s. American homes, too, were getting bigger well before McMansions started to mushroom in suburbia in the 1990s. The super-rich were, in fact, downsizing in the 1950s–’60s, abandoning one luxurious mansion in Newport after another for a more ‘normal’ existence. Interestingly, American houses stopped growing in the 2000s, in spite of dizzying bonuses and escalating inequality.

  Many observers continue to take their inspiration from Thorstein Veblen, the great critic of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in America a century ago, whom we met earlier. Veblen’s moral outrage about the wastefulness of elite leisure, however, blinded him to the simple fact that consumer culture can reach up as well as down. Once a car, a home, a TV and a fridge came to be universal points of reference, elite taste lost a good deal of its autonomy. The ‘standard package’, as the sociologist David Riesman called it in 1955, started to operate as ‘a kind of sumptuary guide’ on the upper classes. Rather than dictating taste to others, the elite was being pulled along by the middle-class mainstream. They started driving the Lincoln required by business etiquette (rather than an eccentric red Jaguar) and wearing the blue jeans demanded by college life (rather than highly personal bohemian dress).102

  As we have seen in previous chapters, it would be foolish to think that class has completely ceased to be a marker of taste. The rich may listen to pop, but they also still go to the opera. Nonetheless, the number of acceptable styles from which people pick their identity has proliferated considerably in the last half-century. Distinction looks increasingly in all directions – sideways and downwards as well as upwards. The advancing pluralism in taste has diminished the influence of the rich as style icons even further.103

  Inequality in recent decades has resulted from a concentration not only of wealth at the top but of poverty at the bottom. Status-anxious people look downwards as well as upwards, seeking to stay ahead of the poorer Smiths as well as keeping up with the richer Joneses. That downward view is equally important and is easily overlooked in arguments that try to tie inequality to material excess. When the Smiths sink deeper into poverty, it should reduce the status anxiety among their middle-class neighbours. Why bother to upgrade one’s car if those falling down the social ladder have just traded down or lost their car altogether? In fact, this is what has been happening in Germany and China in recent decades: higher inequality has prompted higher saving, not spending escapades.

  Arguably, rising equality explains emulative consumption better than inequality, since it produces extra pressure to buy goods in order to keep ahead of those catching up. This was precisely the conclusion Alexis de Tocqueville took away from his tour of democratic America in 1831–2, when he compared it to his native, more stratified France. ‘When inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.’104 It is no coincidence that societies that began to favour an egalitarian lifestyle more recently, such as socialist East Germany, were also those where consumer goods mattered most for distinction. Luxury goods thrive in South Korea, not in spite of the fact, but perhaps because it is one of the most equal societies in the developed world.

  The inegalitarian luxury thesis tends to take the United States today as the norm, but consumer cultures have come in a variety of shapes. In capitalist societies today, extreme personal debt is not only found in countries suffering from high inequality and few welfare services but also in those blessed with high equality and a welfare state, notably Denmark. The difference is that Danes are happy while in debt – they score highest in international happiness surveys. They can go to sleep in the sure knowledge that the state will come to their rescue if they run out of money in the morning. Anglo-Saxon observers often report that conspicuous consumption is unknown in Scandinavia, but this has probably more to do with their inability to read local codes than with its absence. Spending goes on summer houses, interior design and high-end ski wax rather than on wristwatches and SU Vs. ‘Luxury fever’ is not a peculiar disease born out of Anglo-Saxon inequality. Take France, one of the few countries that so far has managed to escape widening income inequality. A high-net-worth French millionaire spends $30,000 on luxury goods a year, $8,000 more than the equivalent American.105 The inegalitarian thesis would predict the opposite.

  When we speak of luxury, we are, in fact, dealing with several markets. The high-end one includes classic Porsches and Tiffany and follows the ups and downs of the stock market.106 Luxury handbags and watches make up a second, more diffused market with a logic of its own. The demand for luxury accessories is no longer primarily about emulating the very rich. It is about a sense of belonging to a global ‘modern’ middle class, about vertical inclusion rather than hierarchical distinction. This is one reason for the popularity of luxury brands in Asian markets, including China, with its stellar savings rate. For millions of urban secretaries, going off to work with the same handbag and sunglasses conveys the feeling of being part of the modern world. In the European Union, an estimated three quarters of luxury bags were counterfeit in 2006; Italy alone seized 89 million falsi articles that year.107 Luxury, like consumption and taste more generally, has benefited from the relative loosening of the straitjacket of class-based taste since the 1950s. Formerly, luxury goods were about prestige: they signalled their owner’s status. What marketing analysts call ‘new luxury’ is about experience rather than ownership as such.108 It promises self-expression and belonging. Luxury is almost a democratic right: everyone is entitled to their own personal version of it. This is the backdrop to the phenomenal growth of luxury groups like LVMH in recent years – it had a revenue of €20 billion in 2010, one third of which came from Asia. Sales to the millions no longer means suicide for an exclusive brand. It is doubtful whether greater equality would change that.

  Looking back at consumer credit over the last century, it is striking how successfully most people have mastered the rising volume of credit that came their w
ay. Commentators in 1900 were united in predicting that debt meant moral corruption, social decay and bankruptcy. Some recent writers continue to argue that affluence has softened inherited restraint, leaving individuals unable to cope with the permanent flow of novelty.109 This is hardly true for credit. By and large, people have proved their moral critics wrong. For every item repossessed there have been thousands of cars, TVs and homes that were loyally paid off. Credit has oriented consumers towards the prospect of ownership. Paying the monthly mortgage or an instalment on a product focused the mind. The number at the mercy of loan sharks and high-interest pay-day lenders is much smaller today than it was a century ago. Yet for the few who have been kept off or pushed off the escalator of credit, being excluded from regular credit is much harder now, because so many features of life today depend on a decent credit rating. Here is one of the first signs of polarization characteristic of contemporary consumer culture.

  10

  Not So Fast

  The Society for the Deceleration of Time was founded in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1990 and, in addition to its inspired name, deserves recognition for one of the more imaginative attempts at behaviour change. In town centres, activists planted ‘speed traps’ to slow down pedestrian traffic. People caught rushing were pulled aside and given a symbolic fine on the spot: a toy tortoise which they had to steer along 50 slow yards, before they were allowed to carry on. The decelerators have not been slow in coming up with other creative disruptions of the hurried pace of life, including setting up hundreds of deck chairs for a collective siesta.1 Ironically, Austrian towns might strike most readers as in need of acceleration, not deceleration – a researcher who compared walking speeds across the world found Austrians walked more slowly than almost everyone else in Europe.2

  The tortoise has long been the symbol of a wise, measured lifestyle. In the 1830s, flâneurs began promenading the galleries of Paris with live ones on a lead, showing off the pleasures of aimless strolling.3 The return of the tortoise in the 1990s was part of a larger, global disquiet about the speed of life that reached a crescendo at the close of the twentieth century. A century that had started with promises of time-saving devices and leisure in abundance ended with anxieties about a ‘time famine’. In 1900, speed meant modernity and vitalism.4 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and other futurist artists glorified it. To be sluggish was for peasants. Today, it is speed that is treated as uncivilized. ‘Fast’ life is under attack in all its forms: food, fashion, design, travel, tourism, music and sex. In 2005, the artist Ohad Fishof set out on a ‘slow walk’ across London Bridge to celebrate Longplayer, a loop of music that will be playing until the end of the millennium – it took him 9 hours, 43 minutes and 25 seconds.

  The slow movement stretches from the many thousands of ‘downshifters’ who celebrate ‘Take Back Your Time Day’ in the USA and Canada to the few hundreds in the Sloth Club of Japan. Slow Food, the largest group, was born in 1989 in reaction to a McDonald’s erecting its golden arches next to the Spanish Steps in Rome. Since then, its initial emphasis on the pleasure of food has widened into an ‘eco-gastronomic’ politics of sustainability and responsible consumption. It currently counts 100,000 members in 153 countries. Cittaslow (slow city), its partner, followed in 1999, and at the time of writing has signed up 190 towns from Goolwa in Australia to Mungia in Spain; its symbol is the slug.5 The philosophy (and, we might add, view of history) of these groups is pretty straightforward: in the words of the Slow Food manifesto, the twentieth century ‘first invented the machine and then modelled its lifestyle after it. Speed became our shackles . . . Homo sapiens must regain wisdom and liberate itself from the “velocity” that is propelling it on the road to extinction.’6

  There is little dispute that the modern period has seen an unprecedented acceleration of life, although it is doubtful this started with the twentieth century. Friedrich Nietzsche worried in 1874 about the ‘increasing rush and hurry of life’ and the accompanying ‘decay of all reflection and simplicity’.7 He stood in a long line of commentators. Two generations earlier, touring the United States, it struck Alexis de Tocqueville that ‘the American’ was always in a hurry: ‘he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them.’8

  Acceleration has been driven by three main forces. One is technological innovation: steam engines and the internet, trains, planes and automobiles. A conservative estimate is that the speed of communication increased by a factor of 107 in the course of the twentieth century.9 The second is cultural: we feel the world is moving faster. It is tempting to think our sense of acceleration must have been the child of technological change, but perhaps it also worked the other way around. With the discovery of progress in the eighteenth century, modern societies transformed their sense of time from a wheel, where past, present and future spun in a circle, into an arrow with an open, unpredictable future. Finally, society itself has been speeding up, especially in the last half-century, as jobs and partners are changed more frequently and, with them, our sense of who we are.10

  The precise interplay between these factors lies beyond the scope of this book. What interests us is what difference our consuming behaviour has made to our use and sense of time. Put crudely, is being time poor the price we pay for being rich in stuff? There have been two slightly different affirmative answers to this question. In the first, quality time appears as the victim of frenetic consumption. Affluent societies squeeze ever greater returns out of every hour worked, but by doing so they also make each leisure hour relatively more expensive in terms of foregone income. To make it worthwhile, people try to get more out of free time by consuming more things more quickly and superficially. Activities that take time and skill are replaced by an ever-growing mountain of stuff that offers novelty and instant gratification. Let’s call this thesis the ‘kid in the candy store’ syndrome. The second proposition goes one step further. In a consumer society, where goods buy status and advertisements are everywhere, it suggests, people become so habituated to wanting more that they trade in leisure for longer work hours in order to finance their rising material aspirations. It is a form of self-enslavement. The quantity as well quality of leisure time suffers. People have to run faster and longer to keep their consuming self fed. This is the hamsterwheel syndrome. How close to reality is either of these answers?11

  THE LEISURE REVOLUTION: WORK IN PROGRESS

  A British man born in the 1840s would have clocked up 124,000 hours in the typical forty years of his life at work. His great-great-great grandson, on retiring in 1981, would similarly have spent forty years in his job but his total work hours would add up to a mere 69,000. And he could also look forward to living twenty years longer. Whereas his ancestor had spent half his waking hours working, he spent a mere 20 per cent.12 This decline in work hours is so impressive that it raises the obvious question of how anyone could doubt that the twentieth century delivered a leisure revolution. Nonetheless, the nature of this revolution and its very existence have been a subject of intense debate. Not surprisingly, what has happened to work and leisure has been most hotly contested in the first affluent society: the United States.

  Optimists can point to the data for work hours gathered by Angus Maddison, a pioneer of quantitative history. In 1900, an American worker worked 2,700 hours a year. By the 1980s, it was 1,600. In 1991, the sociologist Juliet Schor presented the case for the pessimists. Far from enjoying more and more leisure, she found that Americans since the 1960s were working longer hours and feeling increasingly stressed. Schor’s thesis was a version of the hamster-wheel scenario, with a twist. The long-hours culture, she argued, had its roots in the power of American capitalists: for them, it was easier to exploit and control a full-time workforce than to deal with flexible or part-time employees. Workers, who might have preferred more leisure, were bought off with higher pay. Over time, this trade-off trapped workers in a consumerist ‘work–spend cycle’.

  Mo
st time-use scholars who have scrutinized the pessimistic case have found it wanting. John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey have shown how work hours did continue to fall between 1965 and 1985 – by seven hours for men and six for women. By the latter date, the average American adult had a total of forty hours of free time per week. They similarly threw out the pessimists’ discovery of a ‘leisure gap’. Instead of women carrying a double or triple burden – juggling kitchen, children and a job – to support their husbands’ leisure, they identified an incipient ‘androgynous society’, with men and women increasingly spending their time in similar fashion.13

  Whom should a jury of historical readers believe? The competing interpretations reflect in no small measure different methods and lines of inquiry. Schor rested her case on subjective estimates. These captured that Americans increasingly felt overworked – there is little dispute that, in the United States and in developed societies more generally, the number of people who feel rushed has been going up since the 1970s.14 Our subjective sense, however, is a notoriously bad judge of time. ‘The happier the time, the quicker it passes,’ Pliny the Younger observed 2,000 years ago.15 It is not surprising that the more stressed people were, the longer work seemed; people’s estimates of how they spent their time each day routinely added up to more than twenty-four hours. A more conventional method asks people to keep track of their daily activities in time-use diaries. This was the method employed by Robinson and Godbey. These diaries provide a useful reality check: people worked less, it showed, than they felt they did.