The Mystic Social Scientist

By Andrew Norton

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough By Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss Allen & Unwin, 2005, 224pp, $24.95 ISBN 1 174114 671 2

The more we shop, the more Clive Hamilton tells us to stop. The long consumer boom of the 1990s and 2000s prompted Affluenza, Hamilton’s third book—after The Mystic Economist (1994) and Growth Fetish (2003)—to denounce what he sees as the psychological, sociological and environmental consequences of over-consumption.

To fully understand Affluenza, co-written with Hamilton’s Australia Institute colleague Richard Denniss, we need to go back to The Mystic Economist, the first volume of this anti-consumerist trilogy.1 Though Affluenza dates a ‘growing and unhealthy preoccupation with money and material things’ (p.178) from the early 1990s, The Mystic Economist takes us back much further, to the scientific-industrial revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries.

A key contention of The Mystic Economist, as in Hamilton’s later writing, is that we have a ‘true self’ that we need to find (pp.2-3). However, the scientific-industrial revolution made this difficult. In earlier times, individuals were immersed in a ‘community and a consciousness that bespoke a magical relationship with the natural environment and these relationships defined their identities’ (p.124). After the revolution, people were psychologically separated, as science undermined religion and mystical relationships with nature, and as capitalism moved people from families and villages to towns and factories. According to Hamilton, urban life was ‘lonely and fractured’ (p.126).

Though the pre-revolution world of unity is gone, Hamilton believes that the needs it served remain. He says that ‘what we truly want is to transcend the division between ourselves and the universe, to attain the godhead and achieve immortality, but that we attempt to attain it by false means, by money’ (p.101). Our true self is a ‘spiritual self’ that defines us as human (p.175). If we persist with being ‘preoccupied by material enrichment’ we will ‘remain doomed to spiritual impoverishment’ (p.193).

Unsurprisingly, The Mystic Economist lacked the broad interest and appeal of subsequent Hamilton books. ‘Mystic’ writers cannot easily convince people who want evidence or logic, who are reluctant to ‘accept intuition and to acknowledge their feelings as guides to action’ (p.153). The Fairfax online database records no mention of The Mystic Economist in 1994. Hamilton knew he had a problem, stating in warning and with understatement that ‘the arguments of this book run counter to the underlying principles of academic discourse’ (preface), but in 1994 had no solution.

New tactics

Over the next decade, however, Hamilton kept his basic ideas but changed his tactics. To persuade people with no nostalgia for the pre-modern world, and no felt need to transcend any division with the universe, he had to work within the prevailing culture.

1 Growth Fetish, like The Mystic Economist, argues that material wealth is a corrupting distraction from what really matters. But laments for the pre-modern world fade into passing mentions, replaced by a very modern concern with individual happiness. The criticism is now not that contemporary society fails by the standards of a long-gone society, but that it fails by its own standards. For more than half a century, pollsters have asked people in Western societies how happy they are. Despite large increases in material living standards, our average subjective well- being is unchanged. For Hamilton, it is proof that making more money is futile.2

In a 2004 paper, ‘The disappointment of liberalism and the quest for inner freedom’, Hamilton repackages his ‘true self’ argument in more familiar terms.3 In this later version, God retreats into the background, replaced by the uncontroversial idea that there can be differences between our short and long-term interests, between what we are doing now and what we should be doing, between our inauthentic and authentic selves. Cleverly, Hamilton cites comments on the issue by left-liberals such as John Rawls and right-liberals such as F.A. Hayek, to show that he is entering the intellectual mainstream and to criticise ‘neoliberals’ for creating economies and societies in which the ‘true self’ is continually trumped by the untrue self.

It is because Hamilton wants to protect the ‘true self’ that he despises many aspects of modern society, and modern capitalism in particular. Affluenza is the next instalment, after Growth Fetish, in his attempt to demonstrate, using evidence and reason rather than appeals to faith and intuition, that the ideas and institutions of liberal societies make it hard to live an authentic life.

The crowding out thesis

In common with many other anti-market writers, Affluenza’s authors believe that values and attitudes they associate with market societies, such as materialism, crowd out other ways of looking at the world. In their analysis, the norms and goals appropriate to non-market spheres of life cannot survive the invading marketplace ethos. The crowding out thesis is implicit in the metaphor-pun title ‘affluenza’, a virus that spreads uncontrolled through society. It is there in Hamilton and Denniss’ argument that advertising does more than attempt to persuade us of the benefits of this or that product, offering narrow and specific messages. Instead, they believe that advertising sells us a worldview, that ‘happiness can be bought, where problems can solved by a product, and where having more things is a measure of success’ (p.40). ‘The values of the market have penetrated the relationship between parents and children’ they complain’ (p.34). ‘Market ideology and consumerism appear to have a more powerful grip than ever before…” they allege (p.154). Unless these trends are stopped ‘all aspects of our personal lives and social worlds [will be] turned over to the market’ (p.194).

If real, this crowding out is a problem, because an extensive literature shows that people oriented to extrinsic goals such as making money are, on average, less happy than those oriented toward intrinsically-rewarding activities such as personal relationships, fulfilling work, community service, and religion. It is in these areas that we will find our ‘true selves’. But how credible is the crowding out thesis? Have advertisers persuaded us that consumption leads to happiness? Has this belief conquered other more complex ideas of well-being?

One of the most difficult social science findings for Hamilton and Denniss’s thesis is that this extrinsic orientation toward money is least commonly found among the affluent—the people whose presumably materialist motivations have led them to spend their lives in pursuit of the dollar. Instead, it is associated with poverty. It is more likely to be found in poor countries than rich countries, and among poor people in rich countries (it is a subject for another time, but the

2 countries closest to the pre-modern mindset The Mystic Economist regrets losing often perform dismally in indicators of subjective well-being).4

The contrary thesis, one advanced by early pro-capitalist writers like Adam Smith, that wealth creates space for matters other than sheer material survival, looks like the better one. Paradoxically, one cure for the ill-effects of materialist attitudes is more money. Once you have it, you can stop worrying about it and start thinking about other things. Consistent with this, political scientists believe that the last few prosperous decades have seen the rise of ‘post- materialism’ in politics.5 As countries became richer, alleviating material hardship became less important and ‘quality of life’ issues more important. This is why environmentalism has had its greatest influence in the wealthy West, and not in poor countries whose people have had little opportunity to be corrupted by advertising or market ideology.

Consistent with this finding, surveys in affluent countries that ask people about their life priorities, or about what would contribute most to improving their lives, invariably find non- monetary considerations top the list. Drawing on Australian and international research up to the 1980s, Bruce Headey and Alex Wearing found that throughout the Western world the domains of life that matter most were marriage and sex, friendships and leisure, material living standards, work and health. When they correlated domain satisfactions with life satisfaction in their Australian sample, leisure and marriage were the most important.6

There is no evidence that 1990s ‘affluenza’ changed this. In the 1999-2002 World Values Survey, Australians ranked 16th out of 80 nations in saying that leisure was ‘very important’ in the lives, and 90% agreed that ‘family’ was very important in their lives (rankings are less meaningful for this indicator, because opinion is similar in most countries).7 By contrast, on money-related indicators Australian opinion does not suggest a high orientation to pursuing wealth compared to other countries. Fewer Australians than in most other countries thought good pay important in a job, while more Australians than in most countries wanted jobs that were interesting, gave them an opportunity to achieve something, and let them use their initiative.8

About a month after Affluenza was published, Hamilton released a short paper on satisfaction with income, using data collected in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Survey, Australia (HILDA) during 2003.9 What’s particularly useful about this survey is that similar questions asked in the 1984 and 1994 National Social Science Surveys let us track financial satisfaction over time. If the affluenza of the 1990s and beyond did change our values, financial satisfaction ought to be declining as advertising pushes our material aspirations ahead of our incomes. Instead, satisfaction went up rather than down between 1994 and 2003, and was the same in 2003 as 1984.10 The dip in income some people experienced in the aftermath of the early 1990s recession, rather than a 1984-94 bout of affluenza, presumably explains lower satisfaction in 1994.

If we can infer attitudes from behaviour, time-use surveys, unfortunately carried out infrequently, leave no trace of an outbreak of affluenza in Australia between 1992 and 1997. The average number of minutes per day spent on employment-related activities and on ‘purchasing goods and services’ remained the same between the two surveys (though there was a trend toward full-time employees working longer hours in that period).11 Spending went up in the intervening years, but it did not take up more of people’s days.

So even if advertisers try to persuade us that happiness comes from material things their success is very limited. It obviously is not true, and most people don’t believe it. Life experience is a more powerful guide to appropriate values than fleeting images on TV. Oddly, Affluenza itself

3 provides yet more evidence against the psychologically colonising power of marketing. Hamilton and Denniss cite a survey, consistent with those described above, which found that 75% of people nominated more time with friends and family as a way to improve their quality of life, while only 38% nominated more money. They also report a survey in which large majorities in every income group say that Australian society is “too materialistic” (pp.146-150). So “market values” and consumerism are pervasive and most people think that there is too much materialism?

A sense of perspective

Hamilton and Denniss think that Australians are ‘deeply ambivalent about the contradiction’ (p.152) between their beliefs and their consumer spending. But there is another plausible and non- contradictory explanation—that most people keep money and material goods in perspective, seeing them as just one part of overall well-being (common sense that accords with the empirical evidence). As Affluenza’s authors acknowledge a couple of times in the book, consuming itself is not psychologically harmful (pp.16-17, 187). It is attitudes to consuming that make the difference. If you define yourself by material consumption or think it is enough for happiness then you are in trouble; otherwise not. Hamilton and Denniss believe consumer behaviour reveals attitudes that are in fact less common than they suppose.

In this, Hamilton and Denniss are at one with the Australians who describe other people as too materialistic. These findings are not surprising when patterns of answers to questions like this are observed across a range of polls. When asked about other people, almost invariably most poll respondents give more negative answers than if they asked about themselves or their families.12 This is partly to do with bias in favour of oneself, but also to the skewed nature of the available information. People know about their own lives and attitudes, and those of people close to them, but the behaviour of others only provides ambiguous evidence as to their motivations and beliefs. Assuming that materialism drives pursuit of a well-paid job or consumer spending is not implausible, but nor is it necessarily right.

Affluenza’s argument about the pervasive effect of advertising on values is also undermined by its discussion of ‘downshifters’, people who consciously decide to take a lower income and lower level of consumption to pursue other life goals (Ch. 10). Hamilton says that nearly one-quarter of adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s had downshifted in the decade prior to 2002. How pervasive can “market values” be when such a large minority opt-out?—especially as that was the decade in which Hamilton and Denniss claim that Australia was ‘infected by affluenza’ (p.178). Again, their own evidence suggests that people retain a sense of perspective, that they realise that lives can get out of balance (consistent with the earlier survey, more time with family was the most common reason given for downshifting), and can take appropriate action.

Debt and overwork

While it is unlikely that advertising of goods and services can change our deepest priorities (our ‘true selves’), Hamilton and Denniss are on stronger ground arguing that it can alter our behaviour. Indeed, advertising exists to change behaviour. When advertising persuades us to do unwise or imprudent things, it creates a gap between our short and long-term interests, between what we are doing and what we should be doing, as Hamilton discussed in his 2004 paper on the ‘disappointment of liberalism’.

Advertising has surely paid a part in rising levels of personal debt. Hamilton and Denniss point out that it is not just marketers of goods and services indirectly encouraging us to go into debt, it is also financial institutions, keen to lend ever-more money (pp.74-76). Through aggressive

4 marketing of cards, extending credit limits unasked, imposing transaction costs on EFTPOS and ATM withdrawals, and loyalty schemes they have made it easier for people to land themselves in financial difficulties. Hamilton and Denniss greatly exaggerate the number of people vulnerable to problem debt by repeating a claim attributed to the Australian Consumers’ Association that 75% of people are carrying balances on their cards (p.74). Two other surveys report than over three-quarters pay off their cards each month—though according to Reserve Bank data interest is accruing on 70% of credit card debt.13 But some people do have trouble with easy credit.

For the most part, debt does not in itself have the psychologically negative consequences that Hamilton and Dennis associate with the ‘marketing society’, which they say is ‘strongly correlated with the rise in depression, anxiety, obesity and a range of other disorders’ (p.38). The Australian Unity Well-being Index finds only minor differences in the average well-being of those with debt (75.4) and those without debt (74.6). People owing over $200,000 actually have higher well-being than people with no liabilities—because such people are usually high income- earners with assets behind the debt. Not being able to always pay debts, however, is a clear negative for well-being. In the under $60,000 a year income group well-being falls below the normal range among those who cannot always pay their debts, and significantly so for households with incomes of less than $30,000 a year.14

Hamilton and Denniss offer only critique of the debt culture, and no direct solutions. This is a common pattern through all three of Hamilton’s anti-consumerist books, which overwhelmingly point to problems rather than offer remedies. Alternative policies are discussed briefly where they are suggested at all. The closest they go to a policy for controlling debt appears in the ‘Political Manifesto for Wellbeing’ at the end of the book. It suggests advertising codes of conduct ‘be legislated so that irresponsible and deceptive marketing is outlawed’ (p.222). Very little advertising would pass Hamilton’s test of ‘responsibility’.

Affluenza devotes a chapter to ‘overwork’, through both long weekly hours and not taking holidays, attacking its effects on health, relationships and communities. Immersion in a work- spend culture, they argue, makes it likely that some individuals acquire the materialist motivations that make the long hours ‘worth it’ (pp.88-89, the crowding out thesis again). Though the chapter itself is light on policy detail, the ‘Political Manifesto for Wellbeing’ sets out a way of curbing overwork: ‘we need to limit working hours by reducing the maximum working week to 35 hours during the next eight to ten years and by more thereafter’ (pp.220-21).

This proposal applies a standard rule to diverse people, imposing overleisure on some to curb overwork in others. Hamilton and Dennis recognise a distinction between ‘workophiles’ who find their jobs fulfilling, and ‘workaholics’, who work longer to have more money or because they fear the sack (p.87), but do not tell us that workophiles are common. In a 2000 survey under 12% of those working 49 hours a week or more said they would prefer to work fewer hours for less money. Hamilton and Denniss could dismiss this as the false consciousness of those carried away with consumerism. Remarkably, however, more than two-thirds of people working 49-59 hours a week chose the ‘same hours and earn the same’ option, meaning they could keep spending without working as many hours.15 Numerous workophiles also appear in a HILDA survey of fathers. More than half express moderate to high satisfaction with their hours, and they indicate similar work, relationship and life satisfaction to people working shorter hours.16 This may be because long hours are most prevalent among professional and managerial staff, whose jobs are often stimulating, and among the self-employed.17 The text’s theoretical acknowledgment of varying work preferences vanishes from the manifesto’s practical political agenda.

Authoritarians for well-being?

5

The brevity and vagueness of policy ideas in Hamilton’s books leaves how they should be read in some doubt. Perhaps they should be read as self-help books, offering advice for the unfortunate few who do not understand why they are overworked, indebted, and unhappy. Perhaps they should be read as social critiques, providing the minor pleasure of looking down on other people’s gullible beliefs and foolish behaviour. But should they be read so modestly and so innocently? Notably, the manifesto at the book’s end is not aimed just at personal conduct; it is expressly ‘political’.

It is hard to believe that Hamilton is not through his collected works laying the groundwork for a wide-ranging political agenda. Though the latest book moves from the sweeping attack on modern societies of the first to specific discussions of contemporary concerns, such as depression, working hours, and personal debt, it is unlikely that Hamilton has narrowed his concerns to these irritations afflicting minorities in Western societies. They are just recognisable problems that Hamilton can link to his overarching theme of the corrupting effects of money. As Hamilton says, unless affluenza is curtailed ‘our children and grandchildren will be condemned to lives without meaning’ (p.194).

This meaninglessness could not possibly be cured by the handful of policy ideas in the manifesto—the 35 hour week, limits on shopping developments, advertising control, higher taxes on damaging environmental activities. Talking about the manifesto elsewhere, Hamilton has said that the manifesto’s political objective is to contribute to a social movement that would, in time, cause far-reaching social transformation—a call to arms, if you like’.18 The three anti- consumerist books are a similar ‘call to arms’. The narrow and soft focus of Affluenza is not a retreat from The Mystic Economist, but new tactics in selling an old message. Hamilton has learnt things from the marketing books he has been reading, and now knows that Affluenza is a better title than The Mystic Social Scientist.

Accusations of favouring coercion annoy Hamilton. Yet it would be almost impossible to get from where we are now to where he wants us to be without an all-intrusive state. Most people today are happy with their lives, and the financial satisfaction statistics Hamilton provides suggest a widespread preference for more rather than less income. Even with the downshifters, we are a long way from getting to a low-consumption world voluntarily. Social change would need to be sped along by political force.

To be clear, Hamilton does not expressly advocate such force. He is not going to turn into our Hitler of happiness. Instead, Hamilton’s anti-consumerist trilogy is a proto-authoritarian critique of liberal market society, part of a long tradition of such critiques.19 His arguments provide the justifications political authoritarians would use to take away our freedoms to save our souls, but leave the detail to other people and other times. It is the social movements aimed at far-reaching social transformations that we should fear, not Clive Hamilton or Richard Denniss. With Growth Fetish in its sixth reprint, and more than 4,000 people already signed up to the Wellbeing manifesto on it website,20 Hamilton is clearly finding a receptive audience for his views. Whether they want a personal or a political sea change remains to be seen.

1 Clive Hamilton, The Mystic Economist (Canberra: Willow Park Press, 1994).

6

2 Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003). See my critique ‘A Manifesto for Misery’, Policy, Spring 2003, pp. 45-51. 3 Clive Hamilton, ‘The Disappointment of Liberalism and the quest for inner freedom’, Discussion Paper No. 70, The Australia Institute, Canberra, August 2004. 4 For an international materialism ranking derived from the 1999-2002 World Values Survey see Ronald Inglehart (eds) et al., Human Beliefs and Values: A cross-cultural sourcebook based on the 1999-2002 values surveys, (Mexico: siglo xxi editors, 2004), table Y002. Australia ranked 77th out of 79 countries surveyed. Table A008 shows that the less happy countries are all developing—with the exception of South Korea. For citations to evidence on the link between being poor in a rich country and materialism see Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), pp.32-33. 5 For an international overview, see Paul R Abramson & Ronald Inglehart, Value Change in Global Perspective, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995). 6 Bruce Headey and Alex Wearing, Understanding Happiness: A Theory of Subjective Well-being, (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992), pp.9, 91. 7 Inglehart, Human Beliefs and Values, tables A001, A003 8 Inglehart, Human Beliefs and Values, tables, C011, C016, C018. 9 Clive Hamilton and Claire Barbato, ‘Why Australians Will Never Be Prosperous’, Australia Institute Webpaper, July 2005. 10 1984 67.5, 1994 60.2, 2003 67.5. 1984 NSSS 1-10 scale,1 labelled ‘dissatisfied’ and 10 labelled ‘satisfied’, 6-10 classed as satisfied. 1994 NSSS, 1-9 scale 1-4, labeled ‘delighted’ to ‘mostly satisfied’ classed as satisfied, HILDA 2003, 0-11 scale 0 classed as ‘totally dissatisfied’ and 10 classed as ‘totally satisfied’, 6-10 classed as satisfied, with 5 labelled ‘neutral’. Dissatisfaction 20.8, 19.3, 18.1 respectively. NSSS available: http://assda.anu.edu.au/publications.html 11 Australian Bureau of Statistics, How Australians Use Their Time 1997, (ABS: Canberra, 1998), p.19. 12 See my article ‘Quality of Life and the Prophets of Gloom’, Policy, Summer 2003-04, esp. 14-16. 13 On paying off debt: Robert Cummins et al., The Well-being of Australians—Personal Financial Debt, Australian Unity Well-being Index Survey 11, August 2004, Part A, pp.103-114; Reserve Bank of Australia, ‘Credit Card Indicators’, Financial Stability Review, September 2004, pp. 16-17.On total debt and debt accruing interest: Reserve Bank of Australia, Credit and charge card statistics. The difference between these two figures is striking, and perhaps explains the ACA’s confusion. Possible explanations: credit card holders with large balances are less likely to pay each month, people with cards that have no- interest free period may pay each month, people with multiple cards may pay off some but not all, confusion with debit cards. 14 Cummins, Well-being of Australians, p.104. 15 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Social Trends 2002, (ABS: Canberra, 2002), p.133. 16 Matthew Gray, Lixia Qu, David Stanton & Ruth Weston, ‘Long Work Hours and the Wellbeing of Fathers and their Families’, Australian Journal of Labour Economics, Vol. 7 No. 2 (June 2004), esp. pp. 264-70. 17 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Social Trends 2003, (ABS: Canberra, 2003), p.121. 18 See his comments on John Quiggin’s weblog: http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/05/05/wellbeing-manifesto/ 19 Eg Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993). 20 http://www.wellbeingmanifesto.net/

7