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

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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 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.
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