Seven Increasingly Complex Questions For: JULIET SCHOR

Voluntary simplicity, downshifting, minimalism – call it what you will, for over twenty years Juliet Schor has been its most eloquent exponent. Through books (including True Wealth and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need), lectures, articles and whatever other avenues are available to her, Schor has argued that by working less, spending less and consuming less, you can enjoy life more.

Currently Professor of Sociology at Boston College, Schor's training is in economics, which she taught for seventeen years at Harvard. In 1997, she co-founded The Center for a New American Dream – now known as New Dream – which declares its mission in bold terms: "to empower individuals, communities, and organizations to transform their consumption habits to improve well-being for people and the planet."

A current passion is an essential one: How contemporary economic conditions – notably, inequality – are contributing to our environmental crisis. Her work has never been more important.
 

What led to founding The Center for a New American Dream?

It was the mid '90s, and we were feeling that the environmental movement was failing to engage with consumption as an issue. And the reason was, the bigger green organizations were reluctant to be branded as elitist liberals telling other people how to live. To be fair, household behavior is not the dominant factor in environmental degradation. But we felt, on the one hand, it's an important part, and,  number two, it might be a way to get people to push for other things. That was our vision: to use household issues, and increased awareness of patterns there, to turn people into activists.

New projects or priorities?

One paper I'm working on considers the effects of income concentration on carbon emissions, both across countries and within the US. We looked at income concentration at the top of the distribution – among the top 10% or the top 1% of the population. And we found that countries or states that have more concentration of income and wealth at the top also have higher carbon emissions.

We have two hypotheses for why: First, people at the top of the distribution live very intensive consumption lifestyles. And second, in places where you have more concentrated economic power you also have more concentrated political power. And that political power is employed to stop regulations on carbon pollution. It affects the political process. As we can see here in the US.

Have there been studies on the psychological consequences of downshifting? Does it make people – for lack of a less elusive word – "happier"?

I've done surveys on voluntary downshifting – in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2014 – and, generally, people reported they were overwhelmingly satisfied. Only a small number, maybe 10-12%, were happier before. The rest were split between "I'm happier and don't miss the money at all" and "I'm happier though I do miss the money – but I'm still better off." Of course, people who don't think they'll be happier don't make those voluntary changes, so the results aren't surprising.

There's substantial literature on what makes people happy, and it shows that the more materialistic you are, the worse off you are emotionally. We have lots of data on that. What makes people happy is good physical health, strong social connections, a sense of having meaning in life and, very importantly, free time – more time away from work is a big contributor to happiness. Almost all studies say that once you're above a certain threshold, more money doesn't make you happier.

You've also studied social pressures to consume. What are they? What turns us from meeting real needs to chasing illusory ones?

The first point is that consumption is a very social process. Some people think about consumption in terms of functional, utilitarian benefits – we want car to drive from a to b, we buy clothes to keep our body warm. Of course that's true. But really, much more important in terms of what is animating consumption practices in a wealthy society like our own is the social meaning of this consumption.

In my work, the key thing I focused on is consumption comparisons, or consumption competitions – the idea that we measure the adequacy of our consumption by how fits into a social milieu. There are  people whose consumption we see and want to match, or we want to defend ourselves against being out-classed by people who are ratcheting up their consumption. It's primarily social comparison and pressure that drives a lot of consumption – certain kinds of consumption more than others, of course.

A lot of it is for public display. The idea of conspicuousness is key – as per Thorstein Veblen. Some of the work I've done is to show how we're willing to pay a premium for the things we consume publicly, as opposed to the things we consume that other people don't see.  And by a premium I mean how much people are paying for a name, above the cost of production and quality.

Pressures to consume come from the social circles that we're in, but there's also a larger general social dimension. As it turns out, the more inequality we have in our society, the more intense consumption competition becomes. The ratcheting up of standards and the upward pressure to consume more and more, I have argued, comes, in important part, from the growing inequality in our society.

What's the environmental cost of unnecessary consumption?

I have to say it's extremely high. In the US, unnecessary consumption is also unnecessary resource use. We have more than double the carbon footprint of other countries at comparable standards of living. Somewhere between forty and fifty percent of the food produced in this country is wasted. That's huge, and of course food has a huge impact on carbon emissions.

Then if we get to things that some people buy that they don't really care for or discard quickly, it gets to be quite a big number. The average American buys 70 pieces of new apparel every year, and some consumers then throw away some of it after minimal use. Of course, this churn model of buying and discarding is complicated. What's essential for someone my seem wasteful to another. But certainly we know that there are ways to reduce the material footprint of our consumption that wouldn't have a big impact on our quality of life, or the satisfaction we get.

If we did a lot of social and technological and economic reorganization, we could get our carbon footprint down by maybe 75-80%, and people might be better off. There are interesting studies of really low-carbon-footprint countries with very high life expectancies and quality of life. It can be done.

Is it possible that the current downward trend in wages may actually inspire people to rethink, or even abandon, harmful materialism?

It depends on whom we're talking about. There's definitely a phenomenon in which people adjust to reduced opportunity and reduced  income. But that's only if they are well-off enough to have their needs met. Then they can adjust to it in a way that can be welfare-enhancing,.

But, for most people, the kind of downward mobility and degradation that we're seeing in this country as a result of the economic policies we're following – that's just a disaster, and we see what it's leading to. It has devastated communities – we're seeing high levels of poverty, violence, high rates of addiction, etc. More and more people are unable to get access to work that pays livable wages. That's a trend that isn't leading to a happier, less materialistic culture. It's much more a producer of inequality and violence and a lot of ugly stuff.

Consumption is sometimes seen as an expression of freedom and democracy – a historical gift that's a privilege to exercise.

In a sense that's very true – historically, only elites were able to do much discretionary consumption. Mass consumption is an important accomplishment. But because of the failures of the economic system to deal with environmental impacts, it also turns out to be an eco-cidal path. We need to reconcile that belief in widespread access with ecologically sustainable consumption. I think it can be done.