How did we GET into this mess??? Read this site VERY GOOD Info here!
(President) Hoover emphasized individual home ownership. In his memoirs he wrote that “a primary right of every American family is the right to build a new house of its heart’s desire at least once. Moreover, there is the instinct to own one’s own house with one’s own arrangement of gadgets, rooms, and surroundings” (cited Nash 1998 7). The Commerce Department flooded the country with public relations materials on “homebuying” ideas, producing a leaflet entitled Own Your Own Home, along with a film, Home sweet home. They advocated single-dwelling homes over multiunit dwellings and suburban over urban housing. The leaflet recommended a separate bedroom for each child, saying it was “undesirable for two children to occupy the same bed — whatever their age.” Regardless of the reasons for these recommendations, the materials produced by the Commerce Department all promoted maximum consumption. Thus the government responded, as much did educational institutions, to the need to promote the consumption of commodities....
In Britain, 1 million people are thought to have a serious shopping addiction. In the U.S., it is 5 million. “You're urged to buy and you are urged to define yourself by what you have and what you can buy and what you own.... so I think it is a matter of some people being more vulnerable to this, than others,” said Dr. Lorrin Koran, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Its not just individuals who are addicted to shopping, our economy is too. Personal spending now plays a bigger and bigger role in keeping the modern economy going. And when things start going wrong, there is no magic pill. Governments rely on consumers to bail them out. There was a very real fear that September 11 would cause spenders to lose confidence and plunge the world into recession. ‘Keep spending’ was the plea.
. So shopping is now the new patriotism. Keeping people spending has become the top economic priority.”“The economic dream. We refuse to let anyone take it away."...
Currently in many parts of the world, the level of consumption, in comparison is low. With “corporate-led” globalization, the fear is that these negative aspects of consumerism will be pushed throughout the world as well. What is not clear is the cultural resistance to this, and also how different cultures will also assimilate this with their own blend of consumerism, and whether or not the same problems would show up, or not, or if they would be different. Studies are slowly coming out on this aspect (some showing negative signs others showing signs of more choice and freedoms for people) and over time hopefully I will be able to highlight some of those here. There had to be a “change in spiritual and intellectual values from an emphasis on such values as thrift, modesty, and moderation, toward a value system that encouraged spending and ostentatious display.” (p.21) This was seen especially from 1880 to 1930. Robbins further details how religious movements, which became known as “mind cure religions”, became (quoting research from William Leach) “wish-oriented, optimistic, sunny, the epitome of cheer and self-confidence, and completely lacking in anything resembling a tragic view of life.”
These movements held that salvation would occur in this life and not in the afterlife. Mind cure dismissed the ideas of sin and guilt. God became a divine force, a healing power. Proponents argued that Americans should banish ideas of duty and self-denial. ... These new religions made fashionable the idea that in the world of goods men and women could find paradise free from pain and suffering; they could find, as one historian of religion put it, the “good” through “goods.”
— Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.22 That is, a more materialistic view on things like life and relationships with others, etc. would tend to be encouraged or promoted.
Read more here!!
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption/Rise.asp#Achangeofculturewasneededtoincreaseconsumption
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