Save the World with Conspicuous Consumption!

The oh so devious craft of marketing can harness it seems any human emotion for its own purposes. Its recent cleverness has been in the new association of otherwise empty conspicuous consumption with a beneficent sense of humanitarianism.

Efficiency has never been the selling point of luxury products, but in our day, the objective of the new marketing has been to engineer a emotional welling-up when consumers are faced with the choice of buying conspicuous good; we have been taught to see conspicuous consumption as the highest morality.

In the classical framework of conspicuous consumption, the affluent can afford to and do waste unnecessary amounts of their more copious money on comparatively deficient products. The flashy sports car, the yacht, designer clothing and extravagant childrens' toys are the realizations of the wealthy attempting to demonstrate their influence. It's a way to distinguish one's self and ostend one's social position.

Now-a-days their colors haven't changed, although everything seems to be far greener. The affluent still shop at their own grocery stores and buy their own indulgent goods, but now they additionally praise themselves for the moral superiority of their products. Marketing departments have realized that in order to make their buyers fully empathize and identify with the product, they must be intimately familiar with its production and find that production as superior and commendable.

The intention is to associate market activities (hopefully more expensive ones) with morality; if a consumer "supports" local agriculture by buying locally grown foods, he should be praised for his moral behavior; if another buys from a starving foreign farmer, he should be too. If a consumer buys food from purposefully inefficient, unmodified and unsprayed crops of an inapt variety, he should be as well.

Consumer morality is now calculated from the origin of the good and entire product labels, meaningful and otherwise, have arisen to titillate moral sentiments to ethicize the purchase of goods which would otherwise simply not be bought.

Note of course that the emphasized action in all of these cases is not the use of the product, but the "support" of the producer. To the wealthy, the actual use of the product doesn't matter one iota; implicitly the goal is to present oe's self as acting not to satiate one's own needs, but as an act of "charity" to the other party involved. Product quality be damned, in fact, in many cases it would be better if it were worse to show an even better level of the buyer's professed empathy.

The more expensive electric car is honored for the good it would do to reduce pollution, but it's buyer is lauded for its price; the higher the price, the greater the perceived sacrifice and the more righteous its owner can afford to be.

There are a fair share of empty but common labels on food and other products that, although usually lacking precise meaning, have earned an emotional tickling from consumers who are just looking to do good in the world. It's worth looking critically at a few of them.

"Fair Trade"

It's hard to tell what exactly the purpose of the "fair trade" label is. Fair Trade USA states that the label's goal is to "relieve [economic] exploitation." I think that many fair trade consumers guess that this means that the producers of whatever crop, coffee or art form are paid more for their output, rather than the lower returns of the market. For its lack of definition, their guess is as good as mine.

Of course if that were true it would not count for much of anything. Setting a "minimum wage" for laborers in poor countries always consists in excluding all those workers from the market who cannot create the real equivalent of those goods. And even if an American or European firm can support paying some farmers more for less output, say goodbye to any entrepreneurial ventures in the target country; if farmers can sell their product to a foreign importer as is for higher prices, how daft would a local entrepreneur in distribution or retail have to be to beat those unnatural price levels?

The word fair trade in a political context is just a word that bundles up ambiguous anti-globalization or anti-capitalist sentiments. An "alternative" to free trade, for all its use, its proponents have yet to understand what genre of market exploitation is alleviated by whatever difference fair trade may have.

"Organic"

For any confused and culturally ignorant chemists or biologists reading, "organic" doesn't actually mean organic, otherwise plastic would be a viable food at Trader Joe's. Obviously if we used the word in its real meaning it would hardly be useful; humans are basically incapable of consuming inorganic matter so the distinction would be inert.

Naturally that's not what the word means anymore: organic in the context of conspicuous consumption represents that the product in question has undergone less of the processing involved in producing conventional food. Additionally, organic food is meant to be grown from non-genetically modified strands or animals.

People were surprised to hear several weeks ago of a Standford survey of previous research finding that organic products yield absolutely no health benefits to the consumer. When organic products fail the taste test as well, one might wonder why consumers are willing to pay so much more for them.

But frankly I hate to sound moralizing, but I consider the purposeful consumption of organic food products absolutely immoral and abhorrent. When consumers demand that crops be grown organically i.e. often without GM varieties or pesticides, the waste is enormous: for every acre of organic food grown there is one less acre of conventional food grown. That means that instead of high yield varieties shielded for infestation, every acre produces less output, fewer calories and decreases the world supply of foodstuffs. This is innocuous for the typical organic consumer: usually affluent he doesn't mind paying more for a diminished supply of food but the increase must be shared among all food consumers in the world, many of which have only recently gotten their nutrition under control.

There are millions of lives in India and Pakistan, and increasingly in Africa and other developing areas that owe their continued stable existence to the usage of genetically modified stands of sprayed wheat, rice and other staples. Any act that would jeopardize those lives by creating a demand for purposefully inferior crops should be fervently resisted. The very idea that people go out of their way to buy deficient food is revolting to me; I can hardly convince myself that people are so doltish and am tempted to attribute this to malice.

The Original Frankenstein Food

All of the drivel and hysteria about genetic modification of foods strangely seems only targeted to the most recent innovations of food development. In reality, humans have been modifying their potential meals genetically for as long as they have existed. Modern maize is a good example of a crop that simply does not exist in humanless nature and is exclusively the result of human selection and hybridization between different varieties. As a fact, maize as is known today is incapable of growing without human intervention; to reproduce, it requires a good human shucking to release its seeds, the kernels.

Luckily the naturalistic fallacy only goes as far as human memory and awareness, so there aren't many people protesting the breeding of mules or the fact that bananas don't look like bald coconuts with marbles inside.

The intellectual embarrassment of the entire enterprise of "ethical consumption" is mainly that the moralizing masses of consumers will jump more and more at any product that promises to make themselves feel morally superior. In an inexplicable effort to repudiate agribusiness, mass consumption and advertising, suggestible "ethical" consumers will fall head over heels for anything advertised with a chosen few magic words.

Charity and calculated investment in the poor be forgotten after all. Apparently they don't need to exist in the world of moralism. All the good-hearted consumer needs to do is buy x, y, z organic, exploitation free, fair trade, free range products and the world will heal itself. Congratulations, consumer! You've saved the world!