Читать книгу Consumption - Mark Hudson - Страница 11

You have just bought a fashionable shirt. Examining the many decisions that were made in purchasing that particular item as opposed to its many alternatives provides a useful, intuitive entry point into an analysis of consumption. The first decision might be whether to go out shopping for a shirt in the first place. With the money you spent on clothes you could have engaged in numerous other activities, from buying ice cream to enjoying a movie. Or you could have popped it in your savings account and relaxed in the park. The fact that you have opted for shirt purchasing would suggest that this was a more pressing desire than any of those alternatives.

Once you decided that the best use of your time and money was picking up a much needed top, you could then choose among a wide variety of alternative shirts from an impressive array of different stores or online vendors. In making that choice you would compare a number of different shirts – carefully looking at the cut, colour and fabric to choose the one that made you look your most presentable and feel the most comfortable. Additionally, you would consider how much hard-earned cash you wanted to part with. Was the slightly more flattering fit worth the extra money? In making each of these decisions you were most likely making the choice based on what you preferred. People don’t often choose to go shopping for clothes if they have no food in the fridge. Nor do they usually select a shirt that they think looks terrible on them or is made of a scratchy, uncomfortable fabric. In their purchasing activities, people generally attempt to make choices that benefit them.

This may not seem like a particularly brilliant insight, but, at its core, this is the logic behind a theory that maintains that increasing household consumption should be the primary function of the economy and that, further, individual commodity consumption is the most efficient way to meet people’s wide-ranging needs and desires. This chapter will lay out the intellectual history behind this justification, explore some of its implications, and examine some modifications of this theory that attempt to increase its “realism” while still maintaining its general policy conclusions.