The World of Goods

Mary Douglas, Baron Isherwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134791668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

First published in 1979, this volume introduces a cultural factor to theories of consumption. The World of Goods goes beyond standard economic analyses, which rely on theories of individual psychology. Douglas studies how consumers use goods to fulfil their intentions in regard to one another. The World of Goods insists that goods are wanted for social purposes, for sharing and giving, more than for the private enjoyment that is the pivot of utilitarian explanations. This book offers a completely original way of thinking about consumption as a series of rituals.

Part I
Goods as an information system

Chapter 1
Why people want goods

SILENCE IN UTILITY THEORY

It is extraordinary to discover that no one knows why people want goods. Demand theory is at the very center, even at the origin of economics as a discipline. Yet 200 years of thought on the subject has little to show on the question. It is important to know why demand is sometimes stable, sometimes careers along with inflating speed, and sometimes goes slack while people save rather than spend. But economists carefully shun the question of why people want goods. They even count it a virtue not to offer suggestions. In the past, too many illicit intrusions from psychology have damaged their theoretical apparatus. It has now been painstakingly cleansed. It can answer questions about consumers’ responses to changes in prices and incomes, so long as the period is short term and so long as “tastes” can be treated as given, as the ultimate unexplainable factor of demand that is used to explain everything else. On this academically restricted basis the machine can grind powerfully and exceedingly fine. But when it comes to policy problems, the theoretical gears mesh badly with social reality. The cool consensus that economists display on questions of economic method dissolves into a heated wrangle when a major economic crisis appears.

If theoretical economists try not to know about what makes the consumer tick, there are others who will not let him alone. They inveigh against the destructive greed of the consumer society, environmentalists and moralists, and economists, too, when wearing their “applied” hat. The consumer himself may well feel puzzled. With barely a twinge of guilt when he catches himself reaching for more furnishings or food, he partly supports the formal economist’s view that his behavior is based on rational choice. He does not usually believe that he himself is a mindless moron, an easy victim for the advertiser’s wiles, though he admits that others may be. He would agree that once he decides to get something, he chooses between brands and takes price and income level into account, much as the textbooks say. But the economist’s view leaves much unexplained. Often it is not so much a sense of having made a decision but of having been overtaken by events. The new thing-the better lawn mower or bigger freezer—has somehow become, of its own accord, a necessity. It exerts its own imperative to be acquired and threatens that the household, without it, will regress to the chaos of a more primitive era. Far from exercising a sovereign choice, the wretched consumer, as often as not, feels like the passive holder of a wallet whose contents are pre-empted by such strong forces that moral reproaches seem impertinent.

Any vacuum sucks in its own filling. In the absence of an explicit account, implicit ideas about human needs creep into economic analysis unseen. The two main assumptions use each other for support, yet the combination is still dubious. On the one hand is the hygienic or materialist theory; on the other, the envy theory of needs. According to the first our real needs, most basic and universal, are our physical needs, those we have in common with livestock. Probably to avoid a too grossly veterinary approach, a curious moral split appears under the surface of most economists’ thoughts on human needs; they do recognize two kinds of needs, spiritual and physical, but they accord priority to the physical. They allow it the dignity of a necessity, while they downgrade all the other demands to a class of artificial wants, false, luxurious, even immoral. Luc Boltanski calls this bias, “biological Manicheeism.”¹ That famous heresy divided the universe between evil, the low biological side of man’s nature, and good, the spiritual side. But the economists who make the same split unofficially change the heretical signs, so that the biological becomes the good and the spiritual is unjustified.

The hygiene approach seems to promise an objective definition of poverty since it can generally show that the poor in any country have worse morbidity rates than the rich. But the promise is illusory, for it cannot deliver a way of defining poverty cross-culturally that is not counterintuitive. True, this tribe or that is poor in material things, its housing has to be remade every year, its children run naked, its food is deficient in nutrients, its death rate is high—but are these sufficient to capture the notion of poverty? If the hygiene standard is used alone, improved death rates over the last 200 years would imply that there are no poor left in England. In fact, however, poverty studies never risk going out of business even in rich, industrial societies, but they do face an awkward problem of definition. Material standards have been indubitably raised: “Obviously even those at the very foot of society in contemporary Britain enjoy a standard of living that is somewhat higher than that of the poorest in Victorian society a hundred years ago and much higher than in many underdeveloped countries.”² “People who in this country are reckoned—or who reckon themselves—poor today are not necessarily so by the standards of twenty-five years ago or by the standards of other countries.”³ What other countries? The hygienic criterion suggests those which are malaria-ridden and lack public sanitation. Many of the countries that anthropologists study are poor on such material criteria—no wall-to-wall carpets, no air-conditioning-but they do not regard themselves as poor. The Nuer of the Sudan in the 1930s would do no trade with the Arabs because the only things they had to sell were their herds of cattle, and the only things they could possibly want from trade were more cattle.⁴ Since the materialist approach cannot stand by itself, the economist is led to buttress it with a relativist view that invokes an envy theory to supplement materialism. “Poverty is a relative concept. Saying who is in poverty is to make a relative statement rather like saying who is short or heavy.”⁵ To explain the discontent in that relative condition, they are led to impute to the objects of their study feelings of covetousness and envy. For example, Albert Hirschman believes in a universal feeling of envy which can be suspended by what he calls the “tunnel effect” at the beginning of a process of economic development.

The tunnel effect operates because advances of others supply information about a more benign external environment; receipt of this information produces gratification; and this gratification overcomes, or at least suspends, envy. Though long noted as the most uninviting of the seven deadly sins because, unlike gluttony, pride, etc., it does not provide any initial fun to its practitioners, envy is nevertheless a powerful human emotion. This is attested to by the writings of anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, who all have proclaimed, in general quite independently of one another, that if you advance in income or status while I remain where I was, I will actually feel worse off than before because my relative position has declined.⁶

This is a very weak argument however.

Anthropologists have written tomes on the subject of envy. Their fieldwork has forced it on their attention. Whatever they write about, whether about gifts, about witchcraft, demons, zombies, ancestors, or parish politics, their frequent point of reference is fear of envy, individual envy-deflecting techniques, and community envycontrolling edicts. If economists think that the demand for goods is influenced by envy, then anthropology is one place to turn for understanding it.⁷ As we shall see, different types of social organization can be distinguished according to the envy-controlling techniques they deploy. The psychological state, unqualified by institutional differences cannot do service for a subjective definition of poverty. Anyone can be envious, rich, or poor. But if we reject envy and keep materialism we are left with a mild wonder about the irrational human wish for fine carpets and new kitchens, much as one might question why dogs should want jeweled collars as well as food and exercise.

Fortunately a shift in emphasis is in the air. Titmuss wrote

we have sought too diligently to find the causes of poverty among the poor and not in ourselves.…our frame of reference in the past has been too narrow. Thought, research, and action have been focused too heavily on the poor; poverty engineering has thus been abstracted from society.⁸

SELF-CRITICISM OF ECONOMISTS

There is no justification in traditional utility theory for assuming anything about physical or spiritual needs, still less about envy. The theory merely assumes the individual to be acting rationally, in that his choices are consistent with each other and stable over the short time that is relevant. It says that his tastes should be taken as given, that he responds to a fall in prices by readiness to buy a larger quantity and to a rise by buying less, and that he responds in consistent fashion to changes in his income. As he gets more of a particular good his desire for additional units of it weakens. For the anthropologist this minimum watertight rationality leaves the individual impossibly isolated. His rational objectives are tidied out of sight and trivialized under the term “tastes.” It is hard to know where to begin to think about his social problems. But no rebuke that the anthropologist can deliver will be as severe as the self-criticism of the economists themselves on this very score.

Economists are their own harshest critics when it comes to the limitations of consumption theory, but naturally the strongest criticism comes from those who have some improvement to propose. Accordingly, Kelvin Lancaster said in a well-turned passage:

The theory of consumer behavior in deterministic situations as set out by, say, Debreu (1959, 1960) or Uzama (1960) is a thing of great aesthetic beauty, a jewel set in a glass case. The product of a long process of refinement from the nineteenth century Utility theorists through Slutsky and Hicks-Allen to the economists of the last twenty-five years, it has been shorn of all irrelevant postulates so that it now stands as an example of how to extract the minimum of results from the minimum of assumptions.⁹

The criticisms are old, widespread, and still fashionable. “Hardly more than a collection of isolated, arbitrary definitions,” Leontieff said, describing the theory of consumer behavior.¹⁰ “One may wonder why such a theory has survived as a fundamental part of standard economics,” said Michael and Becker. The defense usually falls back on the plea that demand theory, for all its weaknesses, still provides the most powerful method of analyzing choice. Indeed, it is probably true that there is no field of choice in which it cannot be used. But Michael and Becker will have none of this:

To whatever extent income and prices do not explain observed behavior the explanation rests with variations in tastes, since they are the portmanteau in the demand curve….For economists to rest a large part of their theory of choice on differences in tastes is disturbing, since they admittedly have no useful theory of the formation of tastes, nor can they rely on a well-developed theory of tastes from any other discipline in the social sciences, since none exists. Of course, by incorporating an intuitively appealing explanation in each case economists usually interpret these observations in reasonable ways. The important point, however, is that the received theory of choice itself is of modest use in that undertaking.¹¹

To the inquiring anthropologist, the economists certainly seem to be unsatisfied consumers of their own product, and very self-critical of their own narrowness.

The early masters of economic theory were, in fact, intensely interested in the general determinants of economic progress and the broad conditions of wealth or poverty. The title An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations could not have been chosen by one who thought that the price mechanism in a short-run commodity market was the essence of economics. Adam Smith reached down to the fundamental factors that spell riches or poverty for a particular nation.¹²

That economics is still supposed to be reaching down into those factors, but has tied its own hands, is E.J.Mishan’s plaint. Because of admitted ignorance about real conditions of existence, the economists, he says, have busily ferreted

out of welfare analysis all those tacit assumptions that appear to say something about the economic universe. But this purging of tacit empiricism has gone too far. Any generalisation but the most trivial is sure to collapse when all bounds to technical and behavior possibilities are removed—when allowance is made for any and every imaginable situation….What the subject badly needs is a strong infusion of empiricism to end its unchecked wanderings in the empyrean and to bring it down to earth feet first.¹³

If it were even agreed whether consumption was an end in itself or a means to an end, that would be a starting point. But sometimes consumption is treated as if it were a cost in keeping up the supply of healthy labor to the market, as if the consumer were a glorified carthorse to be fed, watered, and kept fit. Kuznets is not happy with this view; he remarks that over the long historical period of modern economic growth the

rise in food supply and improved health conditions should… have made for a better quality of the body of workers. But if the additional food, health and recreation outlays are treated as so many economic costs (rather than as final consumption), the implication would be that living is for work; and the distinction between final consumption, or product, and intermediate consumption, or costs, so basic in the ideological framework of modern society as well as in economic analysis and measurement, would be obliterated.¹⁴

On the other hand the more traditional view, treating consumption as the end or objective of all work¹⁵ is equally objectionable. It demeans labor and disallows its right to be taken as an end in itself, always treating work as an input into something else.

As Frank Knight put it so wisely:

When we consider that productive activity takes up the larger part of the waking lives of the great mass of mankind, it is surely not to be assumed without investigation or inquiry that production is a means only, a necessary evil, a sacrifice made for the sake of some good entirely outside the production process. We are impelled to look for ends in the economic process itself, and to give thoughtful consideration to the possibilities of participation in economic activity as a sphere of self-expression and creative achievement.¹⁶

But Knight knew that he was working in a humane tradition. As Jevons insisted: “Economics does not rest upon the laws of human enjoyment; if these laws are developed by no other sciences they must be developed by economists.”¹⁷ And what about the challenge to Bentham’s own account of utility? “By utility is meant that property in any object whereby it tends to produce benefit, advance, pleasure, good or happiness . . or . . to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness.”¹⁸ No one argues that human enjoyment should be separated off from work, but something in the construction of utility theory often makes it seem so.

Is there any reason why consumption should be found at the end or the beginning of a one-way avenue? Piero Sraffa identifies the tendency to focus on costs of production and outputs with the advent of the marginal method and deplores the loss of the earlier view of the economy as a seamless garment. His own Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities¹⁹ is an attempt to restore something akin to “the original picture of the system of production and consumption as a circular process,”…which “stands in striking contrast to the view presented by modern theory, of a one-way avenue that leads from ‘Factors of Production’ to ‘Consumption Goods’.”²⁰ His investigation “is concerned exclusively with such properties of an economic system as do not depend on changes in the scale of production or in the proportions of ‘factors.’”

This standpoint, which is that of the old classical economists from Adam Smith to Ricardo, has been submerged and forgotten since the advent of the “marginal” method. The reason is obvious. The calculation of marginal differences requires attention to be focused on change, for without change either in the scale of an industry or in the proportions of the factors of production, “there can be neither marginal product nor marginal cost. In a system in which, day after day, production continued unchanged in those respects, the marginal product of a factor (or alternatively the marginal cost of a product) would not be merely hard to find—it just would not be there to be found.”²¹ The work that follows these prefatory remarks ought to be of great value to anthropology because of our tradition of working in the “ethnographic present.” This is a special tense that aims to concentrate past, present, and future into a continuous present. Perhaps not always used honestly, the ethnographic present has more merit than a reconstructed and misconstrued time dimension. It synthesizes into one temporal point the events of many periods, the value of the synthesis lying in the strength of the analysis of the perceived present. Whatever is important about the past is assumed to be making itself known and felt here and now. Current ideas about the future likewise draw present judgments down certain paths and block off others. It assumes a two-way perspective in which the individual treats his past selectively as a source of validating myths and the future as the locus of dreams. The tense refers to a two-way filter being used in the present to sort out from the myths and dreams some sets that plausibly interlock as guides to action.

The ethnographic present assumes an unchanging economic system. Given the short time in which he has to do his research, the main problem to which a functional anthropologist of the 1950s and 1960s addressed himself was the understanding of an economy found in the here and now, a snapshot view, so implicitly deemed to be unchanging. The economic analysis explained how resources are channeled to the political and religious systems and the religious and political analyses explained how the economic system is sustained and credibly clothed in the raiment of distributive justice. Sraffa’s book is too specialized and idiosyncratic to be directly useful to the anthropologist seeking to join issue with economists, but it is encouraging to realize that we have been speaking good prose without knowing it; we have been analyzing a circular process, so much so that the ethnographic picture could often be called production of ancestors by means of ancestors or production of cattle by means of cattle.

This is admittedly only a small qualification, not much to boast of, for entering a debate about the consumer society. One source of encouragement is that no one else seems to have much idea of why people want goods. When it comes to the other side of the same question, the reasons for not spending, there are also some intriguing misconceptions to straighten out.

Chapter 2
Why they save

ACCORDING TO KEYNES

Saving is investment. It is also consumption postponed. As the level of future income depends on the amoun...