The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  Figure 4.1: Income inequality is related to higher levels of problem gambling in rich countries.123

  SHOPAHOLICS

  The internet site GirlsGoGames.co.uk specializes in downloadable games and apps aimed at young girls. There are kissing games, beauty games, dressing up and fashion makeover games, games focused on cupcakes and doughnuts, and an entire section of the website devoted to ‘shopaholic’ games. You can be a shopaholic in New York, Paris, London or Tokyo, buying wedding dresses, beach wear or Christmas presents. The first screen of Shopaholic Wedding Models welcomes you to the ‘town of happily ever after’ and rhetorically asks: ‘You’re really good at shopping aren’t you?’ You are then allocated $700 and a $500 ‘bonus’ to go shopping for an outfit for, say, a ‘Welsh wedding with a floral theme’. In the comment boxes below, girls with usernames like ‘PrincessFairyCake’ and ‘Giggles123’ write about how much they loved the games and how addicted they are to them, but some complain that the game didn’t provide enough spending money. The girls who mentioned their ages seem to be pre-teen and early teens – you only have to be eight years old to register an account.

  GirlsGoGames, owned by Dutch company Spil Games, claims that its games allow ‘girls to experiment with personal development and self-expression through play’. But of course the bottom line is that these girls are a great target for potential advertisers, because the online platform gets 39 million unique visitors each month. ‘From youngsters, through to teens, to women: we’ve got you covered’, Spil Games tells advertisers. When these girls grow up, they can move on to the series of best-selling, ambiguously satirical Shopaholic books, written by Sophie Kinsella and featuring anti-heroine Becky Bloomwood, a spoiled, entitled woman with an out-of-control consumerism habit and commensurate debt problems.

  In his book All Consuming, political commentator Neal Lawson describes the culture of shopping that developed in the UK in the decades leading up to the global financial crisis as ‘turbo-consumerism’.181 Fuelled by the relaxation of trading hours, easy credit, cheap imports and online commerce, shopping – and the products we acquired – increasingly became the way we defined ourselves, the way we spent our time, and more and more of our money. We became locked into a cycle of spending, dissatisfaction, and more spending – we could never keep up and the goalposts were constantly shifting. Published in 2009, Lawson’s book captures a moment in time when it looked as if all this might change. High street chains were closing daily, wallets were shrinking, jobs were insecure and it looked as if everything might have to shift; we’d need a ‘new normal’, structured by an alternative kind of economy and different values. Despite the scale and seismic effects of the financial crash, this change was not forthcoming, and the hopes Lawson expressed were quickly dashed. ‘The crash changes everything,’ he wrote. ‘I believe there is an alternative and that it’s worth fighting for … we can tip the balance against lives that are all-consuming and define a new normality based on having the time and space to find genuine and lasting happiness.’

  Lawson’s book, rather like Jean Twenge’s on narcissism (see Chapter 3), is full of stories that shock and amaze: the amount that people will spend on handbags, the amount they will spend on eBay for a used carrier bag from an exclusive store so that they can pretend that they shop there, the girl who says she thinks that the brands a boy wears are more important than what he looks or is like, the amount the nation is spending on storage units to stash all the stuff we keep on buying but don’t have room for. But just as with narcissism, the human feelings and motivations that lie behind the staggering stories are painful. We buy things to belong, to join the tribe, and we buy things to show we’re good enough. And for the poor, their inability to keep up, to buy the latest goods, seems to mark them out as failures. Second-rate goods are seen as marking out second-rate people.

  Of course we enjoy having nice things. The fillip which follows a good purchase, whether it’s because we’ve scored a bargain or chosen quality over quantity or obtained something we’ve coveted, is universal. It is, however, not always easy to identify where the pressure to shop is coming from. Increasingly, people feel tempted to revamp their houses, even if everything works perfectly well. The compulsion to ‘do it up’ often has nothing to do with function and everything to do with the impression that it looks ‘dated’. You can easily construct a case for renewing everything (the sink has fiddly bits that are difficult to clean, etc.) but really the temptation owes more to subliminal and overt messages picked up from Sunday supplements and television programmes, the recently renovated bathrooms of relatives, and so on, which make what we have seem tired and tawdry. None of us really likes to admit how much we’re driven to purchase things for status reasons, how much of our spending is about keeping up. However, advertisers endlessly exploit our anxieties about status, already heightened by inequality, because they know it works.

  SPENDING SECRETS

  We seem to have quite an appetite for books and programmes that tell us what the stuff we buy says about us. These range from fun social commentary, such as 2013’s Consumed by journalist Harry Wallop,182 which contrasts the spending habits of ‘Asda Mums’ and ‘Wood Burning Stovers’, to the slightly more serious, such as anthropologist Kate Fox’s Watching the English183; from the openly condescending (Chav! A User’s Guide To Britain’s New Ruling Class by Mia Wallace and Clint Spanner184) to those based on lifetimes of scholarly work (Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann185). All make it clear that how we spend our money labels us in other people’s eyes: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, what we read and listen to, where we go on holiday, what we plant in our gardens. Harry Wallop argues that how we spend our money has become a more important indicator of social class than how we earn it, and that it is ‘a cause of great social anxiety as well as financial hardship’ for some.182 Spending money need not be frivolous, of course: many people spend large amounts of money, even when it causes them some hardship, on things like private education and health care, believing that the free equivalents – state schools and the NHS – are not only inferior services, but that using them would mark them out as inferior people.

  But wherever you direct your cash, trying to improve your social status through your spending is an uphill struggle. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has theorized, it is the possessors of ‘cultural capital’, those with education and other social assets, who determine what good taste is in any society at any time.47 Any attempts by those in lower classes to define their own aesthetics and tastes is condemned by those higher up the social scale. And if the middle, and then the lower classes appropriate upper-class tastes and aesthetics, then whatever they have favoured becomes unfashionable and loses any social cachet.

  Type ‘the rise and fall of the Ugg boot’ into Google and you’ll pull up pages of stories about the changing fortunes of this distinctive Australian brand of sheepskin boot. Dating back to the 1930s, Uggs had a steady following among those who like their feet to be comfortable, but in the early 2000s they suddenly became uber-fashionable, seen on the feet of so-called A-list celebrities, such as film star Cameron Diaz and model Kate Moss. And then they (and endless cheaper copies) were everywhere. As soon as they were adopted by the masses, they were dropped by the top celebrities, losing their fashion mojo and seen only on C- or D-list reality TV stars. By 2012, sales were falling, and Ugg was working hard to keep the brand buoyant, even introducing bridal Uggs (white with a pale blue sole and a diamante crystal button). This decline of brands from their desirable and exclusive status has been snobbishly named ‘prole drift’, and if you’re trying to maintain or raise your social status it can become necessary to monitor their rise and fall through magazines, newspaper fashion columns or blogs. The process never stops and you have to keep on spending if you want to try and keep up. It’s not entirely linear; brands can regain their distinction and once again represent a tasteful or fashionable purchase. But if you’re lower down the social scale, then however much you spe
nd, and whatever you buy, you are likely to be scorned and looked down on for your choices.

  In rich consumer societies, shopping has become an everyday way in which we replace people with things. We define ourselves through other people’s eyes and we see them looking not at what we’re like inside, but at the impression of us that our stuff creates. People are compelled to go on shopping until they drop – or credit limits are reached. Until the conditions that induce this anxiety and competition for status are addressed, until we reduce the inequality which drives compulsive consumption, this state of affairs – with all its consequences for our finances, health and, as we shall see, planet – will continue.

  HOW TO BE A VERY IMPORTANT PERSON

  Material goods are not all we buy to elevate our status. Daniel Briggs, from the University of East London, has studied working-class British tourists on holiday in Ibiza.186 Briggs highlights the excessive and reckless drinking, drug use, sex and violence which characterize their behaviour and the impact this has on them and on the holiday resort. But more importantly, he shows how their behaviour and choices are shaped by the culture of their native country and by the exploitation of their social anxieties once they arrive on the island. Although they go on holiday to ‘live the dream’ and ‘be who they want to be’, their behaviour is in fact an exaggerated extension of their weekend lives back home. Briggs describes their actions as having been ‘already structurally conditioned, socially constructed, packaged, repackaged and marketed to them – and it is this commercial pressure which is aggressively foisted on them during their holiday in the resort.’

  For these people, their holiday is a space and time outside their daily routines, where they can enjoy the sun, sea, sand and freedom from the everyday restrictions of work and relationships back home. For that short period, they escape their low status back home; just as in the medieval days of the lords of misrule, for a brief space of time the rules of social stratification are suspended. For the young people Briggs spends time with, their hedonistic, consumerist lifestyle is a marker of status: it shows that they count for something, that they have an approved social identity among their peers. To be able to go to Ibiza shows that you can afford the good life, and will experience the good times. Sadly, all too many are injured, harassed, raped or die each tourist season. But their choices, behaviour and spending are shaped by commercial interests and pressures. The tourist industry and the media, particularly reality TV, create and reinforce the idea that you can only have fun if you spend more. You’ll have a better time if you bring a different bikini to wear every day, or are showing off an expensive watch or pair of jeans. You’ll have a much better time if you buy ‘extras’ – a boat party or a sunset cruise, entry into a more exclusive club or a jet ski experience, a tequila tasting or entry to a private beach club. Briggs describes parties of young people running through their cash long before the holiday is over and having to fall back on credit to make it through. But despite going home in debt, they’re eager to come back next year, with more money, so they can ‘do Ibiza properly’.

  Doing it properly means paying for more exclusivity: a VIP sun lounger, or entry into the VIP area of a super-club. But you can always spend more, and there is always a class of more exclusive space and facilities if you spend even more – so the question is always, what level of VIP privilege can you afford, and if you come back next year can you buy even more status than you’ve managed to buy this year? Briggs labels this ‘extreme capitalism’, a commercial profit-making marketing process that pulls in young people made vulnerable by their low-paid, unfulfilling working lives, and incites exaggerated hedonism and overspending.

  SELLING THE DREAM

  Many researchers and commentators have drawn attention to the sophisticated ways in which the designers and purveyors of consumer products target our neurological reward systems and lure us into relationships with things, providing short-term fixes to our chronic stress and anxieties that might be better soothed through relationships with people. We have evolved to survive in environments where food, sex and comfort are scarce and must be pursued, but are rather less good at exercising restraint in the face of plenty, leaving us vulnerable to the modern world.

  In Affluenza, his book on overconsumption, psychologist Oliver James quotes a Danish newspaper editor who says:

  Multinationals have learnt that there is no market for luxury goods here. When a new type of product comes out, for a few years it doesn’t penetrate at all because it’s too expensive and we don’t like to be ostentatious, so only freaky playboys have one. But when the price comes down, so that middle-class Danes can afford it, then within eighteen months it reaches 70 per cent of the population.187

  James comments that consumption of luxury goods is not a source of status for Danes; their greater equality of income, as well as greater equality between men and women, means that they are less susceptible to advertising and to pining after flashy cars and other prestige goods. Can this be true? Do advertisers really try less hard in more equal societies?

  Figure 4.2: Spending on advertising, as a percentage of GDP, increases with greater income inequality.123

  It would seem so. Looking at spending on advertising as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in relation to our usual measure of income inequality (Figure 4.2), we found that spending increased significantly as inequality increased.

  BORN TO SHOP

  The evidence increasingly suggests that materialism and status consumption are profoundly affecting the well-being of children in unequal societies. In 2007, the British public were shocked to learn that the UK ranked bottom in a report from UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries.188 In two research papers, we showed how that index of child well-being (in both 2007 and 2013) was tightly correlated with income inequality (Figure 4.3).189, 190 The response of the Labour government in power in 2007 was to criticize the UNICEF report for using out-of-date statistics (although this is always a problem with reports – it takes time to collect, process and analyse data – and applied equally to all countries included in the index), and claim that child well-being in the UK was improving. The Children’s Commissioner for England hoped that the ‘report [would] prompt us all to look beyond the statistics to the underlying causes of our failure to nurture happy and healthy children’.191

  Recognizing that call for more in-depth understanding of children’s lives, UNICEF UK commissioned a further study, of family life in three countries: Sweden, which had low inequality and high child well-being; Spain, with mid-range inequality and high well-being; and the UK, with high inequality and low well-being.192 The study aimed to ‘dig beneath the statistics on child well-being to discover the lived experiences of children’, using discussions with friendship groups in schools and detailed observations of family life.

  Seeing the video made as part of the study was both an exhilarating and depressing experience. Exhilarating because there, on screen, were parents and children whose thoughts and feelings reflected what we had theorized about the effects of inequality: these were the stories behind the statistics we had been working with for so many years. But it was depressing too, because the struggles of the British families were such a poignant contrast to the Spanish and Swedish families. In Sweden, parents talked about children saving their money for special purchases and making and mending toys. In Spain, there were children cherishing books and educational toys and storing them in special boxes to keep them nice. In the UK, the parents appeared universally exhausted and their homes were filled with boxes and piles of discarded toys. As the report stated:

  British families [were] struggling, pushed to find the time their children want.

  Many UK children do not refer to material goods when talking about what makes them happy, and also understand the principles of moderation in consumption, but many have parents who feel compelled to purchase, often against their better judgement.

  Children [have a] growing awareness of inequality as they approach second
ary school, and the role of consumer goods in identifying and creating status groups within peer groups … Whilst many UK parents are complicit in purchasing status goods to hide social insecurities, this behaviour is almost totally absent in Spain and Sweden.

  Reactions to this second study were mixed. Some media commentators saw the report as blaming parents. As with the prior UNICEF report, there were criticisms of the methods, this time aimed at the fact that the report was based on the experiences of only a small number of families rather than on the timeliness of the statistics. (Unsurprisingly, commentators from marketing and advertising industry bodies opposed the report’s call for a ban on advertising to children under the age of twelve, calling the evidence ‘weak’.) But taken together, as of course they must be, both the quantitative and qualitative studies show how income inequality increases the strain on family life, and how things replace relationships and time spent together. The stories reinforce the statistics and vice versa. Parental experience of adversity is passed on to children through pathways that include parental mental distress, longer working hours, higher levels of debt and domestic conflict.

  The link between materialism and damaged well-being is strong. Tim Kasser, professor of psychology at Knox College in Illinois, developed the Aspiration Index, which places people’s values on different continuums. One important axis is the extent to which goals are extrinsic and materialistic (e.g., financial success, image, popularity) versus intrinsic (e.g., personal growth, affiliation, community feeling). Over many years of study, Kasser has found that materialism is related to anxiety and depression, to substance abuse, lack of empathy, higher scores on the Social Dominance Orientation scale, more prejudice, ‘Machiavellianism’, antisocial behaviour, and competitive versus collaborative strategies. Materialism makes us unhappy, but being unhappy also makes us materialistic.193 Looking at different countries, he has found that those that value egalitarianism over hierarchy, and harmony over mastery, have better child well-being.194 Working with Jean Twenge, Kasser found that American children have become more materialistic over the generations since 1976, placing more importance on money and owning expensive things.195