Sixth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

Let’s take a good hard look at our old friend Consumerism, the dominant Employment-Creation System (ECS) in the modern world.  In many ways it works quite well, and it fits all the criteria we outlined last week.

1. It creates jobs:  Consumerism creates what has always seemed to be an unlimited supply of jobs, all revolving around the manufacture, marketing, sale and distribution of consumer goods –the famous fabulous prizes of Capitalism.  Blenders, cars, t-shirts, posters, paperweights, computers, microwaves, gold teeth, embroidered wall-hangings –the list goes on, and on, and on.
2. It distributes jobs:  Consumerism distributes jobs via what might be called the “franchise” method.  Anyone can buy into Consumerism at any point in time –just create a product and put it on the market.  You’ve just manufactured your own job, and if you’re successful enough, you’ll create jobs for other people as well.
3. It makes jobs meaningful:  This is where the true brilliance of Consumerism comes into play.  Many, perhaps most, of the jobs in a Consumerist system are not intrinsically meaningful.  With notable exceptions, consumer products aren’t saving lives or making the world a more beautiful place.  However, each and every job in the Consumerist framework has a quantitative value attached to it –that value being the amount of money you get for performing it.  The amount of money for a Consumerist job is related to the amount of money earned by selling the consumer products that generate the job.  The amount of money earned by selling the product is in turn based on the price of the object.  The crucial part of the whole thing, the part that makes it all work, is that the prices are quasi-objective.  No one person or government sets the prices, they are all assigned automatically by the actions of people buying and selling on the open market. In other words, we all set prices collectively, by establishing through buying and selling what we are willing to pay for things.The utility of this system of evaluation is that it gives us all a way to measure our own self-worth, i.e. in terms of dollars and cents.  In our society, under the Consumerist system, your status, your value as a person in society, is roughly equated with your purchasing power, your accumulated wealth.  The day you first get a job, you secure entry into a global system that allows you to compare yourself –quantitatively –to every other person in the system at any given time.

   This in turn provides the motivation that keeps people working.  True, for people at the very low end of the income scale (a vast number of people, largely invisible to the those above them), the primary motivation is survival, the need to purchase the essentials of life, food, shelter and clothing.  For everyone else, however, no matter how it may be disguised, the goal is status, the getting ahead in the system represented by accumulating more money and more goods.

NEXT WEEK – The Downside of Consumerism