The rise in obesity and diabetes is an epiphenomenon of the success not failure of capitalism. We have abundant, safe and available food. We are biologically programmed to seek foods high in fat and sodium. This is a result of the fact that we lived for the overwhelming majority of our existence on the planet in a state of scarcity.

More problematically, healthy economies are based on growth and growth doesn’t happen when people just consume what they need.

Folderal! Need is more clearly understood in retrospect. Did we really need indoor plumbing? Did we really need the internal combustion engine? The integrated circuit? The pacemaker? The internet? The blog?

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

And what of this?

Teens had to buy to fit in and if they couldn’t buy, they were pressured to steal. Identity is constructed and status is marked by consumption. The goal of so many teens when they grow up is to make money so that they can buy the right things.

Such sentiments pique the pathos only inasmuch as they are considered outside the context of history. Sadly, it seems a common phenomenon these days when the teaching of history is eschewed in our schools in favor of identity politics. Or if history is taught, it is done through the lens of identity politics.

Power dynamics are fundamental to human culture. Indeed, the symbols we use to denote our membership in some group or another today are merely the progeny of those symbols we used 25k years ago for much the same purpose. Only today, the consequence of the wrong symbols is some bullying, then the consequence was likely death.

No matter. I fear I’m pissing in the ocean. As you were.

I would also like to add that I believe that the phenomenon where status and identity are constructed through consumption is not restricted to teens. We adults also participate in this. We are just more subtle with it but the pressure to buy to maintain or increase our status is there.

More and more, I am seeing a need to educate children and parents on “consumption literacy”. People need to start understanding that the act of consumption does not just have an economic and financial impact, it also has social and environmental impacts.

In order to influence someone, the way kids influence each other, one must have a level of inteligence/persuasion skills.
Whether we believe on this or choose to blame ALL of it on marketing, kids have a level of inteligence that can be influenced by the parents.
If we can help kids to channel their inteligence towards questioning everything they absorb from the media and their friends, I think we’d have a better shot at making them unique individuals.

Can we teach them to be wiser, more cynical consumers?

Imagine the reaction if someone in the US proposed such restrictions.

Over here, in Argentina, demonizing has been the only way of facing it, leading that demonization to complete blindness against the true extent of this phenomenae, and factical incapacity of facing the matter.

I’ll try a comparison: ages pasts, war was a medium to peace. That was thought before people understood that war was war, and peace was absence of war. In a war scenenario, war is right, but not when people knows war harm a lot and brings no peace. Yet that knowledge is achieved throught war, because of war.

Now is a market-vore scenario, no matter what, because devoring marketing is needed, as you said, for a healthy market. Yet there’s a chance this scenario will change, thought it might be after we see clearly the harm of this kind of marketing.

Thanks for writing, this is a great blog.

Reich emphasizes that it’s essential for citizens (and their government) to take the responsibility to pass laws that protect democracy and human rights. Although corporations sometimes act responsibly, they are not citizens or even “moral beings” – they exist to make money. We cannot expect them to police themselves or lead the way in moral or ethical causes – as citizens, we have to make sure our personal and social values are protected. Reich makes many other good points about government and lobbyists, the conflicting roles of “citizen” and “consumer”, and the changes it would take to revive democracy – check out the program on the the KQED Forum website.