Is abundance bad for you?(Growth Fetish)(book)(Book Review)

THERE WAS a recent flurry of publicity about research done by the Australia Institute, a think-tank run by Clive Hamilton, which showed that Australians waste $10.5 billion in goods and services they do not need.

The research appears to have been carried out through a Roy Morgan Omnibus survey. In the Omnibus survey, which is done weekly, a sample of about 1300 people are asked twenty to thirty questions such as "What brand of margarine do you use?" "What dogfood do you have in the house at the moment?" "If there was an election today, how would you vote?" It is a quick and inexpensive way of getting a snapshot answer to a simple question.

To these, it seems, the Australia Institute added questions about whether respondents had bought goods or services they did not need and if so, to what value? The resulting figures were exploded to the Australian population, giving the $10.5 billion figure.

All a bit wobbly, it seems to me. I have completed one of these surveys (and commissioned others) and by the time you get to the non-commercial questions, which are usually put last on the list, you just wish it to end, so you are tempted to give whatever answer comes into your head. As for accurately estimating the cost of waste, let us say that little credibility should be put on the figures.

Still, there is something in Hamilton's work. We do buy things we do not need or use. One of his categories of waste was books bought but unread. That pulled me up. I do buy books faster than I read. I have never felt this to be a cause for guilt but no doubt I will die with books unread, and this will be a waste.

So I went to my heap of books in waiting. One of them was Hamilton's own Growth Fetish from 2003. I had read the Introduction and the last chapter and decided that the rest could wait. But now I sat down to do it justice.

In the introduction, Hamilton searches for a new role for the Left. Socialism has failed. Blair's Third Way is Thatcherism with a human face. Neoliberalism has produced abundance. So what can the Left do? Hamilton suggests "eudemonism": a political philosophy that proposes a society in which people can pursue the activities that truly improve their individual and collective wellbeing. There is the aroma of sour grapes here. Neoliberalism--the market-based society--has produced abundance, so abundance cannot be a good thing after all.