Does consumerism corrupt families?

The Baltimore Sun

Like any caring father, Benjamin Barber bemoans the everyday temptations that prey upon adolescents like his 15-year-old daughter Cornelia. Lately, he has been speaking out about such ills, yet he doesn't mention drugs, alcohol or schoolmates applying peer pressure.

Instead, he talks about product billboards along the highway. The pop-up ads on the Internet. The endless stream of television commercials and other marketing tools aiming to convince kids that there's a product or service out there that they must have.

"Girls are the big targets. Without your knowing it, your role to protect your children is under vigorous assault by capitalist America," said Barber, who is the Gershon and Carol Kekst professor of civil society at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Barber has devoted much of his life to the study of the effects of the consumer market on individuals and society as a whole. He conveys his concern over capitalism gone amok in his book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Children Whole.

"To get parents out of the way between them and your kids is an advertiser's highest aspiration," Barber adds. "They're spending a lot of money to do it, and the techniques by which they do it have been taught in business school - how to get the parents out of the way."

Barber is decrying the ills of consumerism while - some would say ironically - selling his book, speaking before packed audiences everywhere from independent bookstores to the Brookings Institution.

Consumed highlights what many people have come to observe about how companies entice us to buy their goods - which include blurring our perceptions of want and need.

Barber says marketers see youth as a quality investment, so much so that they're cajoling parents to embrace the kid-oriented items themselves.

That way, everyone will line up for the Transformers film, Nintendo Wii game consoles and Harry Potter books.

"Children from the developed world," Barber writes, "grow older chronologically but younger in their behavior, style and controlling ethos, with children dominating markets and the taste cultures that support them in ways that subvert adult culture."

It's no wonder, Barber writes, that in 2004, four of the top-five grossing films were aimed at teenagers, including the top-grossing Shrek 2.

It's no wonder, he says, that there are increasingly more worldwide conferences on marketing to children, such as the 2005 Youth Marketing Mega Event in Huntington, Calif., where panel topics included "Reaching Kids Through Causes - An In-Depth Tutorial in How to Market With A Heart."

And it's not surprising, Barber says, that in 2004, 33.5 million American youth from 12-19 controlled 169 billion consumer dollars - although many of those kids were too young to bring home a paycheck.

"The global market turns out to be defined by the relatively common tastes of the young," Barber writes. "There are French citoyens and Ibo tribesmen and Iraqi Sunnis and Brazilian patriots, but kids are kids. Market to kids, and secure a single planetary market."

And how did the marketplace become so youth-conscious? Barber says it's due in part to manufacturers recognizing that they're rapidly running out of consumers with adequate purchasing power.

Most people in developing countries, he says, are not moving up the income ladder fast enough to see beyond their basic needs. That, he writes, leaves grown-ups in developed nations - who are currently responsible for 60 percent of the world's consumption - to keep the marketplace afloat.

The problem, Barber says, is that most First World consumers have few genuine needs to match their disposable income. Often they have to be enticed into shopping.

And that's where the kids come in.

"Nobody can argue that 2- and 3- and 4-year-olds are candidates for a voluntaristic approach to what they want or need. And yet increasingly they are the targets for marketing and merchandising," said Barber.

"Their discretionary income through their parents makes them the key deciders in the family, and marketers increasingly see them that way.

"Marketers actually talk about parents as gatekeepers between children and society and the commercial world. The object of marketing is removing the gatekeeper, and that's the language that they themselves use: 'How can we get the gatekeepers out of the way so we can get directly at the kids?'"

Barber said often the solutions are subtle: In some malls, he said shops that cater to adult tastes are in one section and those that cater to children's tastes in another.

"That's so families won't shop together," Barber said. "The family that shops together shops far more prudently and spends much less money than the family divided up as individual shoppers."

He says that psychologists have recently discovered that infants can recognize brand logos before they recognize words, "A lot of marketers have said, 'That's a good thing. We can start securing brand loyalty before kids know how to speak.' "

At Brookings, Barber spoke recently about Consumed as a panelist at a government studies program. His assertions were rebutted by Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, who called Barber's book "a chain of intellectual weak links; you can tug anywhere and it snaps."

Said Wilkinson: "Barber's thesis seems to me to imply that we ought to see some kind of decline in well-being on some dimension since the onset of consumerist capitalism. Then why don't we?"

Wilkinson argued that Barber never clarifies in Consumed the difference between an authentic human need and an invented need. He said that contrary to Barber's assertion, most people in developed countries have needs that are still being served by the marketplace.

"I have no doubt that many of us consume a lot of things that Barber disapproves of, and having read the book, I think I now have a good sense of what those things are," said Wilkinson.

"But I will not buy the moralized overproduction theory in the absence of a theory of needs and in the absence of evidence that our current patterns of consumption are not in fact meeting real needs."

But Barber countered that he was neither implying that consumerism is inherently wrong nor that people shouldn't embrace luxuries. But there's a difference between that, he says, and being cajoled into thinking that consumerism begets happiness.

"There are many human pleasures that are not profitable for someone else," Barber said. "And whether you want to call it overproduction or over-zealousness or over-greediness, the fact is that we live in an economy that wants to make money coming and going on everything."

joe.burris@baltsun.com

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