Amazon’s new series Fallout starts with the end of the world: News reports of an international crisis interrupt a children’s birthday party, mushroom clouds appear outside, and chaos ensues. The year is 2077, but it feels like the 1950s. In this world, the Cold War never ended, and neither did the consumerism that defined mid-century America.

Two centuries after the opening sequence—when the plot of Fallout shifts into gear—cities are devastated, and communities have descended into violence. But brands endure. Advertisements for “Nuka-Cola” and “Super Duper Mart” litter the new American wasteland. Meanwhile, deep underground, a parallel society of Vault Dwellers live in high-tech shelters, cooking with “Atomic Queen” ovens, watching movies on “Radiation King” VHS players, and snacking on “Sugar Bombs.”

Lucy and Hank MacLean enjoy some relaxation in Vault 33, where it feels a lot like 1950s America. Courtesy of Prime Video.

The show, which might easily be dismissed as suburban nostalgia, is rooted in messy historical reality. In mid-century America, conspicuous acts of consumption defined a society facing the end, spurred in large part by the macabre influence of the bomb—evincing fascination and discomfort.

Today, trotting out the bomb to advertise goods might seem misguided at best and exploitative at worst. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the dawn of a new technological age promised an unleashing of scientific potential, and audiences were entranced. Walt Disney produced the 1957 television special for schoolchildren “Our Friend the Atom,” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a very public pro-nuclear campaign called “Atoms for Peace” to reassure the public that the nuclear future was not just about destruction. Meanwhile, atomic advertisers tapped into the excitement of technological modernity while trying to sidestep the true horrors of nuclear war.

Still from a 1950s U.S. Army information film, which appears in the documentary Atomic Café.

So, just as the fictional characters in Fallout sip on Nuka-Cola, real-life Americans of the era sipped a popular cocktail inspired by the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, less than an hour after reports of the successful attack on Hiroshima, members of the Washington Press Club mixed gin, Pernod, and vermouth, charging 60 cents a pour for the “Atomic Cocktail.” It was a smash hit with members of the press—and went on to become particularly beloved in Las Vegas, where atomic tests were a 1950s tourist attraction.

Fallout’s soundtrack features hits such as the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” (1941) and Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” (1957), harking back to a time when songs about the end of the world routinely climbed the Billboard charts. And its reimagined advertisements for “atom powered” wind-up robots and washing detergent that’s as “tough on dirt as a nuclear blast” refer to genuine Cold War-era products that stocked shelves at Macy’s and Sears.

But sometimes marketers weren’t successful in striking a balance between sensationalizing their products and terrifying their audience. Such was the case with a product central to both Fallout and the real-life Cold War home front: the fallout shelter.

One of the show’s main characters is Cooper Howard, “star of stage and screen” and “pitchman for the end of the world.” In advertisements for Vault-Tec, he sells shelters “strong enough to keep out the rads and the Reds.” His pitches close with a promise, made directly to the camera: “You can be a hero, too. By purchasing a residence in a Vault-Tec vault today. Because if the worst should happen tomorrow, the world is going to need Americans just like you to build a better day after.”

A 1951 prototype basement fallout shelter sits on a New Jersey boardwalk. Courtesy of the National Archives.

In real life, a similar directive came from an even bigger celebrity. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationwide address encouraging ordinary citizens to build their own fallout shelters. Speaking to around 25 million viewers, Kennedy argued, “We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country.” That September, President Kennedy opened an entire issue of Life magazine dedicated to fallout shelters with a letter that made the remarkable claim that “97 out of 100” citizens might survive the next war if they took survival into their own hands. Outsourcing survival to the private sector gave rise to swarms of local businesses. Newsweek estimated that in one week in October 1961, over 31 shelter companies applied for business licenses in Atlanta. In the same month companies like Peace-O-Mind Shelter Corporation in Texas, Survival-All Incorporated in Ohio, Survival Construction Specialist in Denver, and Diamond Blocks in Boston all opened their doors for business.

Driving profit was no afterthought in the development of the Cold War home front; it was central to its social function. Historian Lizabeth Cohen describes America immediately following the end of World War II as a “consumers’ republic” defined by the rise of powerful new political language that equated good citizenship with effective consumerism. Shelter businesses, then, attempted to marry two eminently successful ideological constructs of the era: national security and the self-made, individualistic, suburban consumer family. But there were limits to even the best salesman’s pitch. Fallout depicts a nation duped into life underground. But many real-life American households were not so easily convinced—and shelter salesmen routinely went bust, even as the atomic clock ticked close to midnight.

Take James Byrne, a Detroit-based plywood businessman who described the shelter trade as a “can’t miss proposition,” with every political statement from the Oval Office a “million-dollar free advertisement.” As international tensions rose in the summer and fall of 1962, Byrne went door to door trying to make a buck—and failed miserably. “People listen to the sales pitch, take all the literature,” Byrne’s best salesman, Sal George recalled, “ask questions and then just walk away.”

Getting desperate, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Byrne and George loaded up a flatbed truck with their model shelter, drove it around town, dropped the price by $100, and posted a sign reading “FALLOUT SHELTERS—WHILE THEY LAST.”  There was not even a “nibble of a sale.” Eventually, they offered it up free of charge, and a Michigan family hauled the shelter away. “Last I heard from them they were having trouble assembling it. But I’m not asking questions,” said Byrne.

His experience was not unique. Between 1961 and 1963 an estimated 600 shelter companies across the United States filed for bankruptcy. Given the opportunity to purchase their families’ safety, most citizens rejected the salesmen’s pitch.

“The future, my friend, is products,” a fellow actor tells Cooper Howard in Fallout. “You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product.” Maybe in their world. But history shows us that when faced with the prospect of total annihilation, Americans never really embraced the idea that survival should be a consumer choice.

The post What If Cold War Consumerism Never Ended? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So it is as we emerge from the darkest days of COVID-19. The clamor is rising for a “consumer-driven recovery” from the pandemic downturn, or even a binge of “revenge consumption” against the virus. Powerful forces are at work to make sure these calls are heeded, from a surge in advertising spending to government stimulus checks to reminders from lifestyle media that it’s time to follow trends again.

As always, we’re being asked to postpone a conversation about the dark side of consumerism. But to yield this time would be a terrible missed opportunity. Millions of people have just had deep reckonings with their values and priorities, and—maybe most importantly—the pandemic has offered glimpses of what life beyond consumer society could look like. What better time than now to grapple with our outsized appetites and their harmful impacts on the Earth and humankind?

We might start by reminding ourselves where things stood before the coronavirus emerged in late 2019. Earlier that year, a United Nations panel reported that, sometime around the turn of the millennium, consumption surpassed global population growth as the greatest driver of our environmental crises. When it comes to climate change, species extinction, toxic pollution, water conservation, and other challenges, how much each one of us consumes matters more than how many of us there are.

Consider that the average person’s lifestyle in a rich country now demands 13 times as much oil, steel, wood, water, coal, and so on as the average lifestyle in a poorer one. That means that raising two children in a country such as the United States will eat up as many natural resources as having 26 kids in a nation like Bangladesh, Haiti, or Zambia. I’ve traveled widely (I’m an overconsumer), but I have yet to encounter such a large family anywhere on Earth.

While global consumption slowed during COVID shutdowns, we’ve already regained nearly the same breakneck pace we were at in the beforetimes. Nothing we have done to “green” this consumer appetite has been able to keep up with how quickly it is growing. Here and there we ban plastic bags or plastic straws; meanwhile, plastic production overall is set to expand by 40 percent in the next decade. “Sustainable fashion” is trending, but in the past 20 years, the number of garments purchased per person increased by 60 percent, while the lifespan of those clothes was cut nearly in half. The fraction of goods in circular systems—in which discarded products are cycled into new ones—is actually shrinking. The amount of raw materials pouring into the world economy is higher than ever.

The sheer volume of our consumption—the average American alone consumes so much that, if everybody in the world lived the way they do, it would take five Earths to maintain such a global standard of living—has led the World Resources Institute, a non-profit environmental research outfit, to label it the new “elephant in the room”—dangerous, obvious, and yet somehow, overlooked. The standout example is the fight against climate change. Over the past two decades, no environmental issue has benefitted from more public attention, high-level action, or technological progress. Yet by 2019, the best we had achieved through efforts such as building bike lanes, inventing more energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances, and producing electricity with cleaner-burning natural gas instead of coal was to level off global emissions—at what was then a record high—for a few years in the mid-2010s. Then the consumer economy picked up steam worldwide, from the rise of the middle class in India to the supersizing of McMansions in America, and emissions started breaking records again. So far in modern history, the only times that global greenhouse gas emissions have actually declined have come amid major economic downturns—in other words, when the world stops shopping.

The raw power of consuming less became clear nearly the moment the pandemic lockdowns began. Consumer culture ground to a halt—and instantly, carbon emissions began their sharpest drop on record, tumbling nearly 9 percent in the first half of 2020. In a matter of days, skies turned a deeper blue—most strikingly, over the hazardously polluted Asian cities that produce many of the world’s manufactured goods. As the global economy shrank, it bent closer to being able to run on existing renewable energy supplies than ever before. There were visible signs of nature rebounding. My personal favorite was a group of American crocodiles photographed basking and body-surfing on a Mexican beach left empty by the retreat of mass tourism.

It wasn’t only the environment that changed under COVID-19. We did, too. Whether in the relative calm of quarantine or the depths of anxiety and sorrow, people worldwide questioned what matters most in life and where comfort and satisfaction really come from. Nearly everyone, I suspect, is emerging from the pandemic less hopped up to shop than to spend time with people they care about. Many others have a new appreciation for enjoying nature, expressing themselves creatively, or getting involved in issues larger than themselves.

This escape from what historian David Shi, a scholar of America’s simpler living traditions, once called “the prison of activities”—relentlessly overplanned and overscheduled lives—allowed people to learn firsthand what they truly value in consumer culture, and what they can easily live without. Many rediscovered low-consuming pleasures such as gardening, baking, and the art of conversation. Still others enjoyed freedom from social expectations around how they dress, and relief from constant pressure to keep up with the Joneses.

We are not the same people now as we were before the pandemic, and to be asked to put those changes behind us and return to full-throttle consumption is insulting. It’s the resources we found within ourselves and our communities, not consumerism, that got us through this catastrophe. “Go shopping” is as unsatisfactory a message today as it was when George W. Bush famously suggested it as a meaningful response to the 9/11 attacks. Fittingly, when this year’s Prime Day—the bogus shopping “holiday” invented by Amazon for its own benefit—arrived in June, we saw it meet with increasing social media pushback and mainstream critique.

On the other hand, we’ve also been talking too simply about simpler living. Catchphrases like “less is more” and “live simply” have always been glib, and seem even more now that we’ve freshly seen how the pandemic pause in household spending led to joblessness and shuttered businesses. While there are good reasons for individuals to choose to buy less (from saving money to helping the planet to pursuing deeper values), if we really want to achieve a “deconsumer” society, we need to change the system itself.

How, for example, might we reverse the unpopular trend toward products that quickly fall apart, go out of fashion, or need an upgrade? One answer is to move toward a “buy less, buy better” economy in which we buy fewer things that last longer. To get there, we could encourage consumers to pay a premium price for quality, though that hasn’t worked well in the past. A better bet is taking concrete steps to help durable goods compete with disposable ones. We could make companies pay more of the health and environmental costs of pollution, including climate pollution, produced in their products’ manufacture—costs that are currently borne by society at large. We could pass laws mandating that goods be easily repairable, or require life-span labels that tell us how long the things we buy will last. Interestingly, some companies—having witnessed the clear environmental benefits of the COVID-19 consumer slowdown—were inspired to move toward a business model in which customers buy fewer new things. “The apparel industry is facing an over-consumption crisis,” Levi’s posted on its website recently in a momentous public acknowledgement by a major brand. The company was launching a mildly deconsumerist slogan (“Buy better. Wear longer.”), and will also sell more of its products secondhand.

Another tack might address income inequality. Research suggests that larger gaps between rich and poor aggravate consumerism by magnifying status differences, which cause us to spend more in pursuit of a dignified place in society, and by increasing feelings of insecurity, which tend to make us focus more on income and possessions. Income inequality is something concrete we can change. We know there are ways to spread wealth more evenly.

Strategies like these point to a future built more around quality than quantity when it comes to our stuff, services, and experiences. They also point to a quality of life that includes some of the good that we glimpsed in the pandemic—cleaner air and water, less materialistic values, a better relationship with nature. We won’t get there by wishing individual consumers will one day see the light. We get there by building a different world. The first step is to start talking about it.

The post Could COVID-19 Force Us to Confront Our Consumption Problem? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As he prepared to examine the circuit board under a bright magnifier lamp, the power cut out across the service center. The soldering iron, the lamp, the shop’s overhead lights, and the ceiling fans all stopped working. Narendra (not his real name, but used here to protect his privacy) sighed before going to look for the battery-powered generator at the other end of the shop. It was his responsibility to get the overhead lights and fan working again in the boss’s office. The television would have to wait.

Such deep-summer rolling blackouts were a common occurrence. Still, in the electronics service center where I worked alongside Narendra in 2016, the irony was not lost on anyone. Here we were, trying to fix expensive consumer electronics like flat-screen televisions, refrigerators, and audio systems, and the very thing needed for their functioning was out of order. When the power would return—and these devices might be returned to functionality—was anyone’s guess.

Technology—especially the consumer electronics that saturate our everyday lives—is laden with futuristic promises: the promise of seamlessness, the promise of constant connectivity, the promise of invisible function without disruption. GE announces that “laundry time shouldn’t interrupt family time” with its Wi-Fi-connected washing machines and dryers, some of which can also be voice-controlled. “Go ahead and talk,” GE invites us, “your Wi-Fi appliances will respond.”

Reality, however, comes up short of the vision of appliances that require no thought to maintain and no special care to update. Nowhere are the contradictions of this dream clearer than in the places responsible for ensuring that these appliances will work.

I had gone to South India to study the labor of small-town service technicians and get a better understanding of the kind of work and knowledge necessary to keep these devices working. A typical workday alternated between waiting for parts to be delivered from authorized suppliers and trying to help consumers who owned devices that the corporation no longer guaranteed or supported, like old cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions and obsolete DVD players.

A pile of circuit boards from older CRT televisions in an independent repair shop in the town of Guntur, Andrha Pradesh. Courtesy of Padma Chirumamilla.

The center was staffed almost entirely by men, save for the reception area, which was run by two women, who were also responsible for ensuring the paper trail tracking each device in and out of the center was kept up to date. In the audiovisual section, where I conducted most of my research, the service technicians were men of varying ages and educational experiences. Some had studied at government-run “industrial training institutes,” others at privately-owned and operated technical institutes, while still others held engineering degrees and were working on six-month internships to learn through “experience.” One of the bosses complained that he couldn’t get “quality” hires who were technically skilled and appropriately professional, who could live up to the international image of the parent corporation.

In 1960, the journalist Vance Packard wrote in The Waste Makers that, “…when in a joking mood, [businessmen] sometimes ask the definition of the phrase ‘durable goods.’ Their playful answer: any products that will outlast the final installment payment.”

In India, when goods that had indeed outlasted the final installment payment showed up at the service center, it was up to the individual service technician to decide whether it was worth his while to attempt the repair. Given that the service center could pocket whatever money it made from repairing these old devices without reporting the income to corporate overseers, there was an ulterior motive to help customers save their old, often well-loved devices.

The service center, Narendra told me, didn’t pay particularly well, though as an experienced technician, he managed to provide for himself, his wife, and two boys. Entry-level technicians made far less, and they had no formal system of advancement or any real job security. Boredom pervaded the atmosphere between shipments of parts. Because the corporation so tightly controlled and monitored both functional and defective parts for their latest devices, the technicians had no spare parts to tinker with.

They had more freedom with the “obsolete” CRT televisions that were out of warranty and thus out of corporate mind. So Narendra spent a considerably longer time fixing the CRT televisions than he did the newer, pricier flat-screens. He could examine the television’s circuit board directly and isolate the exact problem or set of components that he needed to replace, instead of merely determining whether a new part needed to be ordered from a predetermined list, and then installing the part when it finally arrived.

Of course, the service center didn’t guarantee or even formally authorize any of the work performed on CRT televisions. Whenever a formal inspection from regional headquarters was due, harried technicians would clear away traces that they even performed this kind of repair work. Though these jobs paid less, Narendra found the process more satisfying.

His discontent with the process for the newer devices mirrored a broader concern I heard among many television repairmen I interviewed: their labor—and even the notion of the television as a thing that ought to be repaired when it failed—was being sidelined by the convenience of a “use-and-throw” ethos. With the increasing availability of pay-in-installment schemes and the arrival of cheaper Chinese brands in the small-town market, the basic economic viability of repairing ordinary consumer electronics had been thrown into question.

Writing in The Baffler, historian and activist Maximillian Alvarez notes that the desired domain of tech giants is “a utopia from which there is no way out, where life itself waits for ‘upgrades’ and adjusts to new formats, functions, restrictions, and protocols that are crafted in secret, delivered from afar, and serviceable only by those technical support outposts that bolster their bottom line and solidify their market dominance.”

The service center where I worked certainly fit that model. For the newer models of flat-screen televisions, the defective parts from customers’ sets were carefully bagged, individually labeled, and locked in the boss’s office until they were shipped back to regional headquarters. Attempting individualized repairs on newer flat-screen televisions was mostly disallowed—and even rendered infeasible by the growing physical fragility and complexity of television screen technologies and circuit boards.

What is at stake with the increasing dominance of “use-and-throw” as an ethic that guides our attitude towards the objects within our everyday lives? One answer is that we are losing the ability to maintain a life independent of the surveillance that corporations embed within their devices. Another answer is that small-scale repair practices are becoming less viable, so we are losing the longevity of many objects that shape our daily rhythms.

Only 20 percent of electronic waste is documented and recycled. Disposability is an inherently unsustainable ethic to live by, and one that relies upon the cruelty and constancy of global supply chains to maintain its façade of ease.

The repair shop poses to us, as first-world consumers and users within a startlingly dense world of goods, a simple question: Are there other means by which we might live with the objects in our lives, beyond a relation of utilitarian usage, convenience, and disposability? The popularity of Marie Kondo’s stuff-organizing strategies (based on the Japanese concept of tokimeku, “sparking joy”) or the trappings of Danish hygge (“coziness”) suggests that other ways of living and being with goods do exist.

What sort of future and people do we forsake in relegating ourselves to an ethic of “use-and-throw” with the stuff of our everyday lives? If the unease of the television repairman is any indication, these are questions we need to answer.

The post At India’s TV Repair Shops, a Worker Discovers Technology’s False Promises appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Human consumption is a primary driver of environmental problems. But our urge to consume is encoded in survival—it is clearly not going away.

That urge can also be harnessed to solve problems, though. Information is a powerful tool to enable and move consumers toward sustainable behavior, and it is more readily available than ever before. With information about the environmental impacts of products at their fingertips, consumers can make informed choices, driving a revolution of sustainability for whole corporate sectors.

So far, the revolution has moved slowly. Many companies have failed to translate green into gold. Firms tend to be idealistic about consumer behavior, underestimating their level of sophistication or relying too much on rational decision-making models that don’t account for biases in human decision-making. Furthermore, many have taken a piecemeal approach that decouples green messages from actual organizational practices, leading to inconsistencies and fomenting distrust.

People care increasingly about the environment but are busier and more skeptical about environmental claims. Products are usually not purchased simply because they are better for the environment, and product quality cannot be sacrificed for sustainable goals. Largely, today’s consumers are convenient environmentalists—they will buy green, but it needs to be on their own terms.

Complicating matters has been a steady stream of firms getting exposed for greenwashing and making other false representations. This has made consumers distrustful of green messages. And they are confused about what is really good for the environment in the first place. So, how do you reach these people—a majority of consumers— and convince them to buy green?

The answer lies in the green bundle.

Messaging that pairs sustainability with private benefits creates a win-win for consumers. They are not only doing right by the world but also doing the right thing for their own lives. In a sense, they get to have their cake and eat it too—they benefit psychologically from their altruism and benefit in a more tangible sense from added value.

Of course, to change consumer behavior, firms first need to get their message right. This goes beyond communications. It requires adopting a culture of transparency and framing authentic messages that resonate with consumers.

At a time when information zooms around the world in an instant from any handheld device, transparency is an unyielding force. In most cases, the cost of resisting is greatly outweighed by the benefits of embracing this force before competition.

To reach customers, green messages must pierce a busy cloud of green information. The message must be clear and credible. These may seem like simple imperatives, but many companies fail to hit all of the notes.

Practice green modesty and transparency. CEOs are pivotal to developing clarity and credibility. Rightly seen as figureheads for the companies they manage, they must exemplify a sustainable ethos in their personal and professional lives or risk damaging the credibility of the firm’s efforts. Going green cannot be delegated to a marketing department or PR firm. Indeed, one challenge that often arises (and leads to inadvertent greenwashing) is lack of coordination among different units of an organization. This can cause marketers, to overstate environmental benefits because they do not understand the complexity or impacts of a new product from R & D. To avoid this pitfall, CEOs need to set the tone by clearly stating their green modesty, instituting proper incentives, and relying on codes and standards that promote an ethical climate.

Although this may come as a surprise, even today many firms do not know the environmental and social impacts of their suppliers. Supply-chain environmental-sustainability scorecards are one way that companies can begin to take charge of this information. Once firms better understand the environmental impact of their products, they face the challenge of translating this information not only into a clear signal that can be understood by consumers but also into something that consumers care about.

The steps just described, though necessary, are insufficient to make consumers go green. Again, there is little willingness to pay for environmental benefits or the public good alone. Moreover, research shows that if there is any perceived trade-off in quality, even fewer people are willing to pay. Consumers’ willingness to pay is a less explored piece of the puzzle for green markets, but it is the key to developing effective informational strategies.

This is where the green bundle comes in.

Consumers will translate aspirational beliefs into actions when they see green products as being bundled with private benefits, such as health benefits or improved quality. Firms need to bundle environmental or public-good benefits with private benefits, including better performance, enhanced status, improved health, money savings, and even emotional returns.

Emphasize increased quality. Few are willing to pay a premium without some measure of private benefit. Conversely, with certain goods, such as cleaning products, consumers may confuse or associate eco-labeling with poor quality. It is therefore important to communicate quality alongside environmental virtue. The Clorox Company promotes the view that natural cleaners are at least as good as their conventional counterparts by boasting that products with the Green Works label “clean with the power you expect.”

In many cases, there is a natural overlap between quality and greenness. Performance, functionality, usability, durability, comfort, and convenience are all attributes that can be effectively bundled with sustainability.

Leverage peer pressure. Most of us care what others think, and we like to display the good things we are doing. The unusual appearance of the Toyota Prius became a selling point after the car was used to bring Hollywood stars to the red carpet of the Academy Awards. Suddenly, this strange-looking vehicle could make people look like stars themselves. Status is a powerful tool to compel behavior in the marketplace, and it is particularly effective when consumption is highly visible.

Promote health benefits. Research shows that the most important reason we buy green is for our health and the health of our families. Health is the main reason people choose organic products that are produced without chemicals. Thus, it was not surprising to see that, over a ten-year period, the organic-food market grew 238 percent, from $8.6 billion to $29 billion, while the overall food market grew 33 percent. Health attributes are an important private benefit that can be associated with green products.

But people do not always make the connection between environmental and health benefits. Information campaigns are one way to close that link, and there are critical times when consumers will be more receptive to campaigns about environment and health. These include national health crises, such as the water contamination in Flint, Michigan, which raise awareness and lead consumers to seek strategies to protect their health. They also include personal times in individuals’ lives, such as when they start a family or face health problems.

Unravel monetary returns. Money is the most cited reason to avoid or embrace green products and services. Premiums often scare consumers away, whereas monetary savings associated with saving energy or resources are appealing. But perceptions of premiums or savings vary widely depending on context or reference point. How financial incentives are framed makes a big difference. Small savings framed as a tax or a loss can be quite effective, and raising a product’s price can even help in some situations.

Stimulate empathy. The final piece of the green bundle is the emotional connection between the consumer and the sustainable products. Consumers will empathize with a cause when the story is told the right way. In addition, they need to believe their purchases will make a tangible difference. It is imperative to bridge the distance between green consumption and impact, making the benefits of consumption tangible by showing how they help a specific person.

The post Want to Save the Environment? Give Consumers More Benefits for Going Green appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s striking about these demands is that the responsibilities and obligations of American consumers are understood to be stories about individual accountability. Whether it is the government asking consumers to eschew a low price for the sake of patriotism, or economists calling on them to manage debt at the same time that they unleash their desires, demands made on consumers are imposed at the personal level. Each citizen must hold the reins of protection and growth in his or her own hands, making choices that apparently resonate on the national level.

Given the widespread belief in the invisible hand of the marketplace, such a personal touch seems out of place. Yet the logic behind the importance of the individual consumer is so deeply rooted that it’s hardly surprising to find it persists. It’s a formulation that goes back to 18th-century efforts to understand the creation and preservation of wealth.

Take, for example, one 1767 diatribe written by a frustrated New York linen draper. Infuriated by the poor state of his local economy—excessive imports had left the colony constantly in debt and drained of all hard currency—the merchant published a pamphlet that was intended to act as an object lesson in the arts of economizing. He painted a picture of an industrious farmer from Staten Island, busily bringing to market all the “beef, pork, corn, butter, cheese and wool” he could spare. Having earned a thousand pounds through his sales, he went on to buy the makings of a good party, bringing home “rum, sugar, wine, cloth, silk, muslin and tea.” But this farmer never spent more than he earned. As a result, he prospered.

When his son succeeded to the estate, the parable took a darker turn. The young man’s desire to be fashionable led to overspending on pricey imports. Claret, madeira, linen, chintz, and damask—all of which could have been substituted with items made at home—led to the young man’s ruin. His farm was sold, his “body shut up in prison.” The lesson from such a tale was clear, the linen purveyor suggested: “The conduct of a single Farmer and a Province in this respect differ no more than greater and less.” In other words, a healthy economy comes simply from responsible housekeeping.

Such morality tales were not the purview of protectionists alone. Free-trade enthusiasts likewise sought to justify their ideology with counter-parables about economically righteous behavior. In 1776, when the Scottish economist Adam Smith sought to persuade readers that restrictions on imports were unhelpful, he turned to the example of the “prudent master of a family” to make his case. Why would such a sensible man seek to manufacture shoes or clothes for himself, Smith argued, when it clearly made sense for him to seek out those items from cobblers and tailors who could make them faster and cheaper than any member of his own household? Leaping from the household to the nation, Smith continued: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them.”

Regardless of ideology, such parables shared a basic didactic device: They erased differences between an individual’s personal economy and the nation’s political economy. Collapsing the distinctions between household and country made it easier to imagine that the judgments and actions of a single consumer could have a direct bearing on the health of the nation’s economy. Both authors—the linen merchant, and Smith—went on to argue that economic policy could structure and influence the creation of wealth. Still, the cornerstone of national wealth remained an individual’s actions. The role of policy was obscured by the familiar metaphor of the consumer at home.

In America, such parables about personal habits and individual accountability had special resonance. Even before Smith’s prognostications were rolling off the press, Americans had confronted the question of how far their actions as individual consumers might take them and their nascent nation. By boycotting English woolens and donning homespun and in refusing to drink East India Company tea, colonial consumers challenged the might of the British empire. By 1776, Americans had learned powerful lessons about their importance as individuals. Their everyday household decisions had helped birth a nation.

In the wake of the Revolution this form of patriotism lost some appeal. Still, the idea that each individual might make the choices that would create national wealth did not disappear. Faced with an enormous national debt and seeking ways to raise urgently-needed revenue, politicians turned back to the consumer. Members of the First Congress in 1789 passed a new tariff: Each time Americans bought a foreign luxury, they would pay a price to the nation for doing so.

Once again, personal economy sat at the heart of political economy. Praising the new tariff in 1789, The Connecticut Courant editorialized: “It teaches us to economize not by forbidding us to be extravagant but by making us pay for it if we are so.” For those who were wealthy, it was possible to shop and contribute to the nation’s coffers. For those who were poor or dependent, the only virtuous course of action was to abstain from the world of foreign luxury goods altogether.

This formulation led to a notion that economic liberties in the form of consumer choice should be reserved for the rich and powerful, rather than the poor and vulnerable. In addition, the idea that consumers as individuals had such a direct impact on the nation’s economic health gave rise to the virulent surveillance of less-wealthy consumers whose actions seemed not only to undermine their own solvency but that of the nation, too.

During the Panic of 1857, for instance, retailers scrambled to unload unwanted stock by reducing prices, closing down lines of credit, and selling cheap for cash. Since most Americans, rich and poor, depended on credit to survive, such an action could have provoked widespread condemnation. But it was not the frantic retailers who came in for criticism; instead, it was a “horde” of female shoppers that caught satirists’ attention. In a piece in Harper’s Weekly, women were described as a “spending animal” whose heart was “a bargain” and whose soul was “an immense reduction.” These shallow shoppers were not just criticized for their unbridled spending: They were accused of obliterating “republican values” too.

Even as the nation succumbed to cataclysmic Civil War, citizens continued to monitor each other and make judgments. In the Union, where a new and stringent tariff became law, Northern shoppers found they could defend their personal purchases as contributing to the nation’s coffers. In this way, President Abraham Lincoln’s government helped to enshrine consumption at the heart of America’s political economy, as a civic force for good. But even as the Republican Party helped transform shopping from liability into liberty for everyday Americans, the central idea that individual shoppers bore a personal responsibility to keep the nation solvent remained intact.

As modern-day accounts of consumer behavior show, Americans have not shaken off the lingering belief that the national economy is simply the household economy writ large. With the U.S. financial collapse in 2008, both media and government were quick to scrutinize the actions of the individual consumer. Overspending and irresponsible borrowing (rather than irresponsible lending, for example) were easier to understand. As Time magazine noted in a list of 25 people most to blame for the subprime crisis, consumers deserved some blame: “we enjoyed living beyond our means…no wonder we hoped it would never end.” As had been the case throughout America’s history, government looked to individuals to make right the nation’s economic predicament. Using the language of household economics, it was easy to lay the blame on the shoulders of individuals. Tales of personal fiscal irresponsibility offered a “common sense” solution to the problem; stories of structural failures did not.

The homespun vision of the nation as household enshrines the consumer as the agent of America’s fortune or failure. But such a vision is, of course, a fiction. Though individual citizens may be in charge of their own households, they are not in charge of the American household writ large. The citizen-consumer is at the mercy of national economic policy, not the other way around. Nonetheless, as with all homespun philosophies, it’s a myth that is hard to dispel. Perhaps that is not surprising. It’s a story as old as the nation itself.

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Imagine getting a keepsake made of hair from someone’s head! It would seem morbid. But through the 1800s, Americans showed their feelings with hair. At home, hair was sewn into notebooks, put under glass in lockets, and sent through the mail to loved ones. A large industry for hair products produced earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and wall decorations. While the Valentine’s industry seems recent, Americans have always mixed retail and sincerity; shopping and emotional relationships.

I saw my first piece of hairwork when I was 16 at an antiques show at the Crossroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska. Amongst the postcards and other junk, I found a large button with a woven front of brownish fabric. Though the vendor assured me that the “fabric” wasn’t hair, I bought it for 25 cents and later decided it had to be hair. It was creepy and yet I kept thinking about the loving gesture of the hair enclosed by the metal frame of the button’s edge. When I was getting my doctorate in history, my thoughts returned to that oddly compelling button as I tried to understand how 19th-century Americans used both handmade and commercial objects to define themselves, their memories and relationships, and even death and life. And so I began to study hair art.

These days if you want to feel close to a loved one who’s far away you’re likely to look at a photograph, or even to browse their Facebook or Instagram account. But in earlier times, you might have looked at hair. In 1828, a few days after Valentine’s Day, Walter Mason Oddie, a landscape painter, was at his desk musing about the love of his life, his wife Julia. He unfolded a small scrap of paper to gaze upon a lock of her hair. Three years earlier he had married his Julia, Walter wrote in his diary book, and she was “the constant object of my thoughts [who] has remained an inmate of my bosom – Time has no effect upon my affection.” After that reflection, Walter carefully folded the piece of paper and slid it back into a symbolic bed—an envelope marked “Julia’s March 1824.” It was a home for the hair and a memory for his heart. Possessing someone’s hair was a deeply sentimental way to possess that person.

Hair could soften even the hardest of hearts in the most hard-bitten of men. In 1870, Adelbert Ames, a 35-year-old former U.S. general in the Union Army and a Senator from Reconstruction-era Mississippi—not exactly a softie—met Blanche Butler from Massachusetts. Soon after they met they were engaged and Blanche sent him a locket with her photograph and her hair. She teased: “I am now debating in my own mind the propriety of putting a lock of hair opposite the picture.” Adelbert swooned as only a well-tested fighter of a man could do: “Dear Blanche, I was very glad, happy, to receive your beautiful token—not beautiful, that is secondary—it was dear and precious. Your sweet face and a lock of your beautiful hair. Your hair seemed to bring you very near me. I thank you, Love, for the locket, the picture, and the hair. I shall always wear them.”

For Adelbert and Walter, the hair was much better than a “likeness” or a photograph. Hair was a living part of the person: Its color did not noticeably fade over time; the texture and feel remained the same as it did on the head of the person; and whether the person was living or dead, their memory resided in the lock of hair. Photographic images distorted appearances. Hair wasn’t just symbolic of the person, it was the person—their body, their living material. It was a far more potent carrier of memory than a photograph which only revealed the appearance of a loved one; hair physically brought that person close.

Hairwork in the 19th century could be as simple as Walter’s lock of hair or Blanche’s hair nestled in a locket on Adelbert’s watch chain. It could also be much more ornate, and more about friendship and family than romantic love. Hairwork was often made-to-order by jewelers and the ornate pieces were often worn with a customer’s best outfit. Hairwork could be finely woven beads on a necklace, or bracelets of flat-braided and woven hair to be worn against the skin. Hair was made into wreaths that hung in parlors, into three-dimensional bouquets of ornately knotted hair flowers and leaves kept under glass cloches. Catalogs offered page after page of the same designs, across the country.

This wasn’t a curious gothic-inspired affectation at the time; wearing hair jewelry or displaying hairwork in one’s parlor was to exhibit the best taste in fashion and sentiment. What’s more, it demonstrated that the owner was woven into a web of friends and family and dear ones, displayed in her ears or on a parlor table.

Hairwork was also a perfect consumer product that worked with Americans’ rapidly innovating retail culture. Deeply personalized in material, manufacture, and meaning, it was also generically respected and understood. It was a material so innately personal that the market couldn’t besmirch its sincerity. American fiction, short stories in women’s magazines, the advertisements for the jewelry all assured potential customers that hairwork, while mainstream, was about one’s private sentiment. But that hairwork was likely made in large workshop factories, such as the National Artistic Hair Work Company in Chicago. This balance of the personal and the corporate is as familiar to us as the use of Facebook to share life’s deepest experiences.

But in the 20th century, its meaning began to change. By the 1920s, jewelry wholesalers were selling ready-made hairwork (so who knew whose hair it was made of!) but many saw hairwork as a moldering relic of the Victorian age. It fell out of favor because clothing styles went towards lighter colors and fabrics, and decoration in houses emphasized clean lines. More importantly, the way we showed sincerity changed. In hairwork’s heyday, sincerity was a sentimental expression of honestly held emotions; by the 1920s, effusive displays of emotion seemed overwrought and the ornate lines of hairwork fussy and disingenuous.

Today, we strive to be restrained in our emotional displays—but some things haven’t changed. Jewelers sell upscale “personalized” beads and charms to represent one’s children or family. At my local grocery store in Ohio, the checkers wear rows of Badge-A-Minit pin buttons emblazoned with a daughter’s basketball team photo or a grandchild’s kindergarten portrait. As I interact with them, I know they are in a web of relationships—they love and they are loved by many.

We are still searching for ways to represent relationships that are not about work or the market—the most intimate connections we share with others we want memorialized in an object we can hold, store away, and go back to again and again. We want to buy a way to stop time, to remember the “real” person we love. Walter folded his Julia’s hair back up in its paper bed, and Blanche’s locket still exists attached to Adelbert’s watch chain. Time, as Walter said, has had little effect on affections.

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Whatever happened to electric trains, Erector sets, Lincoln Logs (or even action figures), and dolls? Well, you can still find them at most toy stores and big box stores, technically. But many of the “classic” toys beloved by grandparents (building blocks, construction sets, dollhouses) are now found at high-end specialty shops, as if they’re hallowed antiques from another era. It’s never a good sign when construction toy sets are on display at the National Building Museum in Washington.

But before anyone starts feeling sad about the changing tastes of kids, maybe we should take a look at the changing tastes of adults. Here’s a fact most people don’t know: the average age of gamers these days is 30. Yes, we have come a long way since 1989, when 8-year olds first punched the buttons on their Nintendo Game Boys when they weren’t playing with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those 8-year-olds never put down the console. Today, TV ads pitch bigger and better data plans to preserve family harmony, since kids and parents are jostling for the same hardware and bandwidth.

All this may indicate no more than the triumph of the sensual byte over the tactile block. But I think there’s more going on here. Simply put, childhood and adulthood just aren’t what they used to be. When I researched the history of the 20th-century American toy, I was struck by the reasons parents (especially middle class) had until recently for giving playthings to kids. Usually it was a desire to send the children messages about aspirations for the future or a longing to relive joys from the past. Toy farm machinery or Erector construction sets were supposed to give boys an advantage in technology and business; companion and baby dolls were intended to let girls rehearse their presumed futures as homemakers. At the same time, toys like Noah’s Ark play sets (or the Daisy air rifle) hearkened back to an idealized childhood.

Already by 1900, though, there was a shift. Movies, newspaper comic strips, and illustrated storybooks (and, a generation later, radio) brought new fantasy figures from these media to the toy boxes of many American kids: think of teddy bears (named for Theodore Roosevelt) and Shirley Temple dolls as well as Buck Rogers sparkler guns and Popeye windups. And, after World War II, an endless array of cowboy guns and holsters arrived on the scene, followed by sci-fi action figures and Barbie. Amid this ever-expanding and endlessly changing rush of playthings something was lost: those parental messages of hope and nostalgia, the connection between the parent and the child in the gift of the toy. The dolls, toy soldiers, and novelties desired by kids in the second half of the 20th century reminded few parents of their own childhoods and had little to do with their aspirations for their children.

Curiously enough, the video game, which arrived late in the last century, has in many ways been a break from the 20th-century trend of toys separating adults from children. With roots in the 1970s (Atari) and the 1980s (Nintendo), digital play is something to which most young parents today can easily relate: they, too, grew up with it. And, while video games certainly are not “messages” from adults offering kids a way of playacting their futures (much less parental nostalgia), they are still an activity enjoyed by all in the family. Far from being seen as childish playthings to be tossed aside in adulthood, video games have become more “sophisticated,” so that even grown-ups can hold onto their controllers and claim that gaming has “grown up” with them. (And, of course, game makers since the early 1990s have recognized this, shifting games from “G” to “M” ratings—with the predictable effect of causing youngsters to lust after the “M” games as markers of maturity.)

So should we simply celebrate the reunited nuclear video-game family? That depends on how you feel about the broader cultural shift, especially among males, to lessen the play of their youth and adulthood. Even as boys rush to give up their childish playthings for the “manliness” of video, men refuse to give up the play of their youth. What we’ve seen is a cultural compression toward the “cool” of youth and away from the “cute” of the small child or the “maturity” of adulthood, and this phenomenon goes well beyond video games. Consider many PG-13 movies and the cartoon channels to appreciate how much entertainment targets neither boys nor men exclusively, but the overlap between the two. All around us is the man-boy.

For my part, I confess, I’m partial to the more old-fashioned separation between adult and child—not to mention a less video-centric world. I’m very happy to see that the NFL is promoting the habit of 60 minutes of physical play per day for kids in hopes of prying them from video games. But, then again, why just for kids? Wouldn’t Mom and Dad also benefit from some time outside and away from the screen? Perhaps it’s the future that adults will play like kids and kids will play like adults. But perhaps not. Maybe we need to think a little more of what grown-up leisure ought to look like—and consider giving the toy back to our youngsters.

The post Are Christmas Toys Dead? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And while we’re on disclaimers, I should confess up front that I have none of the academic expertise seen within our universities, where thousands, possibly millions, of man-and-woman-hours have been spent dissecting the library of American television advertising to discern what it all means – “The Semiotics of Cheetos,” and so forth. But some things come through even for us amateur couch potatoes. And what these commercials say about our views on gender roles (I do believe this is the first time I’ve typed those words) wasn’t quite what I expected.

Of course, we did used to be completely sexist – no other word for it – and it’s worth getting the worst over with immediately. It’s an ad for Tab Cola in which a woman is urged to be a “mind sticker” by staying slim for her man (who’s busy at work):

Remember: he wants you with a good shape, and “keeping your shape in shape has its rewards,” when hubby decides it is time to stop working. This is some four decades old now but, if TVs had been around a little earlier, could have easily been shot in the 18th Century. The 1960s might have been seeing major changes in race relations, but changes in male-female roles were much slower to take root. The National Organization for Women wasn’t even founded until 1966.

From the same era, this ad for Goodyear Polyglas tires supposedly aired on the very first Monday Night Football telecast, in 1970. It doesn’t flat out say that women can’t drive, but that’s only because it says it in every other way.

As the 1970s unfolded, though, the change in attitudes toward women manifested itself quite rapidly. Search through YouTube ads from the second half of the decade and you’ll have a much harder time finding Tab-like offenders. Sure, there’s this “Gentlemen Prefer Hanes” (panty hose) commercial from the late 1970s:

But the mentality is still vastly different. This woman is trying to get guys, she’s going on dates, and those classy dudes like classy nylons. She’s not trying to prevent her current man from leaving her but, rather, empowering herself to feel sexy and draw attention. That’s in sharp contrast to the Tab pitch to keep “your shape in shape” (demurely, as these are not bikini-clad ads) to stick in your man’s mind.

By the 1980s, by the way, Tab cola was for both sexes. It had sass:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzaTURy5lts&feature=related

On the other hand, for all the efforts to liberate adult women from traditional gender roles, what was happening in advertising for young girls was in many ways the opposite. Let’s turn the clock back to 1970 with an ad for Barbie that actually isn’t all that bad. It’s for the “Living Barbie”:

While we’ve seen extensive debate over whether Barbie encourages unnatural beauty standards among women, what’s striking about this ad is who sets the standards. It isn’t Barbie; it’s the little girl. (That’s Maureen McCormick, for Brady Bunch fans.) Barbie, boasts the announcer, is “acting more like a real teenager than ever before.” And the girl says, “Wow! She’s real, like me!” Barbie was improved because she was more natural.

This makes 1970 look relatively enlightened. In the years that followed, girls, unlike adult women, were being encouraged to be, if anything, less natural and more “girly” than ever. With no product was this more obvious than with children’s cosmetics, which really took off in the late 1970s. Here’s an ad (embedding disabled) for Barbie make-up from the late 70s or early 80s.

Barbie wasn’t alone in offering such products. Hasbro offered Fresh ’n Fancy. Ideal offered the Gettin’ Pretty Beauty Boutique. It was a trend. And I’d argue that it heralded the sexually precocious girl culture, the “prostitot” phenomenon, that so plagues us today. In 1981, Time magazine observed that kiddie cosmetics had caught on fire in recent years, already becoming a $100-million-a-year business.

Of course, we got wise and have abandoned all that sort of advertising, right? Wrong! Here is Barbie’s Candy Glam from 2008:

Even as women have come a long way, we’ve left young girls behind.

T.A. Frank is ideas editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of me and the sysop.

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