This book reflects the image of contemporary Australian society: a culture obsessed with over-consumption. It depicts a deeply unfulfilled population addicted to credit and aspiring to lifestyles of the ‘monied classes’. With the longest working hours in the developed world, Australians’ personal relationships are deteriorating and ‘self-medication’ with legal and illegal drugs is prevalent.
Affluenza aims to deconstruct the psychology of consumerism. It is sharply critical of tactics used by advertisers and marketers to manipulate purchasing behaviour. In this book, the Australia Institute’s Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss examine the economic ‘growth fetish’, the politics of middle-class welfare, and the social costs of ever-increasing working hours. The thrust of their discussion, however, is downshifting—the challenge to regain control over our spending behaviours and our lives.
Hamilton and Denniss assert that Australia’s best-paid psychologists work in marketing, carefully constructing language that manipulates us into believing that everything we desire, we deserve. Further distorting this manipulation is the issue of our self-image, and our desire to bring our actual self into accord with our ideal self. Advertisers exploit our fear that the ‘real us’ is inadequate, so we consume objects of identity and status to reflect the image we want others to see. The authors assert that almost all consumption today ‘is to some degree an attempt to create or renew a concept of self’.
However, according to the authors, broader discontent with our over-consumption is evident in the downshifting phenomenon, which they argue is the antidote to affluenza.
Indeed, the overarching theme of the Australia Institute’s research is to demonstrate that most of us feel Australian society has become too materialistic. However, the challenge to address our behaviour is complicated by confusion over what constitutes a need or a want, and how we measure up against others’ spending habits and incomes.
Through Affluenza, Hamilton and Denniss explore discrepancies over our personal wealth perceptions: nearly two-thirds of Australians believe they can’t afford to buy everything they really need, and most of us believe we’re doing it tough. Yet statistics illustrate that Australians’ personal wealth is three times the 1950s average.
It’s not hard to see why dissatisfaction and disappointment are the perpetual experience for participants in the consumer society. Retail transactions serve as therapy to fill the void created by affluenza, but our actions prove as superficial as they are meaningless. And so the cycle continues.
However, beyond the authors’ astute observations, many