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Consumption used to be a disease. Now it is the dominant manner in which most people meet their most basic needs and - if they can afford the price - their wildest desires.
In this new book, Ian and Mark Hudson critically examine how consumption has been understood in economic theory before analyzing its centrality to our social lives and function in contemporary capitalism. They also outline the consequences it has for people and nature, consequences routinely made invisible in the shopping mall or online catalogue. Hudson and Hudson show, in an approachable manner, how patterns of consumption are influenced by cultures, individual preferences and identity formation before arguing that underlying these determinants is the unavoidable need within capitalism to realize profit.
This accessible and comprehensive book will be essential reading for students and scholars of political economy, economics and economic sociology, as well as any reader who wants to confront their own practices of consumption in a meaningful way.
List of contents
Acknowledgements 1 The Meanings of Consumption
What Are We Talking About? Consumption and Political Economy
Competing Themes in the History of Consumption
The Rest of the Book
2 An Aspiration for All the World: Championing Individual Freedom of Choice
Introduction
From Classical to Neoclassical Economics: Consumers as Rational Maximizers
Friendly Amendments: Alterations to the Theory with Similar Implications
Conclusion
3 The System: Capitalist Consumerism
Introduction
Capitalist Commodity Production: Naming the System
Commodity Fetishism
Consumption and Jobs
The Evolution of Capitalist Commodity Consumption in the US after World War II
Conclusion
4 Private Choices, Social Problems
Introduction
What You Don't Know Might Hurt You: Information Asymmetry
You're Not as Clever as You Think: Behavioural Economics
Relative Consumption
Created Wants
The Androcentric Consumer
Conclusion
5 The Shopocalypse?
"Ten Ways to Reduce Your Impact"
Blindfolded
Bloated: The Problem of Scale
Embedded Consumption and the Limits of Consumer Environmentalism
Conclusion: Consumption as Ecological Practice
Note
6 Consumption, Power and Liberation
Class and Consumption
Consumers of the World, Express Yourselves!
Consumption and Gender
7 Shopping Police
Shopping as Power
Easy on the Surface, Hard Underneath
Terror of the CEO?
Saviour of the Worker, Farmer or Forest?
Too Much to Bear: The Trials and Tribulations of a Label
The Commodification of Politics?
Conclusion
References
Index
About the author
Ian Hudson is Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba.
Mark Hudson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba.
Report
"This book invites readers on a lively tour across the terrain of consumption in a briskly paced guide to mainstream economic theory and critical political economy. It is a highly engaging book that will appeal to those wishing to secure a deeper understanding of what it means to consume."
Bruce Pietrykowski, University of Michigan
"It is a sign of the consumer fetishism that pervades our society that good poiltical-economic works on consumption that do not simply fall prey to their subject matter and that retain a critical perspective are extremely hard to find. This book, though clearly written for classroom use, belongs in the same broad tradition as Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, Michael Dawson's The Consumer Trap, and Naomi Klein's No Logo. Highly recommended."
John Bellamy Foster, author of The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology
