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Joseph Heath

Joseph Heath has been called "a philosophy prof explaining economics to Capitalist-hating lefties."
   
It’s an accurate description. In addition to teaching at the University of Toronto (yes, philosophy, although he also teaches at the U of T’s School of Public Policy and Governance), the 44-year-old — who was born and raised in Saskatoon — has written several best-selling books. His most recent is 2009’s Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism, but his most well-known is probably 2004’s The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed, which Heath co-authored with Andrew Potter.
   
Recognizable by its distinctive cover — which features the now-iconic image of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara’s face on a Starbucks-esque take-out coffee cup — The Rebel Sell offers an accessible analysis of both economic and social theories using a range of pop-culture references; everything from The Matrix to Star Trek to the Unabomber Manifesto to Critical Mass bike rides. It’s also provocative — positing, among other things, that the idea of a counterculture is merely an illusion, and that anti-consumerism activism over the past several decades has actually served to increase consumerism, not curb it.
   
Heath will be giving a free lecture at the University of Winnipeg on Thursday, Nov. 24 — a date which not-so-coincidentally happens to be the eve of Buy Nothing Day, an annual anti-consumerism campaign which encourages participants to avoid spending any money for 24 hours. (Heavily promoted by Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine/global activist network, Buy Nothing Day is held in North America on the last Friday of November; known as Black Friday, it’s the day after American Thanksgiving — the U.S. equivalent of Boxing Day — and marks the official beginning of the Christmas shopping season.)    
   
Titled The Myth of the Rebel Consumer, Heath’s lecture will focus on some of the ideas explored in The Rebel Sell. The event is being held in the U of W’s Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall at 7:30 p.m.
   
In advance of his Winnipeg appearance, Heath chatted with Uptown over the phone from Toronto.

Uptown: Let’s start with some definitions. We all have to buy stuff to survive in our world. At what point does consumption become consumerism? When does it become problematic?

Joseph Heath: Consumerism is when we’re consuming things and yet it’s not making us happier. Obviously consumption, in general, is good, if it’s making your life go better, and the reason we worry about poverty is we worry about people not having enough consumption. Consumerism refers to a specific kind of social problem, whereby we seem to be putting consumption ahead of other priorities that seem equally or perhaps more significant.

How does advertising factor in: the notion that you can buy to fit in or you can buy to rebel?

There are two major theories out there. The first theory — the one that comes out of the ’60s and became a dominant view — was that people are somehow brainwashed into buying stuff that they don’t really want.
   
Then there’s this older view which Andrew and I, in Rebel Sell, do our best to try to revive. It says, ‘Look, the reason people aren’t made happy by their consumption is that, as we get wealthier, consumption increasingly becomes just competition.’
   
It’s the first theory that gives rise to this idea of the rebel consumer — that, by being a non-conformist, you can somehow strike a blow against consumerism. What we spent a lot of time trying to point out in the book is that, on the contrary, a lot of these ways of being a non-conformist and striking out against the system actually have the effect of exacerbating competitive consumption, so that a lot of anti-consumerism and anti-consumerist activism, far from solving the problem, is, ironically, making the problem worse.
   
Rebellious consumption generates its own status hierarchy — and cool is the central status.

You’re speaking in Winnipeg on the eve of Buy Nothing Day. What are you thoughts on that campaign? Does it have value?

One of the most basic features of a market economy is that it’s a system of exchange. So, for everybody that buys something, there has to be somebody that sells something; one person’s income is somebody else’s revenue. The problem with Buy Nothing is that, unless you also earn nothing, it has no impact on the economy.
   
I remember once seeing a poster advertising a clothing company. It had a bunch of protesters carrying signs and one of the signs said "More green lights," which I thought was kind of cute. It was supposed to represent youthful idealism.   
   
It’s easy to look at traffic and say, "Do you know what the problem is with this town? There’s too many red lights. If only there were more green lights, then I could get where I’m going more easily." There’s a kind of hopeful utopianism about it — but it’s also a consequence of not thinking through the next step, which is that, "Gee, my green light is just somebody else’s red light." It’s actually not possible to increase the number of green lights.
   
It’s exactly the same thing with Buy Nothing Day. Suggesting that buying nothing for a day — or even for a week — has any impact at all on the economy as long as you’re still earning the same amount is exactly like asking for more green traffic lights. It’s a conceptually incoherent thing to be asking for. Their hearts are in the right place — but their brains are seriously not in the right place.

Let’s talk about ethical consumption — the idea that, if we have to buy something, we should be trying to reduce harm while doing so. If symbolic protests don’t make a difference, can our actual consumption habits make a difference?

Absolutely they can. I drive a hybrid and I paid extra money for a hybrid and I think that’s useful ethical consumption. I would rather I not have to lose money. I would rather gas prices be increased. In an ideal world, the price of fuel would be high enough that it would reflect all of the environmental externalities, and you wouldn’t have to be virtuous in your consumption because the price would actually reflect the full social cost.

How has the Internet changed consumption patterns?

Something that Andrew and I noticed shortly after The Rebel Sell came out was that the Internet has significantly changed the dynamics of counterculture. When we were young, time lag was really important in the dynamics of cool.

The cycle was slower.

That’s right. When I was growing up in Saskatoon — I was in high school in the early ’80s — finding out what was cool, what was going on in New York or in London, was extremely difficult to do, because all you had was mainstream radio that never played alternative music and record stores. You had to ship records — like, in trucks (laughs).
   
Now, as soon as somebody does anything that’s vaguely interesting or you get a band with a vaguely cool sound or whatever, then instantly everyone knows about it. As a result, the cycles of co-optation — the rate at which things become mainstream — has become almost instantaneous.
   
What we said in the book was that the people who were most resistant to our thesis — this idea that the counterculture was actually just an illusion — were old hippies. People of my generation who came up in punk rock had said, "We’re willing to accept it." And then kids, younger people, were like, "Um, yeah, this is totally obvious." (laughs)
   
Up until about a decade ago, there was still this radical ethos that came from the ’60s that suggested that there was something really important and rebellious about wearing vintage clothing or whatever. I think that that illusion has just become totally unsustainable in the Internet age, because everything gets instantly co-opted. What you discover is that there’s no real difference between alternative and mainstream.

Along those same lines, the thing I’ve noticed is a change with respect to the idea of selling out. When I was in high school, if a band sold their song to a commercial, that was the worst thing you could do.

The whole idea of selling out goes along with the classic move of saying, "Yeah, I like their early stuff." That’s just entirely, 100% a social-status move. It’s about saying, "I was into them back when they were cool and so I’m still cool, and all these uncool people who are now listening to them, I can’t be held responsible for that."
   
I really have come to think that it’s all purely about social status. It’s about what your taste says about you and the exclusivity and distinctiveness of it; how cool you are, basically.

Let’s talk about the Occupy movement. What are your thoughts on those taking part in these protests? Is there value to what these folks are doing?

I think there’s a huge difference between what’s going on in the United States and what’s going on in Canada.
   
What’s going on in the United States is incredibly important and useful — and it’s late in coming. It’s too bad they’re doing it now as opposed to January, 2009, because January, 2009, was when the Dodd-Frank Bill on financial regulation got introduced in Congress. That was basically the American government’s response to the financial crisis, back when the Democrats still had a majority in congress and the presidency. They introduced this bill and the financial industry spent $1.3 billion lobbying against it — and the Left said and did absolutely nothing. They just let the Tea Party and the financial industry go to town on this bill, and they weakened its provisions systematically. There were absolutely no street protests at the time; there was no activism, there was no popular movement about unemployment, there was no anti-bank sentiment being displayed in the streets. It would have been amazingly useful to have powerful street protests at the time...
   
The American protests are incredibly useful — and overdue — but the Canadian protests don’t have any particular motivation. There’s no particular changes that need to be made to the regulation of financial institutions in Canada, as witnessed by the fact that we didn’t have a financial crisis. The situation with income inequality in Canada is not great, but it’s a completely different story from in the United States.
   
If Canadians want to pick an issue that actually matters, we should be occupying Fort McMurray. We have real problems in Canada that are on the legislative agenda right now — like, for example, the Conservative crime bill; there’s lots of things to be unhappy about with that. We have an environmental catastrophe unfolding in Alberta. Why not occupy Fort McMurray? Why occupy Bay Street? In the scope of things, Bay Street did nothing wrong in the last 10 years.
 

JOSEPH HEATH: THE MYTH OF THE REBEL CONSUMER
Nov. 24, 7:30 p.m., Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall