A few days before this Black Friday, CNN’s business page published a post titled “Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy.”
“While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.”
Author Kevin Williams argues that we need the latest, fastest stuff. “Lost productivity and inefficiency are the unintended consequences of people and businesses clinging to aging technology.” The dean of a business school says, “While keeping devices longer may seem financially or environmentally responsible, the hidden cost is a quieter erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness.”
The article weirdly conflates corporate practices with Heather Mitchell, a 69-year-old woman in Tucson who hangs on to her six-year-old Samsung Galaxy, and says, “I love Samsung phones, but can not afford a new one right now. A new phone would be a luxury.” The question is, does Heather’s choice erode the economy?
Many have noted that the economy depends on our continuous buying of new stuff. In his 1960 book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard quoted marketing consultant Victor Lebow:
“Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
More on this from an earlier post:
In the sixties, when that was written, we still made TVs, furniture, clothing, and most of our cars in North America. We don’t anymore, but we still have an economy that runs on consumption- of fossil fuels. In my book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, I quoted the late physicist and economist Robert Ayres, who wrote,
“The economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”
Vaclav Smil said much the same thing in “Energy and Civilization: A History.”
“To talk about energy and the economy is a tautology: every economic activity is fundamentally nothing but a conversion of one kind of energy to another, and monies are just a convenient (and often rather unrepresentative) proxy for valuing the energy flows.”
Basically, our economy is built on the conversion of fossil fuels into heat and carbon dioxide, with a helping of plastics on the side. There is a reason why COPs always fail, why Donald Trump kills wind and solar, and why even Mark Carney pushes pipelines; they know that fossil fuels ARE the economy. I wrote earlier:
This is why the car-dominated suburban lifestyle was such a success at creating a booming economy in North America. It generated so much more room for stuff, for consumption, creating a need for endless consumption of vehicles and the fuel to power them and the roads to run them on. For the hospitals, the police, and all the other parts of the system.
It would be hard to imagine a system that turns more energy into stuff. It is why houses get bigger and cars turn into SUVs and pickup trucks: more metal, more gas, more stuff. It is why governments are loath to invest in public transit or alternatives to cars: A streetcar lasts 30 years and doesn’t add to the consumption of stuff; there is nothing in it for them. They want a booming economy, and that means growth, cars, fuel, development, and making stuff. It’s why they build car tunnels in Seattle, bury streetcars in Toronto, and fight over parking in New York City: Rule 1 is never inconveniencing the drivers of cars; they are engines of consumption.
Donald Trump gets this, as does Doug Ford in Ontario, as he bans new bike lanes and tries to rip out existing ones: if it doesn’t burn fossil fuels, it’s a problem.
Adbusters doesn’t get that every step of the way in delivering a plastic spoon to our home consumes fossil fuels. It’s just doing its job.
It is all about turning energy into stuff and selling as much of it as possible. And when we buy, we are contributing directly to that conversion of energy, a byproduct of which is carbon dioxide. It’s why we have been inculcated in this culture of convenience, to go through all this effort, to keep the fossil fuels flowing and the economy pumping out wealth.
Which brings us back to Heather Mitchell in Tuscon, who says, “I tend to hang onto my phone until I have no choice in the matter. In 26 years, this is only my fifth phone.” She is definitely a drag on the economy! I wrote in my book, the Story of Upfront Carbon:
“An iPhone is a complicated mix of aluminum, carbon, silicon, cobalt, hydrogen, lithium, tantalum, vanadium, and gold. Materials come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Brazil, and China. Metallurgist David Michaud told Brian Merchant, author of The One Device, that about 75 pounds of ore were mined to make the phone. According to Apple, between manufacturing and shipping, 86 percent of the life cycle carbon is emitted before you open the box. That’s 68.8 kilograms, or about 150 pounds- twice as heavy as the ore mined to make the phone.”
Buying that phone is keeping people busy digging all over the world, while burning the equivalent of 30 litres of gasoline or 28.4 kilograms of coal. That is our economy.
In my 2021 book on living a low carbon lifestyle, I concluded:
“From computers to clothing, the question about sufficiency applies: how much do we really need? It appears that, for any consumer good, the best strategy is to buy high quality with timeless design, maintain it well, and use it for as long as you can.”
How naïve of me. I didn’t realize that I was contributing to “an erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness.” That iPhone 17 is looking a lot more enticing.
Timely insights for today, Lloyd. As usual, I have borrowed from your post to inform my own readers why I consider you to be such a shining light in a sea of intellectual darkness.
Williams' point about "lost productivity" makes sense – in the ass-backwards logic of our economic system. An incessant "upgrade" cycle with new technology means people are constantly having to relearn how to do something that they knew very well a year or two or 10 years ago. But while they waste their individual time every time they upgrade, the cycle keeps battallions of paid IT consultants busy. And the payrolls for all those consultants and fixers and trainers gets added in to the purchase cost of all the new devices, as rising GDP – such a "productivity" boost!