A New Economics Foundation / ICA event panel debate, tagged as
How do we persuade people to be more ethical in their consumer choices? Is ethical consuming the preserve of the rich anyway?
…But unfortunately not much meat to this debate. The consensus seemed to be that we couldn’t rely on personal consumer choice to solve problems of poverty and environmental damage. But little agreement on how we resuscitate collective choice from the stranglehold that free market orthodoxy has imposed.
Richard Reeves made the point that for the first time in history there is a breakdown in the relationship between material wealth and happiness. Previously-and still outside the west- increased wealth correlated with increased well-being. Now we face a trade-off – our increased material wealth is cutting into those factors which we now rely on for marginal changes in our happiness (which are? security, community, free time?). It’s all, as Andrew Simms noted in one of the few occasions when he was being chirpy and constructive rather than chirpy and unconstructive, a good advert for the New Economics Foundation and the need for a New Economics.
The best point of the evening came from the floor. What do we need to do?
We need to redefine freedom as the autonomy to self-manage our lives, rather than the freedom of consumers to choose between products
Put me in mind of the Lakoff article (via Matt) about the need for progressives to stop letting conservatives define the semantic frames within which political debate occurs)