Might as well face it: The addiction economy

Robert F. Kennedy once summed up our approach to tracking growth as follows:

"Gross National Product [or Gross Domestic Product as we more commonly track] counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage...Yet Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children,...it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

An economy allocates scarce resources to where they will provide the greatest utility.  For the first hundred or so years of our country's existence, this meant managing scarce natural resources to - hopefully - prevent over use and depletion.  As we mechanized farming, manufacturing, and extraction, the cost of utilizing those resources we absolutely need plummeted.  To replace this utility, especially as populations exploded, we replaced this economy of need with an economy of want.  This economy requires consumers to regularly desire products they can consume with their senses, and regardless of the impact on their quality of life, return to the product with a desire matched by their willingness to spend money.

In order to sustain this economy, devoted consumers must participate.  In the purest form of the market, those consumers would come back based upon their own utility and make rational choices.  Unfortunately, our current consumptive economy uses psychological and physical manipulation to reduce risk and "force" consumers to return for products.  The clearest examples of this come from the tobacco and alcohol industries.  As much as those who do not drink and smoke would like to think they have immunity from this kind of manipulation, we are learning that food companies manipulate sugar, fat, and salt contents of food to maximize people's addiction to the product.  An entire industry of processed food, supported by research into food science, generates revenue by producing not just foods that people choose to come back to, but foods they MUST come back to.  This kind of manipulated support for consumption undermines the goal of an economy, which should measure and respond to the desires of people within a rational decision-making framework.

Other industries downstream of the food, tobacco, and alcohol industries rely on this addiction as well.  The healthcare industry currently makes more money off people who are sick and ill than off people who lead healthy lives.  Entertainment industries like television and the internet survive on advertising revenue aimed at manipulating choices.  Breaking this addiction economy will take more strength than we as a population may be able to muster.  If we cannot, we place ourselves at risk of over-consumption leading to collapse.

The solutions are varied, but start with better health education, an increased focus on preventative medicine among doctors, and courage by policy makers to separate GDP from health of a nation.  We should see the economy as a way to express our priorities and provide quality of life for all.  Right now, it seeks more to feed itself at the expense of the people within it, and that has to change.