Assumptions about what is essential and what is just desirable if it can be afforded have changed dramatically in my lifetime. My parents, for example, did not have a refrigerator until after I had left home. When I went to my first job in London in the late 1950s, I also did not have one. I was quite well paid, and could have afforded to buy one — just — but was able to manage without. A couple of years later, having married, my wife and I were living in a flat with a small, very hot kitchen. We managed to get a second hand refrigerator.
In the half century since then “white goods”, such as refrigerators, have fallen greatly in price, comparatively speaking, and will be seen as essential by pretty well everyone.
Fundamental
There are many other changes of that fundamental kind. Having a television set, for example, is now seen as for all practical purposes essential. In my youth, television sets were a rarity, but that, of course, is a reflection not of changing prices but of fundamental changes in how people live. If you did not have access to the huge variety of programmes on television you might reasonably feel that you were deprived. (That said, some people choose not to have television in their home — but this is a matter of choice, not of deprivation.)
Another fundamental change has been in the expectation that homes will be warm in winter. That was certainly not the case in the home where I spent my childhood. If you sat in front of a coal fire, your front was warm; the rest of you was not!
Changes of this kind could reasonably be seen as uncontroversial reflections of a changing way of life. Owning a car, to take one example, is not the luxury that it was in the days when cars were quite rare, and most people worked within walking distance of their home. Car ownership is a natural concomitant of the way in which society is now organised.
True though all that is, I do feel anxiety about some of the “must have” attitudes which dictate how many people choose to live. My anxiety is not, I believe, an indication of a Scrooge-like approach. I do not take the view that there is something morally bad about comfort and convenience. Living through the winter in an unheated house, for example, would constitute a health risk, not a demonstration of moral superiority.
My anxiety derives from the fact that for very many people expenditure on “must haves” seems to bear no relation either to what they can afford, or to what is genuinely necessary: Food is undoubtedly a “must have”; yet another pair of expensive shoes is not. We should not, of course, in a free country try to dictate what people choose to spend their money on. At a time when our free country is going through serious economic difficulty, however, there seems to me to be a real risk that compulsive buying puts people, and the society of which they are part, at real risk of financial collapse.
Compulsive buying of this kind is itself a reflection of a major change in attitude to debt. For my generation, debt (except for buying a house, where there was solid collateral) was generally avoided. If you wanted to buy a luxury, you waited until you could afford it.
To return to my point about morality, I do believe that there is a potential moral issue about running up a debt which one cannot afford in order to buy something that one does not need. While I was thinking about this Cambridge Letter, I read an article by Patrick Collinson in The Guardian , in which he referred to a not particularly well-off man regularly paying £82 for a haircut; Collinson remarked that he pays £8 for his. What I pay for mine is of the same order.
Total incredulity
The decision to pay ten times more than the norm for a haircut does not strike my “morality bell”, provided that one can afford it, and chooses to do so. My reaction to this story was not a reaction of morality but of total incredulity. Why would anyone, however wealthy, choose to pay that sort of money for a haircut? If this question brands me as out of touch with the modern world, I gladly accept that branding. Looking at the people I know, however, I do not think that it does.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, UK. Email him at: bill.kirkman@gmail.com
