Yawns in the market

It is always interesting when those who live in the hallowed halls of academia tiptoe out into the real world and come up with a new label for behaviors they observe in human beings, especially human beings in the market place.

I remember when, in the late eighties after the market crash of ‘87, a cluster of supercomputers in an isolated house in Santa Fe, New Mexico allowed programmers to use weather forecasting software to discover that traders on the stock market did not behave in a way consistent with the “rules” of economic theory. You know the (July, 1898 !) theory,- the one that “views” people as “lightning calculators of pleasure and pains, who oscillate like homogeneous globules of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift them about the area and whose choices are not influenced by the choices of other consumers”. (more)

Some economists latched onto this New Mexico research and started to advance a new theory of the market place. To their surprise they were labeled as oddball and flaky and their reputations and careers suffered so much that it has become more and more difficult for any academic wanting to keep their job as a teacher to question the established theory of human behavior in the market place.

Is this all about to change because of a new breed of Gen Xers and Ys, Young and Wealthy but Normal, or YAWNS, arriving in the marketplace? YAWNS are men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who want nothing less than to change the world and save the planet, and who might be “sick to death of buying stuff” This declaration of new market place behavior has been made only in newspapers, and, surprise, surprise, has not been endorsed by any economists!. A sociologist at Stanford University, David Grusky, has ventured out on a limb to say that “a cultural and demographic ‘perfect storm’ ” is responsible. Now there’s that weather forecasting theory again, and with it the implied hope that it might blow itself out like any other storm.

Hmm. I would bet my bottom dollar that there will be no serious economic study made of YAWNS. No academic will come forward with a model that supports a theory of the market where consumers are capable of saying “Enough already!” to all their buying and acting in a way consistent with a “spiritual/eco-friendly goal”. And so the mainstream media, by consigning YAWNS to the same category as hippies and ecofreaks, will deliberately keep us in the dark about these mysterious Yawns and their behavior.

Or will it? We might be ready to discuss self-exclusion from the market place seriously. In my opinion YAWNS are timidly testing their freedom to be free of consumerism. They want their consumerism or lack of it not to affect their ability to function in society. Anyone who wants to ’self-exclude’ themselves from consumerism is suggesting an alternative view of the manner in which the provision for basic needs for their existence as a human being might happen. YAWNS are saying that if buying stuff is necessary for identity within a market economy then that’s a problem with the market economy, not with those who choose to find their identity elsewhere. Now that’s what I call an alternative view!

Home Grown Food Network represents the suggestion of such an alternative view. In its demonstration house project in Desert Hot Springs we seek to emulate a household “self-excluded” from consumerism. The project has been subject to endless legal conflicts on account of its policy of not wanting to use new “bought in the store” methods of creating a sustainable low cost housing unit in a mobile home park. This would suggest that it might be ok for a successful filmmaker and his family (YAWN) living near Berkeley, California to dry their clothes on a line, grow their own vegetables and buy what they need at garage sales and second-hand stores, but if you happen to be a low income person in a mobile home park you better think again!

I welcome YAWNS and support their motivations, but there is work to be done now to boost their stance. And that’s why I think we need a serious bout of contagious YAWNING!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network.