What is Mine is Yours

What is mine is yours

“What is mine is yours” is an interesting book written by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. Their ideas are not new though. They are basically modern applications of the original concept of utilitarianism firstly developed by Jeremy Bentham. Even though I am a huge fan of utilitarianism, unfortunately I don’t believe that these applications are going to work out for a long time even though in the present time they seem to be doing great. The problem lies in the reason why people consume.

Ok, in the first place they consume to survive. But we can see that in today’s products only a marginal component of the price is related to the actual ingredients that compose the product. Almost all the price is given because of the status that the product gives you. That’s why a great number of companies spend millions of dollars on advertising, an advertising that gives us nothing related to the ingredients but they give us a lot of images that tend to make us feel good if we consume this product. So I believe that the consumption is done mainly to show off that we can afford to consume these expensive products and by this we show off ourselves.

There is a book by my favourite author Thorstein Veblen called “The Theory of the Leisure Class”. In this book he treats the concept of “conspicuous consumption”. Basically, it’s the idea that I was talking about before, i.e. that people spend just to show that they are able to buy very expensive products. He gives some examples to illustrate his view as well. For example, he maintains that in the aristocratic period, it was a perfect time to see this “conspicuous consumption”. He claims that some of the usages of that time are hunting us in the present times as well. So for example there was a tendency at that time to make a lot of parties and to keep a huge amount of servants in the house. This was done for no utilitarian or practical concept, it was done only to show that the owner of the mansion could afford to maintain so great a number of labourers and in this way he gained a lot of status in the eyes of his neighbours.

Indrit Beqaraj