Surely there are better steps to growth than 600 million shoes
Terrible news: Britain is doomed to have a puny economic growth rate of about 1 per cent, the CBI said last week. This is just not enough and we should all be very worried about it. But — and I'm probably being a bit slow here — why?
I looked up 'economic growth' in the dictionary, and it turns out to mean 'an increase in the amount of goods and services produced'. And then I looked around my house and thought: hang on. Don't we have too much stuff already?
I'm a stingy git and don't buy much but, somehow, every room is packed with things I neither want nor need. The pot on my desk holds 23 pens, 22 of which I do not use. The bookshelves hold more books than I have time to count, most of which I have no recollection of reading. The cellar is packed with unused tools, the wardrobe with unworn clothes.
It's not just me. There are 1.6 billion items of unworn clothing in British wardrobes, according to the charity Wrap — and despite that, we're expected to buy 61 garments each in 2025. More than 300 million pairs of shoes are sold in the UK every year, despite us having only 69 million pairs of feet. The average child has 238 toys, of which they use about 10 per cent. Between them, our 28 million households buy eight million new TVs a year. You get the point. Yes, some people still have too little: but most of us have stuff coming out of our ears.
This is why you can use all those TVs you own to watch an entire genre of programmes dedicated to 'decluttering', so that in between the ads for more stuff to buy, Nick Knowles or Marie Kondo can tell you how to throw out all the stuff you've already bought. Stacey Solomon has one of these shows on the BBC; the other day she was talking to a very nice, normal family who had 87 board games, 358 plastic dolls and 106 animal ornaments. It was horrifying. The correct number of animal ornaments in any given household is zero.
The economists say that the NHS will collapse and zombies will roam the land if we don't go on acquiring all these things at an ever-increasing rate and then, when our houses are full up, invite Stacey over to help us throw it all out and start again. This seems an odd and impractical arrangement. Swathes of the country are landfill as it is, and the rest is strewn with fly-tipped old fridges and repulsive mattresses.
• CBI warns of triple whammy on slow economic growth
What about the services bit of that definition, then? Perhaps we just need more of those? Our biggest industry in that department is financial services, and I'm not certain having twice as many adverts for banks and life insurance will make the nation better off in any meaningful sense. The rest of the sector is mainly pizza and fried chicken, and you've only got to look up and down your street to see there are too many of those. In the 1930s, hunger-related diseases were widespread in the UK. Now obesity causes 30,000 deaths a year. Seems like we're growing, even if the economy isn't.
Not that we actually eat all of the food we buy. Back in Merrie England, your average peasant's hovel didn't throw out anything at all except the occasional plague-ridden corpse. Now the UK generates about 10 million tonnes of food waste annually. Earlier this year I had a bash at being a binman on a Coventry council estate. It wasn't an affluent area, but we were tipping weighty wheelie bins full of uneaten leftovers into the truck.
I don't want to go back to Merrie England, or the 1930s. On balance, obesity is probably better than starvation. But somewhere along the line there must have been an ideal point between shortage and excess, between a population that staged mass hunger marches and a population that couldn't be arsed to haul its blubbery bulk off the sofa and waddle along to McDonald's, so ordered a Deliveroo instead.
My guess is that we cruised blithely past that point without noticing, perhaps some time around 1991. A halcyon, elusive moment when we had enough to eat, but not too much; where we could replace things when they were worn out, but didn't buy loads more of them for the sake of it; where we could embrace useful innovations, but didn't 'upgrade' constantly just because an advert told us we should.
I know, I sound like some green weirdo who wants us all to eat nothing but mung beans and get our power from burning the resultant methane-rich flatulence. I really don't. Thanks to the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we live in a world with anaesthetics, fish fingers and Netflix, and we can stay breathing to enjoy them for twice as long as we used to. I'm grateful for that.
Still, I find it puzzling to be told that, to maintain this state of affairs, we need to buy ever-increasing quantities of stuff of all descriptions: clothes that won't be worn, gadgets that won't be used, dubious vitamin supplements, pointless scented candles, bloodthirsty video games. None of it seems to be making us much happier.
What's the answer? No idea. It's got to lie somewhere between the 'buy, buy, buy' unfettered free market nutters and the 'scrimp, scrimp, scrimp' eco-loons who think we can live like hobbits in some pre-industrial Shire, shunning modernity and living off nothing but our own postcolonial guilt. An arrangement where we buy what we really need, and those things are made to last by people who are paid a decent wage for doing so. But it does seem to be awfully hard to organise. In the meantime, I'm not going to worry too much about the growth figures. I'm going to clear out the cellar instead.
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