![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/files\/2017\/02\/SBF411-John-de-Graaf.png\")
<\/a>John de Graaf is a documentary filmmaker and author. Fifteen of his films, including the popular Affluenza<\/em>, have been broadcast nationally on PBS. He is also the co-author of the books Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic<\/em>, now in its third edition, and What\u2019s the Economy For, Anyway?<\/em><\/p>\nDe Graaf\u2019s work investigates the intersections of sustainability, consumerism, health and happiness. He is a senior advisor for Earth Economics<\/a>, a non-profit ecosystem services organization. He is also a co-founder of the Happiness Initiative<\/a>, and recently as an advisor to the government of Bhutan as it developed its Gross National Happiness<\/a>\u00a0report for the United Nations in 2013.<\/p>\n The following Q&A is an edited excerpt from the Bard MBA\u2019s March 3rd Sustainable Business Fridays<\/a> podcast. Sustainable Business Fridays brings together students in Bard\u2019s MBA in Sustainability<\/a> program with leaders in business, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n Listen to this interview and others on the <\/em>Bard MBA Sustainable Business Fridays<\/em><\/a> podcast on an <\/em>Apple<\/em><\/a> or <\/em>Android<\/em><\/a> device.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n BARD MBA:<\/strong> What have you seen since making YOUR 1997 documentary, AFFLUENZA, in terms of how consumption and income inequality play out in our current system? And what you are thinking in light of the recent presidential election?<\/em><\/p>\n When we made the documentary, it was a unique time in that incomes were rising for pretty much everybody, and there was a sense that the economy was going to continue on its way up. Although we didn\u2019t believe that, that is what society tended to believe, and so we focused on how that philosophy was a real danger to the environment in the long run.<\/p>\n We heard from Elizabeth Warren, who was then at Harvard, that for increasing numbers of people, it wasn\u2019t about consuming a lot of stuff. Instead, it was about staying afloat as the prices of key things like housing, healthcare, and higher education were suddenly exploding because of policies instituted in the late 70s and 80s. We saw that median incomes were barely keeping pace with increasing inflation, and that in certain parts of the country, it had become very difficult for people to keep up. For those at the bottom for whom it was even worse, some people were working two or three jobs to try to stay afloat.<\/p>\n Income inequality is obviously the most significant factor we have to deal with if we are going to have reasonable consumer patterns.\u00a0I believe that we voted in November to exacerbate inequality: to do cut taxes for those who already have, and to cut programs that benefit people who don\u2019t have. Inequality in the material sense is just getting wider and wider.<\/p>\n We have to address what has led us to a lot of these problems: tax cutting, the Reagan revolution, and the concept of trickle down. Under those policies, wealth gushed up and conspicuous consumption was praised. We also have to understand that we cannot solve our problems by simply growing the economy.\u00a0The concept that somehow our current 2.5% economic growth ought to be increased by three or four, or as Trump has said, as much as five percent, would mean a doubling of consumption for a decade and a half.<\/p>\n The impact of that on the climate and the environment is almost too difficult to fathom.\u00a0People need to understand that we have to turn away from the idea that the answer to the good life is greater consumption. Instead, it is more time and more nature and more social connections. If we manage that, people will not only be healthier, they will be happier.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bard MBA:<\/strong> I am curious to hear your perspective on the role of technology and social media in driving consumption.<\/em><\/p>\n Sales are increasing and increasing through the internet. While it has value and there\u2019s good information to obtain from it, it\u2019s just awash with constant commercials. There are pages on which you can\u2019t even read the articles because there are so many ads popping up.<\/p>\n What we are getting is an environment, particularly online and through our devices, that is totally saturated with messages to consume more. People use selfies on sites Facebook and Instagram to say, \u201cLook at me\u2014look at how exciting my life is, look where I just went and what I just bought.\u201d All of that tends to make their friends, both virtual and real, feel that, \u201cWell, my life isn\u2019t quite like that.\u201d They may think the answer is to shop for more things.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bard MBA:<\/strong> Social\u00a0media sites are selling us this sense of human connection, and while it\u2019s amazing to be able to talk to someone on the other side of the world, there is a disconnect. Can you speak to the disconnect that people living their lives online brings?<\/em><\/p>\n I think that it is so complex. Depending on how social media is used, there\u2019s certainly a positive side to it. But there\u2019s also the unreality of it. When it comes to news, increasingly we\u2019re getting very narrow sources. When I was in college, we all watched the same stuff and talked about the same things\u2014and maybe the facts weren\u2019t always right, but there wasn\u2019t a deliberate effort to distort in pursuit of an ideology. We have become polarized into different worlds, which is a danger because it has become difficult to talk about common values, like how much we consume and how we should live.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bard MBA:<\/strong> What has been your experience of people who have had value shifts, and what has been your experience engaging people with different values?<\/em><\/p>\n Usually, an event forces you to rethink your thinking.\u00a0It\u2019s very clear that young people voted in much bigger numbers against Trump than anybody in any other part of society. That says that these young people want something different and have a different set of values. I think they understand the impacts of climate change and are not already ideologically disposed to hardline market ideas that don\u2019t allow the impacts of climate change to seep in.<\/p>\n We are in a period right now where we are going to have to do some strategy thinking and soul searching about where things are going. Clearly, a lot of people in the country don\u2019t think like us.<\/p>\n Affluenza<\/em> was an interesting film because it actually did cut across political lines.\u00a0 We had a lot of sympathy from conservatives who also had issues with over-materialism and its impacts. Conservatives tend to take issue with marketers targeting children, so that leads me to believe that stuff about kids is the way to begin that conversation\u2014but that\u2019s trickier when we\u2019re all in our silos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Heather Bowden, Lauren Hill, Nick Shore, Catherine Tedrow and Katie Ellman President Trump built his personal brand on wealth, using tag […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":360,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[218,13,220,219,221,217,222,223,224],"class_list":["post-1199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-affluenza","tag-climate-change","tag-consumer","tag-consumption","tag-income-inequality","tag-john-de-graaf","tag-social-connection","tag-social-media","tag-trump"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/360"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}