Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Cheap? The Real Cost of Living in a Low Price, Low Wage World

Author: David Bosshart:

ISBN: 0749449934

Things, all kinds of things, are cheaper today than they ever have been. The spread of manufacturing technology around the world, especially to places where labour costs are low, has led to an abundance of consumer goods and the laws of supply and demand does the rest. Food, in particular, is cheaper now than it has ever been and the growing problems of obesity around the world are testament to the fact that people are, as a result, eating more and more.

In China, for example, as people move out from poverty they switch their diet from grains to meat, especially pork. All well and good but pigs and other meat animals use up a lot of grain and water, which are scarce resources becoming scarcer every day and this is storing problems for the future. The same issues affect nearly the whole world.

What are the impacts on society of these changes? This is the principal subject of David Bosshart’s short but quite powerful book, which has now been published in an English language translation of the original German. That the author is German and brings a German sensibility to the text is evident throughout. This is manifest in the careful cross-cultural and cross-border comparisons and in the ways in which his analysis integrates society, economy and culture in a thoughtful and interesting way. Here, for example, he introduces the ease of access to information and relates it to individual risk-allocation and the wider impacts this is likely to have: “The more connected our world becomes, the easier it is to gain access to information, the more individuals are required to assume responsibility for arranging their lives and for making the right choices. This means that they can no longer depend on tradition (how did we do things before?). (p.11)” The consequence is, decisions are increasingly made solely on the basis of price – hence, in several contexts, ‘cheap is good.’

This is provocative stuff and, to some degree, convincing. It is certainly true that there are societal changes that are negative and attributable to the forces Bosshart cites. However, he goes too far in subsequent chapters, bringing into his sights various aspects of tourism, globalization and other topics which are only tangentially related to his main thesis.

Further, there is to my mind insufficient attention paid to those who really suffer from the cheapness paradigm, who are the working people who are forced to accept the squeeze on their salaries and such benefits as they retain. Bosshart discusses the Walmart example extensively but only mentions in passing that company’s antipathy towards unionization and its role in the pauperization of the working class.

Nevertheless, this is the kind of book which is capable of stimulating an almost endless degree of worthwhile conversation and thought and these are good things. The text itself is written in a straightforward and comprehensible manner and is not cluttered with footnotes, which are collected at the end of each chapter. No translator is named but whoever is responsible has done a fine job and the English is natural and fluent. This is a book which is well-worth reading.