The holiday season is a time of crowds at home but also at festivals, concerts, amusement parks and parties. It is also a time that we celebrate for “the sharing spirit.” What can we learn from such times about ourselves and the quest for sustainability?
After World War Two, the baby boom was characterized by a proliferation of critical reflection and scholarly work on contemporary civilization. Academic books rarely gain traction with the general public but in this momentous period of human history, one book, published in 1950, captivated the American imagination like no other – The Lonely Crowd. A troika of academics in New England at the time – David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney – crafted this scholarly work based on numerous in-depth interviews of American society. The lead author, Riesman, was a mild-mannered legal sociologist at Harvard, who had no grand expectations for this volume. Yale University Press initially published only 3000 copies of the book. Yet, the book captured the public’s attention because of a simple typology of social order which it presented and whose prescience to this day persists, as it is a staple of college course readings in sociology. By latest count over 1.5 million copies of this book have been sold and it is by far the largest selling academic book in social science history.
The simple typology presented by Riesman, Glazer and Denney divided society into three main cultural types: a) tradition-directed, b) inner-directed, and c) other-directed. The authors suggested that initially, social systems favored tradition-directed people who adhered to norms that emerged out of survivalist tribal impulses and cultural norms. With the industrial revolution and the development of the markets came the inner-directed persons who were more driven by individualistic impulses. Finally, the growth of mass communication led to the development of the “other-directed” person who is focused on how others behave and what they might think of each other in a network. The rise of the “other-directed” person created the conditions for mass-consumerism to proliferate without necessarily considering the ecological implications of such a transition. Throughout one’s life one human can pass through phases of being in any of these three categories of social behavior. While the authors of The Lonely Crowd appeared to yearn? for the individual pragmatism of the “inner-directed” person, if we consider their insights of seven decades ago in a contemporary context, the other-directed person presents a new set of potential virtues.
“Other-directed” individuals present a formula for human co-dependence which, if normatively chartered in the context of ecological literacy, can bring about social change far more efficiently and rapidly. Organic food and fair-trade product memes could just as well be spread as those for throwaway toys. Just as negative fashions and consumer fads can spread fast, so too can positive attributes. Cultural “memes” (a term surprisingly coined in contemporary form by the geneticist Richard Dawkins) are able to spread in a networked society with alacrity. The key concern of societal leaders, whether at the level of a household, local councils, or national governments, should be how to improve the quality of such memes for societal benefit. “Other-directed” persons are not altruistic but rather seek to be “liked” in a way which is reminiscent of even Generation Z and the quest for social media affirmations with thumbs up, hearts and myriad other emojis. While such a yearning can lead to psychological pathologies as demonstrated in the 2020 Netflix docudrama “Social Dilemma,” it can also be a means of harnessing collective intelligence.
The advent of the “sharing economy” is a direct positive outgrowth of such “other-directed” individuals. From adding crowd-sourced information on Wikipedia to reviews on Air-BNB and Uber, we can all benefit from such collective intelligence of the crowd modulated by effective technology. The social order of the shared economy also has potential for reducing ecological impact in various ways. In terms of material efficiency, shared mobility can lead to a reduction in average household vehicle ownership without commensurate increases in vehicle ownership in society as a whole. Thus, in such a context, material efficiency would be reflected in the reduction of materials used in automobiles and most precisely in the economy-wide quantity of materials used in passenger kilometers traveled. Shared mobility can also lead to a reduction in demand for parking space with the associated reduction in materials consumed for that purpose. Research on car sharing in California and Sweden has shown potential in reducing private vehicle ownership, specifically for infrequent uses, such as 7-seater and above passenger vehicles, all-wheel drive, long-range vehicles, or vehicles with a large trunk.
Yet we must also be cautious of a rebound effect in the context of a shared economy situation, particularly with built infrastructure such as shared apartments. While Airbnb claimed in a self-commissioned study from 2014 that shared lodging leads to substantial GHG benefits (equivalent to taking 33,000 cars off North American roads), the company did not provide access to the full study and methodology. In contrast, a recent study comparing the environmental impact of shared lodging with hotel stays found that such lodgings did not always outperform hotel stay. Growth in Peer to Peer (P2P) lodging can also increase hotel room vacancies, in which case there will be underutilization of hotel building stock potentially offsetting the gains from use of residential space.
Sharing among crowds certainly has the potential to further sustainability goals in cities but only if we keep track of metrics of natural and social capital. Sharing knowledge is what economists call a “non-rivalrous good” – it does not diminish by sharing – in fact, its quality often increases with sharing. Hence Wikipedia is an example of such a win-win outcome (that in my view deserves particular commendation for its nonprofit business model). With other forms of material and service sharing, important efficiency can be harnessed if we keep track of our curtailing our total resource consumption. While we are in the “sharing mode” during this holiday season, we should also remember the wisdom of lessons from The Lonely Crowd. Let us strive to maximize not only efficiencies in natural capital usage but also generating social capital that can make us a more resilient society.
