Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Limits of Hipster Capitalism
Last year, my wife and I went to the New Hampshire Crafts Fair. We bought a couple of small things, but mostly spent our time ogling hand-crafted products — particularly wooden tables — that were both beautiful and well outside our budget.
Though most of the craftsmen were old boomers, there were a few our age. One in particular was a bladesmith who had quit a financial services job in Boston to turn his hobby of knife-making into a full-time business. Zack now forges his own metal and handcrafts the blades and handles himself. I’m no expert in knives, but the quality was clearly amazing: perfectly balanced, razor sharp. But, just as we had to pass on the handcrafted furniture for now, I had to resign myself to sticking with my CRKT knives for the time being — and praying that Zack is successful enough to be in business when I can afford his work.
Jonas Blade & Metalworks’s Wild Feather Bowie
I had this in mind while reading Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s fascinating article, “Rise of the Hipster Capitalist” in the October issue of Reason. Brown’s contention is that the Millennial generation is far more entrepreneurial, business savvy, and pro-capitalism than the media lets on, though they tend to favor small-scale, artisanal, locally-sourced businesses over impersonal corporate behemoths. In other words, they follow paths much like Zack:
The hipster mixes hippie ethics and yuppie consumer preferences, communal attitudes and capitalist practices. Unlike prior generational stand-ins — from flappers to beats, punks to slackers — hipsters aren’t rebelling against their parents or prior generations; they’re mixing and matching the best of what came before and abandoning the baggage that doesn’t interest them.
The hipster ideal today is neither a commune nor a life of rugged individualism. It’s the small, socially conscious business. Millennials are obliterating divisions between corporate and bohemian values, between old and new employment models —they’re not the first to do this, but they are doing it in their own way. Armed with ample self-confidence but hobbled by stagnant prospects, millennials may be uniquely poised to excel in an evolving economy where the freelance countercultural capitalist becomes the new gold standard…
In the Buzz Marketing Group/Young Entrepreneurs Council survey, 33 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old respondents had a side business. (This included activities like tutoring and selling stuff on eBay.) Platforms such as Etsy, an online emporium for handmade goods, and the ridesharing service Uber put self-employment, of a sort, within millions of millennials’ reach. Much is made of how the new “sharing economy” disrupts old business models and empowers consumers, but these businesses have a transformative effect for workers, too.
It’s a fascinating read, and well worth your time. As someone who goes to the New Hampshire Crafts Fair and blows his spending money at the independent wine, beer, and cheese shop in my office’s lobby, I finished the piece with an optimistic smile on my face. But there’s a problem with Hipster Capitalism.
Of the many forces that have led to our prosperity, the least appreciated has been soulless, impersonal, far-away, semi-automated mass production that has driven prices down to such spectacularly low levels. This not only gives people more spending power, but vastly expands the kinds of products and services available to the poor. Just as the early industrial revolution made metal goods and manufactured textiles affordable to nearly everyone, so has it turned the personal computer into something that costs a weeks’ wages and fits into your pocket. And while things are always changing, the virtues of economies of scale have been proven and larger companies still employee the majority of Americans.
Hipster Capitalism not only fails to get this, but actively denigrates the practices that make it possible. Mass production, big corporations, and impersonal trade may not be lovable, but they’re the source of much of what’s made us prosperous and raised the standards of living worldwide. In contrast, artisanal products are — by their very nature — produced in small quantities and are more expensive than their manufactured counterparts.
Small companies and hand-crafted goods are wonderful — and we may have come to under-appreciate them relative to cheaper, mass-produced options. But those less lovable ways of making a living provide necessary, important work that Millennials should applaud, if not embrace.
Published in General
Craft-based businesses are fine, and increasing affluence (if affluence is indeed allowed to increase) will create growing demand for products made in this way. But the hostility toward mass-production manufacturing has done and continues to do considerable harm. See my post Faux Manufacturing Nostalgia:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11680.html
So these hipsters can reject capitalism. Seems to me it’s what they’re doing. Now, I doubt they have the brain cells to formulate their thought process in a way as to understand what capitalism is or isn’t. But that’s not important.
PS: This isn’t about “doing what you love”, or “art” or “making a niche product” etc. This is essentially a rejection of “modernity” and of the economic forces which have created the modern world.
Of course, it’s just a juvenile fad. Hipsters are, after all, kidults.
This is laughable on the scale of Obama knowing what foreign policy is.
What do you know about selling art that you created? Please enlighten us to your knowledge of material costs vs labor costs vs energy costs to produce a piece of art to price for a buyer.
These artists let it hang out every weekend around the country to earn an extra buck or 2.
My guess is you’re either a lawyer or an accountant and haven’t the slightest clue as to what goes into great art and/or design.
If you only had the brain cells to formulate. Sigh…..
I agree with Misanthropy
“People can afford the occasional high-quality, hand-crafted item THANKS TO the fact that they save so much money relying on the abundance of cheap, mass-produced goods for their daily needs.”
The low cost of overall items allows the average joe to have the best of what they want in the area of their passion. For example, a world class road bike costs about 10,000. I know a number of people who earn quite modest livings, but have $10,00o bikes, because they can afford the bike and still eat. Same thing with the artisnal knife maker. He has got to hope there are enough folks who love knives that will drop a few hundered for a knife. Though I also have a few artisnal friends who did not do the math of “I can make 5 a week and sell them for$50 each that means I will be living on $1000 per month……” Hence the value of a biz degree.
Is Ricochet considered a artisan product?
I don’t pay this kind of money for porn. Although this may be a poor example. I don’t comment much with one hand.
No, artisan products are high quality…
It’s not just colleges. My 7-year old grandson attends a private school in LA where they routinely talk about finding one’s “passion.”
I don’t know where you grew up, so …
I was born in in 1976. My parents in 1947.
Many of friend’s parents (though not mine) grew up with the following:
No running water
No indoor plumbing
One bed (often 4 to 6 kids in one old double bed)
No mine safety beyond a battery lamp and a hard hat
Horses for heavy labor
No refrigeration
No central heating
Hunger
So there are people in your baby-boom model who grew up knowing real wants. I had lots of luxuries growing up, comparatively, but, I have also known scarcity in my life twice.
1981-1983 when our very middle class lifestyle collapsed with the steel industry. I went to bed hungry many nights before my parents got back on their feet.
2001-2003 working three jobs 75-80 hrs/week barely making ends meet. Thank you student loans (was that a lie I bought into – pursue your dream, bah humbug).
Yes, fill a kid with this nonsense for 12 years (plus college) and he’ll be swamped with debt, mostly unemployable, and me, ’til I figured it out, or lucky.
My mom (born ’55) grew up in a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house with 12 kids. She got fresh packs of socks and underwear for Christmas more than once. I can only imagine how much a place like Costco or Sam’s Club or Mega Wal Mart would have improved their standard of living.
That is so not my name.
I’m beginning to wonder if messing up your name has become a running Ricochet gag, Miss Theocracy.
I don’t like hipsters either, but let’s be realistic; every generation has their share of them.
Frankly, I don’t think any of the preceding postwar generations experienced anything approaching the kind of scarcity of opportunity Millennials must deal with now. Young people aren’t as screwed in America as they are in the rest of the developed world, but that isn’t saying much.
And yet, these people still got to work. They were able to afford housing. Economic opportunity was widespread. The government (wrongly) went to absurd lengths to maintain full employment. It drives be crazy when older generations look down on us, because I (and, I think, most other Millenials) know that it is impossible for the government to guarantee that sort of job security for more than a few decades.
Let’s face it: prior generations lived easier lives by stealing from the future, and my generation is the one that’s going to pay.
Careful with this crazy talk; next you’ll be saying that Baby Boomers won’t be able to get “their” money out of Social Security!
Demonstrably easier lives as a whole? I doubt it. And pissing contests between the generations to prove whose life was harder often miss the point. Life can get harder in some ways, easier in others, and in any generation, some have it harder than others.
Your point about employment is well-taken, though. The barriers to employment have increased in this country. That some conservatives apparently go to great lengths to avoid seeing the obvious connection between conservative gripes about increased barriers to employment and conservative gripes about the “laziness” of Millennials is really rather absurd.
Here’s a decent article about how “big box” mass-capitalism helps to INCREASE the demand for artisanal luxury goods:
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-big-box-effect
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.
Hmm. Come on, you don’t actually believe that, do you? I’d say it’s never been more the opposite of that.
I used to fingerpaint a lot when I was in kindergarten, so yes, I have plenty of experience with great art.
If you want, you can go to Williamsburg Brooklyn and find some modern-day replicas of my fingerpaint work being sold in art show kiosks for about $450 per copy.
PS: To be serious, maybe you misunderstood everything I said? Must be, since I don’t understand the relevance of your reply to what I said. You seem to think this is some “attack” on art or “design”, when it is clearly no such thing. This is about the mental models of the economy and society some of these people have.
Material goods aren’t much comfort if one cannot get a job that earns enough to support oneself until one’s late twenties and, for most people, have to go through low-quality, exploitative university programs.
It’s absurd.
How much income does one need to “support oneself” in modern-day America?
It’s all about location isn’t it. When Willie Brown was mayor of SF he said you shouldn’t live the city if you made less than $100k a year. Obviously, that’s ridiculous but not far from the truth. Sadly. On many levels.
Given our culture of playing the property market, quite a lot.
No, I understood you.
The hippy-dippy arts and crafty people, as you say, “doubt they have the brain cells to formulate their thought process in a way as to understand what capitalism is or isn’t”. You think they are rejecting capitalism, that they are in fact rejecting modernity and economic forces that created the modern world. That they are kidults caught up in a juvenile fad.
And I’m saying, for the most part, that’s flat out wrong. They are the epitome of capitalism: take one dollar, convert it into a knife or pot then convert that into 2 dollars.
Mystery solved?
One would need less if government wasn’t so terrified of technology-induced deflation.