Ethical consumption needs to be easy to identify, accessible and affordable, especially in a worsening economy. And we need to rethink what we should be optimising our economy for

I don’t know anyone who wants the rainforest, which is storing carbon and biodiversity and undiscovered medicines for us all, to be burned down for their coffee, and the people harvesting it paid too little to live a dignified life.

I don’t know anyone who wants the animals they eat to be mutilated without anaesthesia, to be trapped in overcrowded conditions without ever seeing the sun, to not receive medical care, to be slowly gassed to death.

I don’t know anyone who wants their clothing to be made by children working long days under dangerous conditions instead of going to school.

I don’t know anyone who wants our soil and water to become unbalanced or poisonous to our native animals through rampant overuse of artificial fertiliser and pesticides.

And yet the vast majority of products bought in the West contribute to exactly this. This isn’t because the consumers are bad people who want to make the world a worse place by being in it. This is the world we ourselves live in, that our friends and children will live in, why would we want it to sicken? Why would we want other people, and innocent animals, to be tortured for no good reason?

People buy what they do because they want to feed and clothe their families, survive each day, and because they are simply tired. Inflation is eating our savings, if we have any; many of us haven’t just stopped saving, but are slipping into debt. The costs for food, rent, heating, mobility are skyrocketing. Yet our wages are not rising. Promotions are being postponed, empty positions not replaced, with us expected to work more without more pay, and more and more of us burning out. Degrees or a can do attitude no longer guarantee work. Many of us are finding our jobs being replaced by AI, leaving people without jobs they did well and liked doing and that paid them a living wage, while AI does the job less transparently, less reliably, with less of a human touch, and while there are thus fewer and fewer jobs – how is this compatible with the general good? It means some people will systematically end up out of work, but there is no universal basic income forthcoming, the welfare that is given is tied to shame, and itself increasingly cut and lowered when it is already not matching the rising costs of living. At my age, my parents were buying a house. My peers and I are struggling to find anything we can afford to rent and keep at a bearable temperature.

And the vicious circle of it all is part of the worst of it. People can’t upgrade to newer appliances or switch to green contracts, so they waste electricity made by burning coal. They can’t renovate their homes, so they waste fuel to heat them which releases even more CO2 into the atmosphere, and then bake in the Summers that climate change makes ever worse. Trains are ever more expensive and unreliable, e-cars are unaffordable, and so people continue driving their petrol cars that poison the air. People can’t afford to buy fairtrade products, and realise their poverty is reproduced on a scale incomprehensibly worse across the planet. They can’t afford organic food, and know insect populations are collapsing around us. They are constantly stressed and tired while navigating a landscape in which you often need to do research just to figure out which is the most ethical option, if any of this packaging material can actually be recycled, whether the animal welfare claim means anything at all. It is grossly inefficient for each individual. And it will make things harder for all of us in the long run.

I’m not disputing that ethical choices are still possible in this world. We do have options left, and something is better that nothing.

What I am pointing out is that the behaviour we would want everyone to show to heal our planet and injustice, the behaviour that the vast majority of us actually want to show, is made systematically difficult, and thus de facto fails to reliably materialise for the vast majority of people, and guilting them and pointing out the remaining possibilities has not substantially changed that.

In our societies—the richest in the world! - behaving ethically in our consumer choices is increasingly, and with justification, seen as something only the most privileged can think about. That is crazy.

The solution to that is not more guilt. Guilt is seldomly a productive emotion.

Instead, here are some ideas for proposals for our governments, for us to lobby for.

Specifically, and exclusively, direct subsidies towards ethical products; in particular, do not subsidise unethical products. Do not subsidise or bail out petrol, flights, industrialised meat production, overuse of pesticides or financial speculation. Do subsidise a switch to renewables, reliable and safe public transportation, farming practices that keep our land healthy, produce plant based proteins, and treat animals with kindness and respect. Pouring tax money into products that make the world worse is incomprehensible.
Introduce mandatory, clearly defined and non-ambiguous, verified labelling for degrees of ethical practices behind goods. A consumer should see at a glance whether the chickens laying these eggs could roam outside. This labelling should continue beyond the original product. E.g. there is currently zero incentive for any restaurant to purchase ethical produce, because the origin and composition of their products is not displayed in any way. Yes, this is work. But it is far less work to do it for products and them have every consumer see it at a glance, than for each consumer to try to figure this out with nothing but a smartphone while in a rush in the supermarket.
Outlaw practices that fall below what we consider ethically acceptable, enable ways to not break these laws in practice, and verify that these laws are not broken. Outlaw them specifically both inside our own countries, and outlaw the imports of products produced under such conditions abroad to prevent displacement. E.g. having outlawed battery farms for eggs in Europe, we shouldn’t important cakes made with eggs from battery farms, and sell them to our local consumers who have no idea.
You cannot simultaneously «optimise» our economy by stripping human labour for it and blocking people from the labour market, and then make providing human labour a precondition to a dignified life. We have humans who need resources, and who are willing and able to work to provide them. Make this easy. E.g. make it possible, with low bureaucratic hurdles, to start up businesses, or provide independent services for each other. It should be easy to offer babysitting, cleaning, repairs, construction, moving help or chauffeuring services, or to sell things you grow or create, to bring forth a new product that people actually need—you shouldn’t need a work contract with a huge number of preconditions and consequences to do something productive and be paid for it. Do not punish people for re-entering the labour market.
Where there is work that needs to be done, and humans who like doing it and have no better alternative, it isn’t optimisation to strip humans from it by adding resource sucking tech and stress. Like, we do need more public green, greened roofs and facades, solar mounted everywhere. Humans like creating art, writing texts, teaching, gardening, it is good for us to do. I would rather have a bunch of people calmly and quietly take their time to look after the greenery in my area, planting trees, watering plants, just clipping and raking by hand where it is necessary, and be paid for this – instead of being given welfare by an agency that judges them for burning out in modern workplaces, and having them sit at home feeling useless, and just have one person go through with loud, oil sucking machinery and butcher everything green while stressing the entire neighbourhood with the noise. I think everyone involved – the people working, the people living in the area – would prefer this. So why are we optimising for something else?
If we seriously do not need remotely as much work to be done as there are people who need to do work to be paid a living wage, and we’d just be occupying people to keep them busy – then don’t punish people for accordingly not working, or force them to do mindless things that no-one needs, but set them free in a dignified manner. Instead, consider universal basic income, and empowering and valuing other work they do in looking after children, the elderly, looking after their neighbourhoods, doing activism and being creative. I’d rather have the cashier down the street look after her kids and paint public murals than work behind a cash desk that has her bored out of her mind, just because she knows that if she didn’t have this pointless job that can in fact be replaced cheaply by a machine, she would lose all public respect and security. Her human dignity should be independent of that. Her contribution to society is not logically reflected in this wage.

Very happy to hear other and better suggestions, or issues with the ones I have raised. Economics isn’t my field; I am just looking at what is going on around me and thinking, whatever this is, it isn’t fit for purpose.

The whole point of our economy, of money itself and our subsidies in particular, of our laws and our bureaucracy, should be to enable better lives. It is why they were invented. We made them up; we can change them if they are not fit for purpose as is. They are not goals in and off themselves, they are tools to help everyone, and should be aligned with our values.

If people are on average less happy, and acting less ethically, feel all their choices are bad and make them feel like they are not themselves, not doing as much good as they can, not getting the respect they need; if non-humans animals are less happy, if our very planet and climate is getting sick in a way that endangers us all; then I don’t care what the numbers say, we are setting our priorities and incentives wrong and need to rethink them.