I’m not sure that I should be making this a public confession, but I have a history of criminal activity.

It all began the year Roxette’s Joy Ride made it to number one on the charts. It was the first time I remember being allowed to stay up after my bed time and I painstakingly recorded the top 100 off the radio – ‘the best of 1991’ for my personal music collection. And I still have that cassette somewhere.

With today’s technology, it’s pretty easy to copy copyrighted material. I have a stack of recipes photocopied from library books, a friend burned me a copy of a CD, I’ve downloaded music off YouTube, visited bit torrent sites, placed a DVD on hold at the library with the explicit purpose of copying it for future use…

There is no end to my criminal activities.

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A frugal blog will inevitably extol the virtues of ‘the simple life’. After all, the simple life (synonymous it seems with ‘the good life’) is often one of the reasons for being frugal. But what is the simple life and is it a one size fits all definition? Is it something specific, or are there principles that can be embraced so that no matter where you live, or what you do, you can live the simple life?

Living the simple life is generally considered a voluntary lifestyle choice for environmental, frugal, spiritual, philosophical and social reasons. It is often characterised by one or more of the following traits:

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I’m currently reading Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics, an introductory book to economics and it discusses an interesting alternative to the way we calculate a nation’s Gross Domestic Product.

Generally, a nation’s GDP is calculated on spending: consumer spending + government spending + investment + exports – imports = GDP. But the question that many people have asked is, is this a valid measure of a nation’s wealth and prosperity?

One of the alternate methods for calculating a nations economic wealth, the genuine progress index, attempts to put a dollar value on domestic duties and include that value as part of the GDP.

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Crisis over or diverted or put off or whatever, but the Australian Reserve Bank has raised the cash rate – the first Reserve Bank in the world since the big ‘GFC’.

Well what the heck does this actually mean and why have they done it?

I’m no economist. I can’t read complicated equations and fiscal models. I need things dummied down to my level to understand them. This is my dummy’s economics understanding in a nutshell and the ‘x-factor’ that I think we forget about when talking economics.

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Photo by Mr Kris

We have sponsored a child now through World Vision for quite a few years now. Occasionally they send us requests to support other projects. If we can we donate a little extra.

Recently we were asked to give extra money to help with their agricultural programme that supplies seeds, tools and training to help communities develop farming practices to ensure future independent food supply (assuming that the country stays out of war!)

Well, I like the idea of fostering independence rather than a continuous dependence on charity, so I’m quite happy to support such a programme. But I had a few misgivings. They were:

• Where are the seeds sourced? Locally or some big business like Monsanto?
• Are the farming techniques being promoted regionally appropriate and sustainable or do they rely on chemical fertilisers? In other words are these people being enslaved by big business agriculture?
• When WV refers to drought resistant crops, are these crops naturally drought resistant or are they genetically modified?

I waited a while, but this is the response that I received from WV:

Thank you for your email regarding our Seeds, Tools and Training appeal, and apologies for the delay in our response. Please be advised that we had forwarded your queries to a specialist area who had come back with the following answers:
The local World Vision national office will source the seeds.  Often this will be from a government agricultural department, and if government resources do not exist then commercial distributors will be used. 
Chemical fertilizers are not applied, they’re expensive and outside the reach of poor farmers. Fertility improvement is provided via maintaining ground cover, compost and manure.  Contour bund is also used to slow run-off, reduce erosion and capture water into the soil.
Seed is open pollinated, neither hybrid nor genetically modified. Drought resistant crops used include TEF, millet, and even acacia.
Our focus must always be on avoiding dependence and helping sustainable independence.  In some circumstances this is easier said than done, and each project will have its own context. There are communities where the politics or the climate is subject to instability, but we believe these communities still deserve our assistance and we do our best to ensure the work we undertake provides these communities with the know-how and belief in themselves to overcome any problems they encounter in the future.

I’m more than satisfied with this response.

It brings me to the point of knowing what we’re supporting when it comes to giving to charity. I had quite a heated argument with family a couple of weeks ago about this. I get surprised sometimes about how strongly against giving to charity people feel. My position is this:

• I don’t want to make someone’s life worse by giving, which is why I emailed WV about their agricultural programme.
• I don’t mind that charities incur admin fees – that’s just a reality of doing anything in a capitalist world. As long as the charity is transparent and accountable and I can make informed decisions, then that’s fine.
• Sometimes we have to just give unconditionally. I’ve read and heard a lot of cynicism about giving to charities. I wonder if this cynicism is an excuse not to feel bad about not giving. While we argue about admin fees and advertising campaigns, people who need help and whom we could help, go without, and to me that’s an issue more important than the bottom line.
• Anyone who needs assistance deserves it regardless of geographical location. I don’t discriminate according to land mass.

Anyway, that’s just my thoughts on charities, a topic that’s come up a few times in our life lately. Of course there are other points of view and things I haven’t thought about, as well as permeations on the above like does anyone who needs help deserve it?

What are you thoughts and experiences when it comes to giving to charity?

Photo by Huntz

I was picking family up at the airport the other day, and at the ticket station the man in front of us was having awful trouble getting the machine to take his money. He needed to pay $20 and despite trying a hundred different ways, the machine just wasn’t going to play. As a result, quite a queue formed behind him as we all waited our turn.

Soon I heard murmuring and shuffling, and the man having trouble got more flustered. My brother voiced what I suspect everyone else was thinking: “Why doesn’t he just get out of the way and let everyone else through, the selfish man!”

What I was thinking was: “I wish I had cash on me to swap with him and put the poor guy (and the rest of us) out of his misery.” I asked my mother, who had no cash on her either, and no one else offered. Eventually he gave up and walked away.

I think that I would have thought the same thing as my brother not so long ago. It’s such as small shift in perspective but one that I’m liking.

Maybe it’s a sign of maturity, or maybe not, but I’ve really been giving long hard thought to some of my values and attitudes. Hours of spare time has given me time to reflect on a few things. On of them in particular is my attitude towards my family, to the community, to the environment and to the future.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a shining star or an example to follow, I fail far more times that I succeed. It’s just something that has been on my mind lately, and I want to try to ‘walk the talk’ and be more accountable.

One thing in particular that has been on my mind is moving towards an attitude of giving rather than taking. I want to move away from the “what’s in it for me” attitude. It’s not easy, but I’m working on it.

I think that generosity starts in our minds and with our attitudes towards ourselves, each other and towards our environment and then extends through the actions that we do.

Part of this reflection on shifting my attitude has been a growing concern about the amount of things that I ‘consume’. We are pretty frugal and far from being typical ‘consumers’ yet it still concerns me how much I contribute to our environmental degradation by our unsustainable lifestyle. I’m not sure that I am going to have to live with the consequences of my decisions or actions, rather generations to come are going to have to deal with them, and that doesn’t seem very fair or show much forethought. While governments and big businesses certainly play their part in creating a sustainable future, I don’t think that should be an excuse for forgoing personal responsibility. I have control over personal responsibility and it is where I can make the most change. I’m not advocating moving back to the dark ages, but to move forward in a more sustainable and responsible manner.

So what exactly am I doing? Well, not enough actually. But I’m working on it. Slowly. And I’m excited because it is very freeing and empowering to take responsibility for your own life and to live by the values and standards that you set for yourself rather than living by the conventions set by others.

Like everything, it begins with a shift in perspective, a different way of thinking. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. Now it’s time to turn it into action.

Logo from The Corporation website

I’ve said this before, but being frugal isn’t just about saving a buck. It encompasses a whole set of values about sustainable living, community over commercialism,  relationships and personal responsibility.

I recently watched a documentary called The Corporation. If you’re interested in the negative side to capitalism, then this is an extremely interesting documentary. You can watch if for free on Google video, or visit The Corporation website to purchase the documentary, learn more or support the project by giving a donation. I warn you, the documentary is three hours long, but well worth the watch.

This film looks at the role of the corporation in our everyday lives, and their role in the destruction of natural resources and the inequitable treatment of human beings all in the name of profit. The documentary raises many, many important issues worth exploring, but I wanted to look at one issue in particular, and that is marketing to children.

I admit that this isn’t an issue that I’m going to have to deal with for a few years yet, but it’s one that I’ve been thinking about lately and an issue, I think, that all parents face.

Marketing to children is big business. Companies and advertisers have researched, understand and exploit the “nag factor” and market not only children’s products to children but also adult products because children’s attitudes to products increasingly affect their parents purchasing decisions.

“One study estimated that children influenced $9 billion worth of car sales in 1994. One car dealer explains: "Sometimes, the child literally is our customer. I have watched the child pick out the car."” T. L. Stanley, `Kiddie Cars’, Brandweek, Vol. 36 (23 October 1995) from the University of Wollongong website.

Further, advertising to children is seen as a long term investment: get them while they are young, their minds not fully developed and they are vulnerable to manipulation, and they will be brand loyal for life. (for interesting info on the development of the child consumer see the article Marketing to Children on the Uni of Wollongong website.)

“…people talk about cradle to grave brand loyalty. You know if you don’t get a child by two or by six you won’t have them at all. Or if you get a child by six you’ll have them for life. So all of a sudden infants are now fair game. And it’s been discovered that six months old, children as young as six months actually respond to brands and recognize brands…The corporate message that children are being implanted with is that buying things will make you happy. Things will make you happy…And children are bombarded with corporate messages from the moment they wake up in the morning to the moment that they go to bed at night. And even in school. And they can’t escape them they’re everywhere.” Dr. Susan Linn, Prof. Of Psychiatry, Baker Children’s Center, Harvard (transcript from movie).

So how does a parent prevent the extreme consumerisation of our children?

One solution, explored on The Wisdom Journal is to protect children as much as possible from attempts at manipulation by marketers by limiting their exposure to marketing, in particular limiting TV time. While I personally believe that limiting TV time is beneficial anyway for everyone, maybe this is also a valid argument based on the premise that young children really don’t have the cognitive development to reason properly. I don’t know. I’ve never tried reasoning with a two year old, so I can’t say from experience whether this premise is valid or not. Ask me in another year or so. The book Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough describes how Coke actually affects the brain through branding, in it’s perception of taste, so possibly limiting exposure to advertising and marketing is valid at any age. Companies do, after all, employ psychologists to make manipulation as affective as possible. 

My qualm with protecting children from marketing exposure is that by doing so, we’re not teaching them the necessary skills that they will need to make informed decisions as adult consumers. Are we by limiting their exposure, in the long run just making our children more vulnerable to marketing? I can imagine that it would probably be difficult and maybe not appropriate to make every request for something a life lesson. I imagine that it would take a lot of patience explaining why a child can’t have this or that. Further, maybe telling a young child that they can’t eat McDonalds because we don’t support companies that exploit other humans and the environment is way too intense.

Of course there is a middle ground, one that reduces exposure to marketing activities at a young age, and explores them objectively as a child grows older.

I have a feeling that parenting is going to be hard enough as it is without external factors like unethical marketing weighing in. But it’s certainly a concern I take seriously because the last few years have seen me explore for myself society’s worship of consumerism versus values that are more meaningful to me and a lifestyle that is more sustainable in the years to come. These are the values that I want to pass on to my children. As one man pointed out in the film, our lifestyle and choices today are like a compulsory tax that our children will have to pay tomorrow, in one way or another. 

What are your thoughts? Are you concerned about this issue? What do you do with your children when it comes to marketing and the ‘nag factor’?