The Economics of Hoarding

Hoarding is now the subject of two series on cable TV. One, called “Hoarders,” is on A&E. The other, called “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” is on TLC (The Learning Channel)

The format of both shows is similar. Both feature people suffering from hoarding. What I mean by “people suffering from hoarding,” is those who love and care about the hoarders. The hoarders themselves look quite happy, even gleeful, about their habit.

Hoarding, we are shown by the camera, creates homes filled to the gills with “stuff.” There is literally no room to walk in some hoarder homes. Some hoarders can’t even open the outside doors to their house. Some can’t even live in their homes.

Hoarding is a degenerative process that ultimately robs individual rooms within a home of their once-valuable functions. Kitchens can’t be cooked in. Showers and sinks turn into storage bins. Dining rooms aren’t for eating in or playing games on the dining table. Living rooms aren’t for living in anymore. Even the beds are so full of piles of stuff they can’t be slept in. One man was literally reduced to a single upright chair where he sat clipping “historic” events out of newspapers all day.

Is there anyone in America who can watch these shows without a fear that they too might turn into one of these miserable creatures, literally buried alive by possessions?

The pathologizing of hoarding

My mother, an orderly housekeeper, was often called a “pack rat” by my older brothers because she held onto items like string, wrapping paper, nails, etc. Once, my oldest brother visited one of my mother’s relatives with a reputation for being “not like” the rest of the family. With amazement and pity in his voice, he told a story of a house piled from floor to ceiling with newspapers. He was afraid their house might burn down someday with our uncle and aunt inside it.

Back then, hoarding was considered quirky, possibly dangerous, and an embarrassment. But it wasn’t considered a disease. My siblings and I credited hoarding by my parents, uncle, and aunt to the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II. They lived through a time when things were quite scarce. Even a few years ago, as I watched in dismay along with her other friends, a colleague descended into the pit of hoarding shown on those TV shows, hoarding was not called a disease. We just didn’t see it that way.

Because I think often and sadly about my hoarder friend who died after falling off the small sliver of her bed left empty for her to lie on and was unable to get up or even crawl to the phone for days, I noticed it when hoarding became connected with OCD a few years ago.

OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is an official psychological disease, perhaps best personified on cable TV by Tony Shaloub’s character “Monk.” Hoarding is called part of OCD because of the compulsive nature of the hoarder’s thoughts and actions.

Psychological “causes” of hoarding

One of the cable TV shows on hoarding points to psychological trauma as a catalyst for hoarding behavior. A dead child or spouse or similar loss is to blame, we are told. Having the name for a cause of a “disease” seems to give many of us a sense of control over it.

It appears that we who watch shows about hoarding need that sense of control as much as those poor souls we watch clinging angrily to their stuff when family and organizers show up to help them throw it out.

But our sense of control through understanding a cause of hoarders’ “disease” is as false as the hoarder’s illusion of control of their lives through hoarding. We non-hoarders are merely protected from our own anxiety by our distancing of ourselves, the “us,” from “them.”

The “cure” for hoarding

The second series on hoarding I watched didn’t offer pat “causes” to comfort viewers. However, like the first series, it too offered redemption through the love of family members who intervene in the hoarders’ lives. Sisters, spouses, and children all stepped up to the plate. The shows end with the mess cleaned up and the family able to sit together again in the hoarder’s house.

It didn’t seem to bother the shows’ producers that many of the older adult children of hoarders wound up living next door or even in the home with the hoarder to “help them out.” Nor did the shows question the effectiveness of a cleanup so that other adult children got to enjoy coming back to a parent’s home and playing games they played as kids. I couldn’t help but wonder, whose benefit was cleaning out the house really for? Kids who wished to remain kids or the adult hoarders who were forced into cleaning in order to visit with their children?

These kinds of TV endings don’t really result in much contentment or closure. I just didn’t believe the identified patient in these shows was really cured of the compulsion to hoard. Truly, for me at least, the psychology of OCD does not offer much real understanding of hoarding (or of OCD).

So let’s try economics

Watching TV shows about Afghanistan after we invaded, I could”t help but notice how the people in that country hoard everything they can lay their hands on. They collect old bicycle rims, pieces of cloth, torn books. I was struck by what one of the American women on the TV show about hoarding said, “I feel guilty for just throwing this out.” Did she perhaps have a previous life in a war-torn country like Afghanistan?

If you’ve heard stories of the Great Depression, you know some Americans went through a similar level of poverty and learned to hang onto old things in the same way. You might have heard about the dumping of mass quantities of potatoes in streams to keep prices of potatoes up in the 1930’s. You might still be harassed by an older relative warning, “Remember the starving children in (fill in the name of the country). Eat your (fill in the name of the food you dislike)!”

Could hoarding actually be a byproduct, or what economists call an “externality,” of advanced capitalism? Could overweight be a similar undesirable result of economic success? How about financial bubbles? Doesn’t each of these things include a tantalizing feeling of “starving” for more? Aren’t we really afflicted with a bad case of overabundance?

Is hoarding possibly a hanging on to a way of coping that’s necessary in places like Afghanistan on in times like the Great Depression where every little thing is scarce and precious, but here and now is no longer economically functional?

Or is individual hoarding actually the outtake from corporate overproduction? Our capitalist society depends heavily upon consumer spending to keep going with jobs and investments. The pressure all of us to buy the latest car, gadget, or clothing is immense. And retail therapy does work. But why do some of us need so much of it? And what do we do with our old stuff?

Aren’t most of us feeling a tad guilty and just a teeny bit worried about the prodigious quantity of stuff being produced and bought in this country? Can recycling really handle all the stuff that’s being dumped into landfills, caves and the oceans? Do we fear to discard?

Information overload – a form of social hoarding?

And what about the gazillion pieces of paper and bytes on hard drives we’re creating each nanosecond? As all this information piles up, who will sort through it all and decide what to discard? Are we all hoarders when it comes to human knowledge?

What a public furor arose when the public library in San Francisco inadvertently let slip the fact that all libraries “weed” (i.e., toss out books) when their buildings become too full. Citizens were outraged. So how about Google, the biggest hoarder of all? Will Google keep piling up web site after web site until we can’t find anything we need in the ensuing approximately-infinite mass of data online?

Are hoarders perhaps the canaries in the coal mine? Are they warning us of the possibility of our own collective destruction as all of our lives become buried in more and more things; as all of our energies become increasingly sapped by caring for these things? Is hoarding really a disease? Or is it the normal result of an abnormal focus on owning man-made commodities?

The metaphysics of hoarding

Here’s my final question for those interested in the future of economics. Economics is based on the core idea that it is scarcity which creates the economic value of all things. When scarcity itself becomes a valuable thing to possess, what will happen to economics? What will economics do with a home, and ultimately a world, where buying less is more highly prized than buying more?

Copyright © 2010 Nancy K. Humphreys