* No amount of personal spending decisions can advance systemic changes like better public transport or more careful military funding. These require governmental action.
* With our wallet, we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only choose between bad options.
* Voting with our wallet requires immunity against professional PR campaigns, time (for researching on what to buy), money (to afford options which are better according to personal views but more expensive), friends who appreciate instead of belittle our purchasing decisions, ...
In the end, I believe the story "vote with your wallet" internalizes a form of victim blaming: The consumers are blamed for their irresponsible purchasing decisions, but the responsibility really is with the companies and governments.
Of course, not spending consciously is also not a solution. But we obtain greater leverage by using our influence on society. Only few of us are editor-in-chiefs of important newspapers or important politicians, but most of us can engage in visually powerful protests which are also able to generate political wind.
> With our wallet, we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only choose between bad options.
One weird thing markets do is make unusual alternatives far more expensive than the difference in cost of manufacture between them and more-common options. The market “chooses” the $80 option because the one that costs $5 more to make but is way better retails for $200.
You also see whole markets (effectively) collude to make cheap upgrades expensive to buy. There are several very-cheap upgrades that make a refrigerator much nicer, but are only available on expensive refrigerators. Think, things like making the drawers open and close much more smoothly. There is no low-end-except-for-$30-in-upgrades option. The car market does some similar things.
This is called menu pricing and is a way to segment your market [0]. It is used to separate high and low demand consumers. If you are on the low end of demand it will tend to extract most of what you are willing to pay.
I "vote with my wallet" as a form feel-goodism. It has almost no impact, but it helps me feel satisfied with myself. This is similar to donating a small amount to a charity that works on issues I personally feel connected to, even if they're relatively low-impact. While the majority of my donations go to charities that I understand (to the best of my ability) to have the greatest impact on human flourishing.
In the same vein, I can't stop at voting with my wallet; as you say, I'm choosing between the options given to me and their artificial costs. If I care about a particular outcome, I have to give extra effort beyond my purchasing decisions. There's no amount of inconvenient train rides I can take in my city that will convince it build new train lines; I have to go around the city and tell people that trains and density are more effective for the outcomes we want.
While there are some dictatorships out there, in the democratic world the people voting with their wallets and the people in charge of government are the exact same people. Which means that any governmental change comes by what is ultimately the same mechanism.
> we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered.
Only in the short-term, though. The wallet can also communicate what one wants in the future, and that is only limited by what is fundamentally possible. Of course, often people don't actually want anything better, even if they say they do. Talk is cheap. The neat thing about the wallet is that it proves what people actually want.
There are lots of things that the government will do when individual market participants don't have market incentives. In the US, the Interstate Highway System and rural electrification are two examples. Even the Transcontinental Railroad required the government to incentivize its development through land grants and so on. Governments and markets operate by different mechanisms.
From a voter's perspective, voting with a wallet seems not too dissimilar from voting in elections. Both are necessary, but insufficient to "advance systemic changes."
Voting in an election isn't generally necessary for most people. It is rare to see a candidate show up who is incapable of doing the job.
What is necessary is to stay in regular communication with whoever you hired. If they never hear from you, they can't represent you, which questions why bother to hire an employee to represent you in the first place if you are not going to use their services?
Reading this, one concept just keeps ringing in my ears: learned helplessness[1]. As it happens you really do have a fair bit of control over your life. How you choose to live it, what you buy and what you don't, and whether you submit to the persuasion trickery that calls itself news and entertainment—that's all up to you. Your choices really do matter. I can't promise you that they'll drive the kind of macro change you might like to see, but I can assure you beyond all doubt that waiting for companies, governments, and established propagandists to do it for you certainly won't.
The argument is not so much that waiting will work, as that things more drastic than voting etc. will.
Personally I gave up trying to improve politics where I lived, and instead moved to a country with better polices. This feels kind of like cheating, or shirking my responsibilities, but it was vastly more effective at getting me the life I want.
* No amount of personal spending decisions can advance systemic changes like better public transport or more careful military funding. These require governmental action.
* With our wallet, we can only choose between those alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only choose between bad options.
* Voting with our wallet requires immunity against professional PR campaigns, time (for researching on what to buy), money (to afford options which are better according to personal views but more expensive), friends who appreciate instead of belittle our purchasing decisions, ...
In the end, I believe the story "vote with your wallet" internalizes a form of victim blaming: The consumers are blamed for their irresponsible purchasing decisions, but the responsibility really is with the companies and governments.
Of course, not spending consciously is also not a solution. But we obtain greater leverage by using our influence on society. Only few of us are editor-in-chiefs of important newspapers or important politicians, but most of us can engage in visually powerful protests which are also able to generate political wind.