Author: David T. Courtwright

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Date: 2019

Comments:*Professor Courtwright from North Florida has written several books on addiction and has become an expert. Here, he extends his reach from drugs such as opiates to a range of activities including internet porn, gaming such as Assassin’s Creed, shopping, and Big Macs, which he claims, reward the same human brain’s centres driving us to addiction. A sufficient number of businesses are involved in this process to justify calling it “the age of addiction”.

“Addictions”, he writes, “begin as journeys, usually unplanned, toward a harmful endpoint on a spectrum of consumption”. This has led to what he labels, “limbic capitalism” with reference to the limbic system of the brain, held to support emotion, behaviour, motivation, and memory. Of course, addiction may be social as well as biological.  Thus, “limbic capitalism”, for Courtwright, refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments and criminal organisations, encourage excessive consumption and addiction.*

Listen to audio interview of the author on this book:

Audio interview of the author

And see article from Boston Globe on The Age of Addiction and compulsive shopping:

boston globe article: Why we shop and shop and shop