I mean consume less “Made-in-China” and consume less over-all.
I’m asking if we could, if we should, and what the consequences would be.
We buy stuff from China because it’s got the best price. If we buy stuff from places with higher prices (or don’t buy the stuff in the first place) we’ll buy less stuff, or we’ll buy more stuff on credit. I don’t think you want us to do the latter, so if we do the former, we’ll have a lower standard of living.
Should we have a lower standard of living? That’s a value judgement. Personally, I live a pretty simple life, but I don’t think I should make everyone else do the same.
No, I don’t want a lower standard of living.
So, for my questions in post #98
Are you saying that both would result in lower standards of living for most people in the US?
What is not being explained to you is that we are already facing a lower standard of living.
Because of trade with China and other low wage nations we have seen ten years of job growth lagging behind working class population growth, wages not keeping up with inflation, and soaring consumer debt. In fact, every time someone tells you that the last 10 years marked any kind of growth for the United States be sure to remind them that it was fueled by skyrocketing consumer and national debt.
What you’re seeing all around you right now is a decline of America’s standard of living - a permanent decline to a lower level than what existed prior to 2000.
In short you are going to have a lower overall standard of living regardless. It’s inevitable if we stay the course.
About consuming less - I have some ideas to throw at you.
Technically speaking, since I use high quality grocery bags repeatedly at the grocery store, I am consuming less. Consuming less plastic bags, that is. That has a nano-effect on the grocery store’s operating cost: I by myself cannot make much of a difference doing this. But if all of America used reusable bags to bring home their groceries, over a decade this represents a dramatic reduction in consumption - no matter how you define consumption, it is reduced. If plastic bags aren’t made by machines instead of humans then there’s really no hope for any argument in favor of automation… basically what I’m saying is completely eliminating the “plastic bag producing” industry shouldn’t affect jobs at all… which means that when you cut consumption in this way, you lower food prices a smidge, you don’t harm jobs and you also benefit the environment (in particular, the oceans which are becoming clogged with plastic bags). In short you increase standards of living… a little bit.
Now if we bought electric cars that cost more but would last 20 years (hypothetically) without needing to be replaced, that’s a different issue. This is where things get dicey. We would consume less, for sure - we’d use less natural resources for one, and we would CERTAINLY generate far less pollution, and as car battery production matures the cost of these electric cars would go down. But here’s where the problems start… fewer cars would be sold, which would mean a hit on auto sales jobs and manufacturing jobs. (Many electric cars may soon be made in America, if Tesla Motors finally gets off their butts and starts walking the walk.) This has positive and negative effects on standards of living.
So basically cutting back on consumption can be highly beneficial or have highly negative effects on America’s standard of living… depending on what kind of consumption reduction you’re talking about.
Those are pretty good points actually. I think I was coming at it from an all or nothing approach, which really makes no sense. I’m being overly simplistic and, with a few exceptions, I usually try to avoid that.
Overly simplistic or not, your point is worth looking into.
We need to identify the dark sides of consumerism in order to start working on a way to eliminate it. Then we need to look at possible solutions.
For instance Americans have this “keep up with the Joneses” mentality. We have to look like we have a high standard of living to impress others - even if this means going deep into debt to do so. This is why America saves so little. We fall prey to bullshit like Black Friday like lemmings fall prey to a cliff, and when we don’t win one of those 3 cheap iPods they were selling that day we wind up buying something else that is a total ripoff. I’ve seen people take out 125% equity loans on their houses to buy Corvettes and dump their trusty old washers and dryers in favor of newfangled shiny shit. (Which, unlike their old ones of 10 years, broke down in just 3 years.) How many of us have the discipline to make a list before we go to the grocery store… much less stick to it?
The saddest part of that side of consumerism is that it’s making the corporations rich… while they’re laying off workers and sending the jobs to China. Even the fast food joints are trying to find ways to offshore order-taking! How long will it be before they figure it out? But if we retreat from this kind of consumerism the cashiers lose their jobs. Yet if we don’t retreat, we go bankrupt and the cashiers still lose their jobs. But the CEOs don’t… at least not before they get their golden parachute retirement package. Figure that. What this means to our standard of living is we’re damned one way or the other: we’re spending ourselves into poverty or we’re saving our way into poverty, because if we save we’ll lose our jobs and if we spend the money isn’t going back into this country - it’s going into the black hole of corporate and investor bank accounts* or overseas. Getting rid of this dark aspect of consumerism is going to be a real bitch no matter what you do.
What’s worse is the fact that it’s not the most dangerous aspect of consumerism.
The more dangerous aspect is the pollution that rampant consumerism generates. We as Americans are wasteful**… very wasteful. We generate tons of garbage per person per year… most of it goes right into landfills. A LOT of it goes into the Pacific Ocean to become part of the gigantic Texas-sized plastic continent developing out there right now (or is it bigger than that already?). This is threatening the integrity of the ocean and a lot of animal species, including animals we eat. This will come back to us in the form of higher food prices, toxic water and, if we let this go on for decades into the future, food shortages. Again, this means a major threat to our standard of living.
Part of the solution of this is recycling and a focus on goods that we can re-use. For instance high-endurance grocery bags to replace plastic bags, cars that last longer, a more efficient system of recycling ALL plastic goods and better incentives for people to do so, and so on. All of this would amount to lower prices for you and me; which would mean a better standard of living. If we can find a way to turn this system into a net GENERATOR of jobs, then we have a double-plus effect on our standard of living.
Another part of the wasteful thing is we consume energy like crazy. Wastefully, no less. Our thirst for fossil fuels - particularly coal - is why you have so many mercury warnings on fish in grocery stores. And we can’t get away from coal because the right wingers keep bamboozling people into believing solar energy will make men turn gay and make women go shag tree gods to produce pro-communist babies (or whatever new innovations in frantic wild eyed right wing BS propaganda is in vogue today). So we’re consuming fossil fuels which aren’t very renewable and we’re polluting our skies and water and food. All of this consumption exacts extremely high costs upon America - costs that are visible, measurable, and which amount to a dire long-term threat to not only our standard of living but human survival itself.
Building a network of solar plants and geothermal systems around America to replace coal plants has obvious benefits for jobs and will inevitably reduce energy prices in the medium-term. A double plus for our standard of living, and increases in efficiency will enable us to consume MORE energy without ruining our environment. This itself will lend to even greater leaps in our standard of living.
As for looking for solutions… if we want to generate more jobs we probably need to look more into consuming goods produced locally. This problem will solve itself very quickly if oil prices skyrocket. The more innovative and adaptive grocery store chains will purchase from farmers closer to their local markets, cutting down on transportation costs. This has additional external benefits… like preventing more small farms from closing in favor of large corporate mega-farms. This itself has a positive effect on national food security - if one big farm has to shell out big bucks to transport food you’re gonna have issues, big time. But if many small farms are moving food just a few miles to local stores, you won’t pay as much for food. This shows how moving consumption to a more local level can potentially represent a positive effect on our standard of living while generating jobs (at least for farming, if you wish to do such a thing, which we recently found a lot of people don’t***).
Just a few things to ponder. No, really, just a few - I actually had a much larger list of valid consumerism issues that arose from reading your posts but who’s gonna sit through reading all of that? 
- corporate profits are at record levels now. Plus they are amassing record cash reserves. But yet they’re not hiring. In the last 10 years corporate profits have been off the scale and they have either been stuffing their cash into proverbial mattresses (hence the meteroic rise in the number of billionaires and the concentration of wealth to the top 1%) or investing overseas.
** although not as much as the fine folks in Linfeng, China or those who are dumping garbage in the Indian Ocean
*** because farming pays crap wages, sometimes below minimum wage; and the work is unnecessarily unsafe because farms aren’t always even required to protect workers from heat stroke. Raise the wages and enact BASIC workplace safety measures on the farm and see how many more Americans come there to work. Tell ya what; I insure contractors; I can tell you of a LEGION of workplace hazards in construction that currently lead to nasty workers’ comp claims… yet tons of men work in construction. Farm work ain’t all that much worse than that, yet no one wants to touch it… because it’s both horribly unsafe AND pays dog shit for wages. Double whammy.
Wow, I can tell that this topic has been on your mind for quiet a long time.
I always wonder why cars-the second most expensive thing (after a house) that most people buy, are not made to be kept for 20+ years.
The depreciation on a modern car is staggering-you are looking at a 16-18% residual value after 5 years. For luxury cars, even worse.
Preston Tucker (developer of the ill-fater “Tucker” car) conceived of a car that would be capable of running forever-the plan was to make the engine/transmission easily replaceable-you would drop in a new engine and be good for another 200,000 miles.
But we throw away cars after 10-12 years-what a waste of raw materials.
But (as we have seen) any attempt to reduce consumption of cars would result in an economic depression-the autombile industrie employs millions of people.
Leaving aside your assertion that the Tucker would be good ‘forever’:
IIRC, the car is one of, if not the, most recycled machine in history. We don’t ‘throw away cars’…in general we resell them on the used car market until the car is unusable, then the cars are parted out, with the usable parts going to the used parts market and the bulk of the car crushed and recycled as scrap, going back into making new cars.
-XT
They could re-employ manufacturing workers literally in a lateral fashion: building public transit systems and infrastructure. To build the next generation of energy-efficient transportation this is almost an imperative… but we’re not seeing that happen because the oil industry (or, more specifically, some Middle Eastern shieks who are partial owners of Fox Entertainment*) won’t allow it.
- I’ll never refer to them as Fox News if I can help it.
How. specifically, do the oil sheiks not “allow” us to develop alternative energy sources? Let’s say I’ve got some great new idea. How are they going to prevent me from pursuing it?
Also, why are you so keen on building a better transportation system? According your hypothesis, no one is going to have a job anymore, so what do they need a transportation system for? So they can visit their relatives and play canasta?
Good luck getting any funding.
I guess you forgot what the industry did to the electric car for so many years, right?
I’ve got an electric SUV in my driveway that’s not made anymore because of this.
Worse yet, Saudi billionaire Al-waleed bin Talal bragged about owning a substantial portion of Fox. Fox News has quashed stories critical of the oil industry because it would damage his profits.
So, like I said, good luck building an electric car factory.
You’re not reading what I said, are you? Either that or you’re intentionally twisting my words and making up stuff I never said.
I said, if we stay the course, we’re going to have very high (European-level) unemployment on a permanent basis Remember, we used to laugh at Europe for their persistent unemployment.