Consumercide

Consumption vs. well-being

The United States, with 5% of the world's population, consumes 40% of the world's resources. You don't have to be a genius to figure out what that's leading to.

For one thing, a lot of that consumption is artificially induced -- it doesn't have to do with people's real wants and needs. People would probably be better off and happier if they didn't have a lot of those things.

If you measure economic health by profits, then such consumption is healthy. If you measure the consumption by what it means to people, it's very unhealthy, particularly in the long term.

A huge amount of business propaganda -- that is, the output of the public relations and advertising industry -- is simply an effort to create wants. This has been well understood for a long time; in fact, it goes back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

For another thing, those who have more money tend to consume more, for obvious reasons. So consumption is skewed towards luxuries for the wealthy rather than towards necessities for the poor. That's true within the US and on a global scale as well. The richer countries are the higher consumers by a large measure, and within the richer countries, the wealthy are higher consumers by a large measure.

Noam Chomsky, From media control