On Consumption
Jared Diamond, he of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame, had quite the interesting opinion piece in today’s Times:
Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.
Wow. When you put it like that…
Technorati Tags: Consumption, Jared Diamond
Tags: News
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 am
Well… except that the UK is vastly more densely settled than the US. You can get away with very little gasoline in a big city like Boston or NYC or London, but in the town where I grew up the closest grocery store to my house was 4 miles away along a sparsely populated winding road with no public transportation. It’s not a “wasteful use of gasoline” if you can’t get anywhere without a car — and most of the US west of the Mississippi fits that bill.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:39 am
Oh, absolutely agreed, Katie. If you have to use a car, by all means do. But be careful: I don’t think I (or Jared Diamond) would advocate using no fuel, or heating oil, or water.
How many times have you run up to the store just to get one thing? Or driven to the bank, returned home, then 20 minutes later gone out to the video rental store? I know I’ve acted out both of these in my life many times, and with a little planning, or simply making do without temporarily, I could have cut my suburban consumption down drastically.
In my opinion, the antithesis of overconsumption is planning: planning meals, trips, routes, budgets. When you organize yourself and your habits, the likelihood of overconsuming decreases. I’m not advocating a rote lifestyle, mind you, or one without fun or indulgence, just one with a little more thought.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
> How many times have you run up to the store just to get one thing? Or driven to the bank, returned home, then 20 minutes later gone out to the video rental store?
Sure — but since I live in a city I can walk to the store. I bet people in the UK do it, too, but like me, they just don’t have as far to go. Diamond’s making an absolute comparison (per-capita consumption in W.Europe is half that in America) without accounting for environmental factors.
Show me figures on consumption/quality-of-life in Western Europe with a comparable distribution of urban/rural America, and then I’ll be more likely to buy in. I’m all for planning, but tsking people in Maine because they use more oil in the winter than people in Florida, and tsking them again because the beaches are nicer in Florida too — that’s just ridiculous.