There is a great movie with Alec Guinness called The Man in the White Suit. He creates a fabric that can't be torn, can't get dirty, cannot degrade. Everybody ends up hating him lol!
As someone who lives a very comfortable life in the imperial core I was thinking about this - what would my life look if forced to reduce consumption/increase production by 50%?
I think you could drastically reduce consumption by merely re-ordering american life in certain ways - i.e replacing car dependent city planning with public transit centered alternatives (this alone removes the necessity of car ownership for most people, or reduces the 2-3 cars/family thing you see in the suburbs). fostering/creating "community", so that our "free time" isn't colonized by increasing commercialization where we must consume in every waking moment (think watching netflix, scrolling tiktok, online shopping, etc, Very much Critique of everyday life a la Lefebre). Reordering production such that "unproductive" sectors like marketing or finance (my own career lol) are filtered into productive ones, etc.
I think a combination of these things could easily result in a reduction of 25-30%. What's crazy about these statistics is that equality would require an additional reduction of 20-25%. I imagine accomplishing the first part would put US consumption at the level of a less-consuming EU state, but even those states consume at rates higher than the global south. It's wild to think about
When seeing things like this I always wonder how much of western overconsumption actually takes the form of goods and services consumed by average people. A lot of it must also be connected to corporate or government consumption that does not improve the lives of normal people, like military expenditure or marketing, most of which could be done away with without causing a fall in experienced standard of living.
And going further, how is this overconsumption distributed internally in the imperial core? I suspect that a tiny demographic is responsible for most of it.
Bottom line, for most westerners, a 50% reduction in consumption, if planned rationally, would probably mean a significantly smaller reduction in their personal consumption. And then there's all the added social and environmental benefits of reining in inequality, consumerism and car culture.
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Getting rid of planned/forced obsolescence would fix a large bulk of overconsumption without negatively impacting QoL.
There is a great movie with Alec Guinness called The Man in the White Suit. He creates a fabric that can't be torn, can't get dirty, cannot degrade. Everybody ends up hating him lol!
The existence of a USSA would be a totally warping thing. The fall of the imperial core would probably have a tidal wave effect.
As someone who lives a very comfortable life in the imperial core I was thinking about this - what would my life look if forced to reduce consumption/increase production by 50%?
I think you could drastically reduce consumption by merely re-ordering american life in certain ways - i.e replacing car dependent city planning with public transit centered alternatives (this alone removes the necessity of car ownership for most people, or reduces the 2-3 cars/family thing you see in the suburbs). fostering/creating "community", so that our "free time" isn't colonized by increasing commercialization where we must consume in every waking moment (think watching netflix, scrolling tiktok, online shopping, etc, Very much Critique of everyday life a la Lefebre). Reordering production such that "unproductive" sectors like marketing or finance (my own career lol) are filtered into productive ones, etc.
I think a combination of these things could easily result in a reduction of 25-30%. What's crazy about these statistics is that equality would require an additional reduction of 20-25%. I imagine accomplishing the first part would put US consumption at the level of a less-consuming EU state, but even those states consume at rates higher than the global south. It's wild to think about
When seeing things like this I always wonder how much of western overconsumption actually takes the form of goods and services consumed by average people. A lot of it must also be connected to corporate or government consumption that does not improve the lives of normal people, like military expenditure or marketing, most of which could be done away with without causing a fall in experienced standard of living.
And going further, how is this overconsumption distributed internally in the imperial core? I suspect that a tiny demographic is responsible for most of it.
Bottom line, for most westerners, a 50% reduction in consumption, if planned rationally, would probably mean a significantly smaller reduction in their personal consumption. And then there's all the added social and environmental benefits of reining in inequality, consumerism and car culture.