“Stuffing ourselves on Black Friday”

The article “Stuffing ourselves on Black Friday” by Annie Leonard and Rick Ridgeway raises a question: “On the biggest shopping day of the year, think for a moment about the demands our consumption makes on the planet’s resources and ask yourself: Does our family need more stuff?”

In the class we learned that during the first decades after the Depression, most economists looked to developments on the real side of the economy for explanations, rather than to monetary factors. Some argued, for example, that overinvestment and overbuilding had taken place during the 1920s, leading to a crash when the returns on those investments proved to be less than expected. Another once-popular theory was that a chronic problem of “under-consumption” – the inability of households to purchase enough goods and services to utilize the economy’s productive capacity – had precipited the slump. Each year our planet can produce a certain amount of resources and absorb a certain amount of use – nature’s budget for the year. Comparing the past to the present, one group of scientists that keeps an eye on this is the Global Footprint Network, and by its calculations, in 2011 we exhausted the annual budget on September 27, less than 10 months into the year. That means we are currently 135% above the capacity of our planet to replace essential “services” like clean water, clean air, arable land, healthy fisheries and stable climate. Our overconsumption is eating into the very ecological systems that all the world’s economies depend on. If that is troublesome, consider that the Global Footprint projects that in 2050 we will be 500% above capacity unless we change how we make, use and throw away stuff.

Sources:

1) “Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke: Money, Gold, and the Great Depression.”

2) “Stuffing ourselves on Black Friday” (latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-leonardridgeway-blackfriday-20111125,0,2159130.story)