The consumer society terrifies me, too, but I believe you are wrong where you write:
At 16:04 21/10/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Some wealthy people, with the ambition and means to rule, cleverly created the consumer economy to provide jobs after world war two, thus delaying the need to reassess the role of human labor in an automated economy.
Not so, I think. We have been in a consumer society ever since early man started long-distance trading in pigments and ochres for personal adornment 75,000+ years ago -- an imaginative use of possessions in order to exhibit status ranking. The latter is behaviour that is deeply predisposed in the genes of all primate species. This imaginative ability to impute status in almost everything we buy (except food, clothing and basic shelter) is a product of our frontal lobes -- something that other primates have little of. "Some wealthy people" (as you put it) take advantage of this but they are not the cause; it's ever-present in all of us.
The only thing that will check the consumer society is sheer exhaustion of time and/or effort and/or space, and I believe that some societies are already close to this despite the efforts of governments, business and opinion-moulders to promote consumer spending (e.g. in Japan, Germany). Promotion has been much more successful in America and the UK, even to the extent of most consumers being deeply in debt and at the mercy of the slightest rise in interest rates. Here it is likely that their economies will not stagnate but collapse catastrophically. Anytime soon, I suggest.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
