On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > me: >> the problem is that you're missing the point of Doug's missive ... most of >> the people who yell and scream about > "over-consumption" (1) are preaching >> to working-class people, telling them they don't deserve the kind of >> standard of living that they (the elite) enjoy;< > > raghu wrote: >> Yes absolutely they don't. No one is entitled to this unsustainable >> consumption-based lifestyle. What's wrong with saying so? > > Don't you think that the US working class deserves a share of the > bounty that they produced? During recent decades, their share of it > has been shrinking steadily. > > You seem to be forgetting that not only is US consumption one of the > highest in the world (in per capita terms) but so is its productivity.
First of all, I don't buy these productivity and other economic statistics. There are far too many externalities they don't account for. Sure, of course the US working class deserves a decent standard of living just like anyone else. But it is no use pretending that a lifestyle based on over-consumption is (a) worth fighting to preserve or (b) sustainable. To take just one example, the US "working class" cannot continue to eat the kind of food it is presently eating. Why do we have to ignore this while talking about the inflation in health-care costs? Why can't we talk about both and how the kind of food Americans are getting is a product of the same process that is making health-care unaffordable to them? Sure that does involve saying some things that the average American probably doesn't want to hear e.g. no you can't get so much red-meat at such cheap prices, because that is the product of a barbaric and destructive factory-farm system. But so what? -raghu. -- "I bought some batteries, but they weren't included." - Steven Wright _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
