MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS

Consumption vs. well-being

The United States, with 5% of the world’s population, consumes
40% of the world’s resources. You don’t have to be a genius to
figure out what that’s leading to.

For one thing, a lot of that consumption is artificially induced—it
doesn’t have to do with people’s real wants and needs. People would
probably be better off and happier if they didn’t have a lot of those
things.
If you measure economic health by profits, then such
consumption is healthy. If you measure the consumption by what it
means to people, it’s very unhealthy, particularly in the long term.
A huge amount of business propaganda—that is, the output of the
public relations and advertising industry—is simply an effort to
create wants. This has been well understood for a long time; in fact,
it goes back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
For another thing, those who have more money tend to consume
more, for obvious reasons. So consumption is skewed towards
luxuries for the wealthy rather than towards necessities for the
poor. That’s true within the US and on a global scale as well. The
richer countries are the higher consumers by a large measure, and
within the richer countries, the wealthy are higher consumers by a
large measure.

Cooperative enterprises

There’s a social experiment in Mondragón in the Basque region of
Spain. Can you describe it?

Mondragón is basically a very large worker-owned cooperative