I found Juliet Schors article on The New Politics of Consumption to be very noteworthy. I believe many of the reasons stated in this article can support the causes of the United States current financial situation. Its almost as if the article was predicting the future and foresaw that our society’s spending habits would increase. I consider people who have excessive spending habits with no money to back them up can fall under the category of the recession contributors. Something that I found to be true was the conventional view of the production and consumption having no “external” effects. Which states there are no consequences for the welfare of others that are unreflected in product prices. An example being pollution, which imposes cost on others that are not reflected in the price of the good that produces the pollution. Another point that Schor defended that I also agree with was “it is difficult to make an ethical argument that people in the worlds richest country need more when the global income gap is so wide, the disparity in world resource use is so enormous, and the possibility that we are already consuming beyond the Earth’s ecological carrying capacity so likely. (184) Americans need to realize the repressions of there consuming habits.
That's a good point Grace. Economists call these "externalities." In other words, damage to people's lives, the environment, etc are "external" to the production of a product, the selling of that product, and the consuming of that product. Of course, we know that's not the case. The recent BP disaster if nothing else tells us that we should think about potential disaster (and constant danger or damage) as internal to the cost. That means, for instance, that as with many if not most countries, energy and food should be far more expensive, and that (perhaps) profits for those essential elements of society should be restricted to keep the prices CONSUMERS pay down.
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