How We Can Live with Less and Still Feel Rich

 

On a sunny weekday morning late last spring at the Mall at 163 St. in North Miami Beach, Fla., in the parking lot outside The Home Depot, Hector Portillo is loading an LG Electronics window air conditioner into his Ford F-150 pickup. Portillo, a 34-year-old who emigrated from Cuba 12 years ago, says the $279 unit (on sale) will replace a smaller one in his family's two-bedroom apartment.

The rest of the tax rebate check he just received -- a tiny part of the $152 billion economic stimulus Congress approved this year -- will soften the blow of high gasoline prices and other day-to-day expenses, including new clothes for his two children and, perhaps, a necklace for his wife. "We're supposed to spend it, right?" he says, smiling.

Inside the mall at the discount clothing retailer Steve & Barry's, Janice Jenkins is shopping for a new outfit. She used part of her $600 tax rebate to pay down credit card debt, but now she's holding two pairs of backless shoes and a blouse; three flower-print sundresses designed by Sarah Jessica Parker are draped over her shoulder. Each item -- like nearly everything in the store -- is just $8.98. "I needed a new dress," says Jenkins, a 26-year-old nursing assistant. "For that price, why not three?"

A good deal, indeed, and perhaps a short-term boost to the economy. But as designer sundresses fill our closets, the world drifts deeper into what environmental economists are calling "ecological deficit." Simply put, too much of the Earth's biosphere is engaged in production and not enough is set aside to regenerate and to accommodate the resultant waste.

By any measure, America consumes a disproportionately high share of global resources. While accounting for just 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. burns nearly 25 percent of the world's energy and is the No. 1 user of virtually all traded commodities like corn, copper and rubber. Americans consume, on average, three times more meat than the rest of the world. The U.S. uses about one-third of the world's paper. In the end, the U.S. produces 30 percent of the world's waste (including 25 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions) and throws out a staggering 96 billion pounds of edible food each year. By one estimate, if all 6.7 billion people on Earth raised their living standards so they consumed like Americans, the present population would feel like 72 billion.

And the consumption imbalance may increase: While populations of other industrialized nations are leveling or declining, the U.S. is growing -- about 10 percent over the last decade compared with 1 percent in Europe.

To be sure, there's no general consensus that America's appetite for world resources is cause for alarm. Spending keeps our economy robust, generating jobs and new business investments. Indeed, consumer spending -- that second iPod (for the office), new Reeboks for the kids, a night out with the boys -- accounts for roughly two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S. After 9/11, President Bush famously urged Americans to keep on shopping.

"Nobody really wants to talk about consumption, itself, as the issue," says Michael Maniates, co-editor of Confronting Consumption, a scholarly dissection of the origin and politics of America's consumer society. "We talk about ways to save, ways to conserve, ways to be more efficient, but when we do, we don't get at the heart of the problem: Our demand is simply too high." Only when the question is placed directly on the table, he says, will government consider measures to reduce consumption. And only then, he says, will Americans confront the fundamental assumptions of economic policy that underlie their consumer behavior.

Can low consumption and high prosperity coexist? In theory, yes, Maniates says, but in practice, it won't happen until U.S. policymakers begin pondering how it might, in the real world. "The world is looking at how forcefully and effectively we respond to these challenges," he says. "If not us, then who? If not now, then when?"