John Latta
Executive Editor
[email protected]
I bought a T-shirt some years back that said “He who dies with the most toys wins.” It was a caustic little comment on rampant consumerism, a pointed jab at the hordes of Americans who assess their own lives on the basis of how much good stuff they buy. But it seems it’s not accurate.
It also seems few people are influenced by this inaccuracy. Consumerism is booming worldwide, and private consumption expenditures – the amount spent on goods and services by households – have increased fourfold since 1960 according to a new report by Worldwatch. The report says around 1.7 billion people worldwide – more than a quarter of humanity – have “entered the consumer class, adopting the diets, transportation systems and lifestyles” that were limited to the rich nations during most of last century.
In America these days, says Washington D.C.-based Worldwatch, there are more private vehicles on the road than people licensed to drive them. The average size of fridges in U.S.
households increased by 10 percent between 1972 and 2001, and the number per house rose, too. New houses built in America in 2000 were 38 percent bigger than new houses built in 1975, despite the fact that fewer people live in an American house today.
And yet, says Worldwatch, today only about one third of Americans report being “very happy” with their lives. That’s the same number who said they were very happy back in 1957. And back in 1957 we were only half as wealthy as we are today.
Worldwatch concludes, in a re-phrasing of my old T-shirt, that, “Consumption among the world’s wealthy elites, and increasingly among the middle class, has in recent decades gone beyond satiating needs or fulfilling dreams to become an end in its own right.”
