Consumption Theory - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 55

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Consumptio nTheory
Although the primary meaning of the term consumption is to eat or drink,
the secondary connotation is to “use,” which is how the term is employed
in economics. With this in mind, Chapter 4 is composed of four sections:
(1) consumption for survival, (2) consumption in practice, (3) affluence as an
unmitigated public good, and (4) toward an economics of enough.
Consumption for Survival
Even the word consumption is a misnomer. As the laws of thermodynamics
indicate, nothing is finally consumed—only transformed. This may seem
like a point of picky semantics—an example of the unimportant debates over
terms in which ivory tower intellectuals love to engage. But it is not. In fact, it
is indicative of what is perhaps the major disastrous error that we have made
in structuring society along the lines indicated by the discipline of econom-
ics. Let us explain.
The purpose of economic activity is to meet the material needs of human
beings. Originally, the economic problem was mere survival, and the term
consumption meant to meet the necessities of life. In the development of eco-
nomic methodology, however, it has become much more in that humans
have been reduced to consumers. The act of relegating a human soul, with
all his or her emotions, values, aspirations, and creativity to a mere processor
of material goods is a travesty in itself—but that is another story.
For our purposes here, we focus on a person's demand-side role in the
economic sphere and in dissecting and understanding the workings of the
economy, which is as the final consumer of goods and services. And how, one
might be tempted to ask, is this supposedly a disastrous error? To facilitate
addressing this question, we reconstruct one of the most common images
employed in the basic exposition of the economic system, the Throughput
Economy . This model depicts a process wherein one begins with natu-
ral resources and moves through to the supposed final consumption of a
good—depending on which meaning of the term is appropriate.
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