Saturday, September 12, 2009

Economics II

Several weeks back I posed a thought problem about the relationship between debt and the economy (trust me, it wasn’t terribly profound!).

This morning my twitter friend @PaulVanderKlay tweeted a link to a Salon.com article about the documentary film “No Impact Man.”

Here’s the paragraph that caught my attention:

If any significant number of Americans downscale their consumption to any significant degree (setting aside the Beavan model) we would see a widespread economic collapse that would make the current downturn look like a glamorous European vacation. If some of those people actually decided, as the Conlin-Beavan household genuinely seems to do, that they were happier with a low-stress, low-consumption existence — that working all the time and buying more junk did not correlate with happiness — well, then we’d be forced to deal with a massive restructuring of our social and economic lives. But isn’t that day of reckoning coming, one way or another?

Hmm, a “massive restructuring of our social and economic lives.”   What would that look like?

By the way, “No Impact Man” is scheduled to open in Houston on October 23rd.

[Via http://beholdthelowlytomato.wordpress.com]

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