shop smarterAlong with today being the 34th anniversary of the premiere of Doctor Who, as I mentioned, today is also Buy Nothing Day. Buy Nothing Day is the brainchild of a group called Adbusters. I've been following Adbusters for ages. Lately, though, they've been pissing me off a bit. Nothing to do with September 11, . It's the ignorant half-truths they use to perpetuate themselves. The bane of the whole anti-globalization movement, really. (Incidentally, GDP is a measure of all economic activity in a country. Military mobilizations boost GDP because governments dump resources into the military. Duh. This is economic growth, but it's unstable. This is bad. Repeat after me: stable growth good; unstable growth bad. Military spending increases launched to fight the war in Vietnam sent the US economy spiralling into 25 years of inflation, which is a very bad thing, and which was only really brought under control with the recession at the start of the 90s). I'm down with the whole environmental consumer thing, and I don't like the spectacular amounts of waste in our society. But these guys are going about it the wrong way. It's the typical "Let's have a revolution and then figure out what it's for" mentality that I'd hoped we'd done away with 20 years ago. They propose to bring down the Western consumer society, but propose no alternatives. And when they do propose alternatives (like "buy nothing") they're a little short on convincing rationale as to how it would actually work long-term. There are less wasteful and less harmful ways to get by just as well in our consumer society. The problem is, right now at least, they're more generally expensive. That means, unless people can be convinced that it's worth it, they're going to buy the wasteful thing instead. "Buy Nothing" targets the very people who might believe that it is worth it. But they're busy buying nothing, so the alternatives go unsupported and the harmful, wasteful products continue to rule the marketplace. They should be telling people to buy better. To create commercial incentives to companies to produce goods which cause less damage. They should also be working to push governments to strengthen environmental laws—to force the cost of goods to better reflect the real cost to society (which, despite what people might say, is the right role for governments to play in a free-market economy). They'd rather burn cars and doodle on posters, I guess. Okay, yes, I should have saved my pennies, learned to drive standard and bought an Insight. I went half-way, which isn't bad. It's too bad more people don't do even that... comments:This post is archived. Comments are disabled. Feel free to send me email if you have something to say. | |
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