Consumption Patterns Quotes

People don't eat in the long run. They eat every day.

Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.

There are too many people, that's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff.

The government has, in all countries, a vast influence, in determining the character of the national consumption; not only because it absolutely directs the consumption of the state itself, but because a great proportion of the consumption of individuals is gained by its will and example.

Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today

The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich. There isn't enough for both, and the latter get far more than they need...But could anything seriously be done about it?

We used to be hunter-gatherers, now we're shopper-borrowers.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

I think Veblen had an interest in logic.

We need to make growth greener, to make our economic and environmental policies more compatible and even mutually-reinforcing. This is not just a matter of new technologies or new sources of renewable, safe energy. It is about how we all behave every day of our lives, what we eat, what we drink, what we recycle, re-use, repair, how we produce and how we consume

There are more humans than all of the rabbits on earth. There are more of us than all the wildebeests, than all the rats, than all the mice. We are the most numerous mammal on the planet. But because we're not like rabbits or rats or mice, we have technology, we have a consumptive appetite, we have a global economy.

The people of this country have been erroneously encouraged to believe that they could keep on increasing the output of farm and factory indefinitely and that some magician would find ways and means for that increased output to be consumed with reasonable profit to the producer.

One of the strongest arguments against a protective tariff is the impossibility of estimating what the indirect effects of it may be. No one--not even those in whose interest it in passed--can predict the result. Modern commercial relations are so intricate and multifarious, there are so many hidden and yet important connections between different occupations, that the wisest protectionist cannot foresee how a tax laid upon one import which he wishes to exclude from the domestic market may affect the production or consumption of some other which he has not the least desire to touch.

Lets talk about the holidays, more specifically, consumption during the holidays. If it's true that 'We are what we eat,' most of us would be unrecognizable during the period that ranges from the night before Thanksgiving through that day in early January when everyone decides to return to the gym.

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.

GDP has been a con perpetrated upon the poor of the world: a measure of economic activity and not of actual wealth. What it masks is the way in which we transform their natural capital into our consumption through international rules that regard the ecosystem services upon which they rely as mere externalities.

Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.

A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns.

Purchasing power parities are not a reasonable method for comparing households across countries or currencies. The reason for this is simply that PPPs are sensitive to the prices of all the commodities, goods and services, that households are consuming worldwide, with each commodity weighted in the calculations according to its share in international household consumption expenditure.

The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.

I've got the drinkers and the smokers and the eaters on my side.