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Peak Stuff? Really?


I just saw a BBC News interview where the anchor asked an economist of Pantheon Macroeconomics whether recent sales data indicated that we had reached 'peak stuff' yet. [1][2]

A sort of anchor piece at the Guardian website offers a brief overview as of late 2011 of this idea of peak stuff with some data on what's going on. [3] More recently Ikea's sustainability officer said similar things. [4] If one wants the wiki experience while reading about this tripe one can try the P2P Foundation. [5]

One thing that caught in my craw about the interview - and about discussion of the latest Guardian story online - was that the question included the economic fallacy of planned obsolescence. [6]

But going back to the Guardian overview from 2011, one sees that it's all about just raw quantities of stuff, not economic growth. Tonnage of household waste, food and fertiliser, cement, paper, water, and energy usage are the main contenders. The other example was total car purchases. The author is quite interesting on the why of dwindling auto sales;
I suspect dwindling vehicle sales are being driven by lots of factors working in parallel. These might include our increasingly urbanised population, better car design meaning that each vehicle stays on the road for longer, the birth of car clubs, and the fact that we only have a certain amount of road and parking space.
Quite interesting that in there the author basically admits that the longevity of automobiles has only increased, which brings up a massive sore point of mine re the interview. That is that, carrying on from a few paragraphs up, planned obsolescence is not a quantity in real life product design and never has been. [7]

The fact that the folks writing at a major newspaper and in the alt-econ blogosphere don't actually know what economic growth is doesn't surprise me but it's always disheartening to encounter their ignorance time after time.

Economic growth and increasing quantities of stuff used are not the same thing. Economic growth comes from increases in the value-added from exchange over time. That's it. Love ya, learn econ.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[1]
http://makewealthhistory.org/2011/11/14/has-britain-experienced-peak-stuff/

[2]
http://makewealthhistory.org/2016/01/20/did-ikea-just-admit-to-peak-stuff/

[3]
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/nov/01/peak-stuff-consumption-data

[4]
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/weve-hit-peak-home-furnishings-says-ikea-boss-consumerism?CMP=fb_gu

[5]
http://p2pfoundation.net/Peak_Stuff

[6]
http://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/6773/peak-stuff-big-business-starting

[7]
http://ecomonyblogtime.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/built-in-obsolescence.html

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