Reducing income (Heath & Potter)
January 9th, 2008 | Published in Finances, Consumerism, Quotes | 1 Comment
It is useless to reduce your own consumption unless you also reduce your income. Everything you earn gets saved or spent, and anything that you save just gets spent later, by you or someone else. Changing your spending pattern will put a dent in the amount consumed only if it allows you to reduce your income.
–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 153
January 17th, 2008 at 9:49 am (#)
Useless to what ends? Not the end of greater self-sufficiency. Not to the end of giving less support to the abuses of the corporate economy (fossil fuel depletion/pollution, Chinese labor situations, Walmart labor situations, destruction of farmland, etc., etc.) There’s a lot to be said for reducing (in dollar terms) consumption, even apart from income.
I guess I would agree with the authors, though, that there’s a lot to be said for “reducing income,” but not so much because of any corelation to consumption. Living conscientiously cannot help but lead us to compromise other things, ill-gotten gain chief among them. I think people really fail to see the impact of the work we do on the world. The world is cared for/destroyed almost entirely by people “on the clock.” So long as our income-generating activities are exempt from thorough scrutiny of conscience, we are going to continue destroying the world (including people/communities) as mercenaries of the bottom-line-driven beast.
Saving can certainly help us a lot in opening up better options (i.e. better stewardship.)