my public school system is falling into bankruptcy and disrepair so I enroll my child in an expensive private school. more consumption. good!
Second, if the public school system is falling into disrepair, it probably means not enough money is collected to run it. And some of that money goes into the private school system instead. What's the basic difference - unless you are willing to argue that the public schools are inherently more efficient, and this reallocation is a net loss to the society. The difference is at most of second order even in this case.
my point is obvious: simple measures of "consumption" are simply insane, even in the absence of true energy and environmental costs. not all consumption is the same.
There are many other examples of things that according to some value judgement are pure waste - watching Hollywood movies, eating fast food, donating your time or money to charity, or driving a sports car are examples for people I know. Still, other people do value them. Some people buy guns for pure fun and because gun possession satisfies them - probably, in a way you or I would enjoy a good book or a nice picture on the wall.
if categories B and C here far outweigh category A, then rising levels of consumption are bad news. they mean that products are shoddy and misfortune is commonplace. which is... actually... kinda where a lot of the industrial workforce is wrt expenditures at present.
Actually, consumption could be a better measure than GNI, because inequality in consumptions tends to be significantly less than in income, thus aggregation is less of an issue.
May indeed be horror -- to the child... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
actually my point was not (for once) about making moral assessments of the ways people spend money, just drawing an (imho essential and overlooked) distinction between spending money in a discretionary way, for pleasure or benefit, and "having to" spend money to compensate for injuries, misfortunes, crimes, degradation of the quality of life, etc. all yr examples above fall into Cat A for the purposes of my argument here; though we could wrangle about their true-cost to the society at large and hence their desirability as consumption behaviours, they are gratifying to the individual making the expenditure, and hence not Cat B or Cat C (red-queen expenses and damage-control expenses).
the sports car is a Cat A expenditure -- fun, pleasing, gratifying; the hospital bill after the car crash is a Cat C. in many cases (certainly seems to generalise to society as a whole), an excess of Cat A leads to a rising tide of Cat B and Cat C. actually this seems axiomatic if we're on a finite planet, which we are. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
