Think along with me here.
Picture in your minds the lives that your grandparents lived, however short or long it was. Think about their material comforts. How much did they travel? How far and how often? How much of a rich variety of foods did they eat on a daily basis?
If you are like me, even without additional prompts, you will be ready to conclude that your life is immensely more comfortable and richer compared to how the grandparents lived. In case you have records about your great-grandparents, then you know for certain that their lives were filled with daily hardships and diseases of various kinds that felled the young and old.
Now, people all over the world enjoy a standard of living that is far greater than a mere two generations ago. If our great-grandparents were to return to earth, they will find our lives to be unrecognizable. Dogs have their own beds and toys?
If we are that incredibly better off compared to generations past, isn’t it time we asked ourselves and each other a rather simple question: How much more material well being do we want? Is there a ceiling at all, or is our material want sky high with no limits?
More than 60 years ago, in 1958, the economist-thinker John Kenneth Galbraith raised the question that I have borrowed as the title for this post. Galbraith warned and worried that this appetite "is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question."
Galbraith was not arguing against consumption. But, he was farsighted to argue that we needed a change in our consumption patterns, "from those which have a high material requirement to those which have a much lower requirement. Education, health services, sanitary services, good parks and playgrounds, orchestras, effective local government, a clean countryside, all have rather small materials requirements."
What is common to education, heath services, sanitary services, parks, orchestras?
Labor. Humans doing the work.
Now, think about the contemporary world. Live orchestras are endangered species because people do not want to pay for labor, and would rather stream music that can be digitally reproduced at next-to-nothing costs. Teachers and healthcare workers are being paid far less than those who want us to consume materials and entertainment in various forms. Societies seem to operate as if parks and clean air and water do not matter at all: Have you checked the recent air quality updates about New Delhi?
In liberal democracies, our collective governance is focused on making sure that we consume more and more. Even NPR (National Public Radio) provides detailed updates on “Black Friday” sales.
Once the basic needs are met, the "want" that drives the consumer economy is all about creating a demand for goods and services that never existed before and convincing people to spend their money on them. Such consumption is also the reason that we have ended up with the greatest challenge that humanity faces--climate change.
Instead of measuring what we truly value, we have settled on valuing something that can be relatively easily measured--the Gross Domestic Product (GDP.) Nearly 70% of the GDP comes from consumption. In such a context, "what's good for the environment can be not so good for the economy and vice versa. How do you struggle to reconcile that? What is the answer?"
What can we do about the appetite when we are awash with so much abundance that it is like most of us live in a King Midas world.
It is true that the planet needs us to stop shopping. The economy needs us to keep shopping. But ultimately, it's the planet that has the priority here. We cannot continue to expand the amount of consumption that each individual person on the planet does in perpetuity. So the answers have to be found, I think, in what kind of changes can we make to the economic system?
Meanwhile, the world’s population having reached 8 billion people has a few worrying about “overpopulation” in less affluent countries with brown people, when in reality overconsumption in affluent countries is the most pressing problem:
Kenya, which is suffering through a devastating drought, has 55 million people, about 95 times more than the population of Wyoming. But Wyoming emits 3.7 times the carbon dioxide as Kenya. Africa as whole has 16.7% of the world’s population but historically emits only 3% of the global carbon pollution, while the United States has 4.5% of the planet’s people but since 1959 has put out 21.5% of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
The average Canadian, Saudi and Australian put out more than 10 times the carbon dioxide into the air though their daily living than the average Pakistani, where one-third of the nation was flooded in a climate change worsened event.
So, “what of the appetite itself?”
In a liberal democracy, we will not be able to answer that question until we the people of the United States (and people in other democracies) reach a consensus that this appetite is even a problem. But, giving up is not an option either. We have no choice but to keep thinking about the changes that we--individually and collectively--can make to the economic system.
How are you going to rethink your appetite in 2023?