We do indeed have too much stuff, but too much stuff being produced. With no sign it's stopping. In fact it's accelerating.
Instead of getting what we need, we're getting what we need, in excess packaging, and having to replace it every year or two as structural components, hinges, gears and bearings are made of plastic. If that's not enough we build far larger and heavier cars, we buy far more food than we eat, fridges and freezers get ever bigger. Clothes that lasted years are now made to wear out after a few months or if lucky, a year and the rubbish bin is now a wheelie bin with 2-3x the volume, and a recycling bin or 3. Today we struggle to get all the crap in the huge bin as it's full. So is the recycling. In 1980 the old school trashcan was rarely filled, except maybe the week after Xmas.
Meanwhile industry is convincing us that some other standard bit of being human is a source of failure and sells a cream, perfume or product to mask it, or a pill or service to avoid it. Or selling us a subscription to some simple thing made complex - e.g. fruit juice, bottled water, coffee pods. Even those of us who still try to be old-school and not buy into every fad, or replace a kitchen because they fancy a new colour, end up buying far more than we did in the 80s or 90s as the world is now built to make it unavoidable.
I'd love to see the merest hint that people are even thinking about not wanting more stuff...
I don't know what country you're from, but this is already happening in western Europe. Slowly, but it is happening.
If we were, then we'd see wealthy people living in average-size houses. As is, however, wealthy still live in bigger houses, presumably buy more stuff to fill them, than those without the money to do so.
This all implies if/when average income rises, stuff ownership will continue to rise with it.
Is that true? Anyone have numbers/research on sand that’s good?
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-g...
Also, I wonder why concrete crossties don't use neoprene bearing pads under the rails to reduce the abrasion problem.
What do you mean these serfs cant pay $2,000/ month for a studio apartment while earning minimum wage?
Note that historically, this sort of behavior on behalf of markets has preceeded revolutions - from Irish Independence to Mao's Communist Revolution.
We can stop it, if we work NOW to make the economy actually distribute goods and services.
It could be clearer throughout, whether he's talking per capita or overall.
Data is selective and ignores resource utilization shifts. Example: In the 1940s crop acreage decoupled from crop yield, he says. Great! Instead it coupled to petroleum and energy, he doesn't say. American farms today are in the business of converting fossil fuels to food. For example, the 1940s are when when cheap internal-combustion tractors started being mass-produced, thanks to all that spare manufacturing capacity left over after the war. There's also a graph where he looks at "every input" into growing corn, even down to the phosphates, while scrupulously avoiding any talk of fuel or energy.
A resource shift of a different kind: efficiency gains in chicken production are due mostly to inhumane factory farm conditions. (Ones to which pork & beef are less amenable, hence chicken outdoes them.)
Wood is no longer used for railroad ties, because we use concrete. Which has its own problems! The point in most of this kind of example is that we stop using A because B comes along to fill the void. Nobody uses paper anymore, but they sure use a lot more lithium than they used to. And so on.
Finally, and speaking of stepping in to fill the void: ctrl-F - "China" - 1 match. The single mention is to refer to it as a developing country, not to acknowledge it as the present-day location of much of the USA's manufacturing.