Re:Why Inequality Matters
by lmm on Thursday October 16, 2014 @12:05PM
(#8465633)
But consumption has a tighter feedback loop that ensures money spent on consumption is never truly wasted. If something is useless you stop buying it, and there's a limit to how much one person can waste - you can only eat so many meals, wear so many nice suits, take so many private jet flights. People who lose fortunes don't do so through consumption, they do so through bad investments.
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That would be true in practice were it not for the existence of marketing, job of which is to create random arbitrary needs to keep people buying, and planned obsolescence, which makes sure that needs don't stay fulfilled for long. The market found a way to increase the limit to how much one person can waste to the point that the waste keeps accelerating.