For Christmas, my Aunt Tish sent me a copy of The Waste Makersby Vance Packard.  The copyright date is 1960 and the book is amazing.  If you have the opportunity to read it, I think for the most part you’ll be impressed with his thoughts written some 47 years ago and horrified that we as a society are still dealing with these problems in an alarming fashion.

“It could be asserted that most Americans are becoming waste makers…Historians, I suspect may allude to this as the Throwaway Age.”

In discussing growth for the economy’s sake, he writes:

“Few have considered that while some selective kinds of growth may well be needed in the United States, other kinds are undesirable or would produce only surfeit.  It is just assumed that any growth is good.  Growth is fast becoming a hallowed word alongside Democracy and Motherhood.”

I’ve read several recent economic books addressing just this issue.  Their thoughts echo Packard’s in more modern terms but in essence are very much the same.

In another chapter, Packard writes:

“Another general tack the marketers took was to try to induce people to get rid of the products they already owned.  In its broadest form this took the form of encouraging people to throw things away.”

That particular thought really struck a cord with me in light of two TV commercials I saw recently.  One was for Toyota, I think, and it showed a man transporting a huge steel beam with a crane who purposely misses the dump truck in order to smash his vehicle in order to buy a new car.  The other was for an appliance manufacturer.  It showed a woman gazing in a store window longingly looking at a new refrigerator with the announcer saying “The only thing standing between you and a new {Name Brand I don’t remember} refrigerator is your old refrigerator.”  The next scene shows the woman throwing her refrigerator over a cliff.  Oy, I think of both cars and household appliances as things to be used until they no longer work and if at all possible repairing before purchasing new.  These are sad things about our society, in my opinion.

I know we all want nice things.  I’m one of those people.  I like having a comfortable home and I realize that I have way more luxuries than most of the world.  Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone did stop consuming less and had to work less and could enjoy family more?