Sections (TOC) :
• 1
72 Words; 445 Characters
• 2
24 Words; 136 Characters
• 3
54 Words; 355 Characters
• 4
10 Words; 64 Characters
• 5
56 Words; 333 Characters
• 6
47 Words; 325 Characters
• 7
41 Words; 271 Characters
• 8
76 Words; 488 Characters
• 9
141 Words; 884 Characters
• 10
21 Words; 144 Characters
• 11
37 Words; 247 Characters
• 12
132 Words; 767 Characters
• 13
28 Words; 134 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• 1
...hated grocery shopping. None of the elaborate surveys and studies in depth of the buying habits of Americans had a classification for Randolph Bragg. Usually he grabbed a cart and sprinted for the meat counter, where he dropped a written order. Then he raced up and down the aisles, snatching cans and bottles and boxes and cartons from shelves and freezers apparently at random, running down small children and bumping old ladies...
• 2
We seldom trust our own taste even in food; but are a prey to labels or advertisements or the simple eloquence of the salesman.
• 3
The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.
• 4
Higher prices is simply a form which lower wages takes.
• 5
Sometimes, as a gesture of technical bravado, economists may add to the social cost of motorized traffic an estimate of the costs to the community of the number of fatal accidents by the felicitous device of reckoning the cost of a man killed as the loss of a potential future pecuniary contribution to the national product.
• 6
Like the Americans, we in this country [Britain] are cultivating a dependence, perhaps as much psychological as economic, on the car industry and all its ramifications. Vested interests have grown and become formidable. They bar the road to consideration of all radical innovations that threaten their establishment.
• 7
Men have become the victims of their faith in progress. Owing to the institutional framework lagging in crucial respects behind economic developments, men are under the illusion that they have freely chosen the private automobile as the conveyance of the future.
• 8
...not only do producers determine the range of market goods from which consumers must take their choice, they also seek continuously to persuade consumers to choose that which is being produced today and to 'unchoose' that which was being produced yesterday. Therefore to continue to regard the market, in an affluent and growing economy, as primarily a 'want-satisfying' mechanism is to close one's eyes to the more important fact, that it has become a want-creating mechanism.
• 9
...this attitude of affluent-society man is to be explained by the central thesis of this volume: that beginning from the norms of postwar affluence economic growth has failed to provide men with additional choices significant to his welfare; that, indeed, it has incidentally destroyed some cardinal sources of welfare hitherto available. The bewildering assortment of gadgetry and fashion goods offers the sort of expansion that is as likely to subtract from than to add to his welfare. As produce, affluent-man has little choice but to adopt himself to the prevailing technology; no provision is made by industry enabling him, if he chooses, to forego something in the way of earnings for more creative and enjoyable work. Nor, as citizen, has he yet been presented with the vital choice of quieter and more human environments, free of the ravages of unrestrained traffic.
• 10
...consumers' surplus, when used as an index of the benefits to be derived from private automobile travel, may give perverse results...
• 11
The new consumer society required armies of workers to move, distribute, advertise, finance, sell, and service mass-produced goods. Thus, the growth of the industrial city was closely tied to the growth of the mass market and consumerism.
• 12
The things the worker buys with his wages are first of all consumer goods which enable him to survive, to reproduce his labor-power so as to be able to continue selling it. And they are spectacles, objects for passive admiration. He consumes and admires the products of human activity passively. He does not exist in the world as an active agent who transforms it. But as a helpless impotent spectator he may call this state of powerless admiration "happiness," and since labor is painful, he may desire to be "happy," namely inactive, all his life (a condition similar to being born dead). The commodities, the spectacles, consume him; he uses up living energy in passive admiration; he is consumed by things. In this sense, the more he has, the less he is.
• 13
...choose to do in life outside of the making of things and keep it in mind -- not for a day, nor a year, but for a lifetime.
Chronology :
April 11, 2020 : Consumerism -- Added.
HTML file generated from :
http://RevoltSource.com/