Move to sufficiency
Madam Editor,
We live in very strange economic times. Figures just released indicate “Black Friday” in late November gave a substantial boost to retail sales but Christmas Markets were somewhat disappointing while e-mail deliveries by An Post increased by more than 25%. Another aspect of worry is how Christmas Sales required very substantial price-cutting to keep them from dropping any lower than “disappointing”.
The reality is that every Friday and practically every day of the year is a “black” day as discounting of prices, special offers. Intense advertising and hype tries to get people to buy more than they really need or want. All that marks official “Black Friday” as special is the greatly intensified advertising, promotion and hype which induces many people into “frenzy buying” often at higher prices than they would pay on most other days. Such selling and buying leads to enormously “over-supplied” purchasers and inevitable mountains of waste.
Yet it appears politicians and economists see no way of progressing economies other than continuing to produce more, sell and buy more and waste more. Continuing to “grow”, “grow”, “grow” appears to be the only economic game in town and nobody wants to hear about or discuss any alternative. There appears to be nothing in the gene pool of economic wisdom and ideology which questions whether, in a situation of gross oversupply, economies can continue to “grow” indefinitely. One would think it logical that since we have already substantially surpassed adequate sufficiency, we should consider abandoning or at least adapting an ideology of continual growth except of course in cases of replenishment, renewal, new invention, innovation and items periodically in short supply. Sufficiency is a great place for economics to have reached; being able to supply goods and services sufficient to satisfy all consumer demand is a wonderful success story and something never achieved before. We should be delighted and celebrate and stop the foolishness of continuing a “growth” drive to grossly overproduce goods and services way beyond what we need. “Growth”, which historically was always desperately needed, was an integral part of economic activity until technological advance made it unnecessary and it will be difficult to break away from it.
The step from “growth” to “sufficiency” must be taken however or we risk destroying economic activity under mountains of oversupply, struggling commerce and obscene waste.