Well, the good news is that overspending also stimulates the economy. For every person that purchases a sandwich or cup of coffee they don't really need, that's also some other persons salary.
But as others have mentioned, reckless / impulse spending can also be a sign of conditions like depression, BPD, ADHD, and the list goes on...
Paying someone to break a window, and then someone else to fix it, will also stimulate the economy. But it's clearly not a rational use of our time here on earth.
Replace window with house, and you basically described a lot of the market?
There are also interesting efficiencies in there. Fixing a window is not as quick as just replacing it.
Not sure I understood your comment. How often do you pay people to break your house / phone / car, just so you can pay someone (else) to fix it?
I presume you just mean the farcical "break a perfectly working thing" idea. But, demolition is a thing. Similarly, turning a usable vehicle in for scrap is also a thing.
Don't need to be rational all the time for your whole life. Sometimes you just want an extra sandwich.
Many of my most memorable moments stem from from a bout of irrationality.
You aren’t really aware of the realities of the modern economy are you.
Games like these are everywhere.
I mean this comment is like the epitome of sweet summer child.
And ? How does that changes the second sentence of gp ? "But it's clearly not a rational use of our time here on earth"
Because the alternative game for 10,000 years has been war and violence.
Please read the Price of Peace.
While I understand the sentiment, it is important to distinguish between mindless consumption and wanting a better quality of life. Buying all kinds of useless crap (usually items of small value and little utility) should not be conflated with wanting to have better things. Better quality house, appliances, clothes, etc.
It is the latter that is useful and brings peace. People won't get too mad if their neighbors have more stuff as long as their stuff allows them a pretty good quality of life. But problems arise when you cannot buy the better stuff to improve your life and instead the focus is redirected to stupid items.
This is what the article is about, in my opinion. In the end, filling your house with gadgets and gizmos of dubious usefulness/quality does not improve your life substantially. But this is what much of the population has been relegated to, and it has a soul-crushing effect.
Adding it to my reading list.
But still, are you saying that I'd better consume things I actually don't need because that's the only way to avoid war ? I'm not saying that you should stop buying things. We need objects in our life.
But are Apple Watches, Airpods or VR headsets or foldable phones protecting us from war ? I hope not because that sounds depressing.
(Asking genuine qestion, I'm not doing virtue signaling here, I do own a VR headset, a pair of airpods and an Apple Watch and none of those objects are making me happy actually)
The price of peace historically explains how most war is faught over resources or local status games. Both of those behaviors were mostly captured by world trade and consumerism which replaced each respectively.
But then what emerged is that the largest consumer engines of production and consumptions could control the global trade and resources in a way that would suppress warfare globally by creating an economic MAD game alongside the nuclear one.
People don’t understand how much violence this likely saved us. However it is of course not without consequences. I'm just saying so far the side effects have FAR FAR outweighed the sickness (world war)
Can you cite an example?
> You aren’t really aware of the realities of the modern economy are you.
OK, but you did recognise that it was a reference to the parable of the broken window by the 'sweet summer child' Claude-Frédéric Bastiat?
Yes and it's completely falsely applied, and maybe even arguably wrong to begin with. It's moralizing not reality. Geeze guy, do you not get this?
No, I don't get 'this', because you have not actually said anything. Across this post and the ones above it you have pretty much only insulted me witouth saying anything I can either understand or misunderstand, because there is no content.
In a sibling I see that you actually drop the name of a book, as if you expect the world to read a book to respond to you.
I propose you formulate your argument, if you actually have something to say. Even if it is a summary of a book, summarise it into a argument which is relevant for this conversation. Who knows, maybe even I manage to understand you then.
My guy, the fundamentals of Neoliberalism are like newtonian physics at this point, if it's not my job to explain them for you from first principles. Born out of WW2 and specifically thrived from 'fixing the broken window of Europe and Japan.'
But basically speaking, games of destruction can be obviously extremely economical incentivized regardless of what humans call 'productive.' And economies and markets have never ever promised to be narrowly productive for a specific moral world view. Quite the opposite actually.
Please don't claim insult where basic knowledge is simply lacking.
> For every person that purchases a sandwich or cup of coffee they don't really need
But that's also a toll to the environment.
Really the problem is that we are alive?
It's pretty easy to be alive and not harm the environment in the outsized way we do. We have the technology!
We do not. We simply moved your outsized impact to places you do not see.
Hmm... no, not really, even considering rare earth mineral mining, the total elimination of fossil fuel combustion would dramatically reduce human environmental harm.
There is zero way with current technology and economic development that we could support even half of the current worlds population without fossil fuels.
We certainly could not continue providing the current world with latest gen iphones, you are right.
Feeding and housing them though? Absolutely doable. It would require a significant change in our societies, but we know enough things about the universe to accomplish this.
If you're saying, politically, this is impossible, sure, you're probably right.
Ho man, the level of delusion here. Have you ever visited India? China? This isn’t a ‘latest gen iPhone’ (which, btw, is well out of reach of your typical Indian already).
This is a ‘the entire world economy is based on fossil fuels, and attempting to redo the entire worlds economy to use non-fossil fuels is not currently doable’. Even the best case emergency scenarios would have to use even more fossil fuels to try.
Germany and California have tried elements of it, but even despite massive investment they are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for almost all the baseline parts of their economies (transportation, heating, industrial uses, etc).
If we all went on a wartime footing and devoted our entire economies to completely retooling the worlds economies, maybe - but realistically, it’s clear that people would rather blow each other up (which will also solve this problem a bit !) than do that.
And a big reason why is a lot of people are likely to starve to death or be pushed into poverty to attempt it.
You carefully ommitted China who is working (and will succeed as they always do unlike Germany and California…) on post-fossil world way before fossils become scarse
You can't be serious. China does invest in renewables, but that is just on top of their ever-increasing fossil fuel consumption.
They are not powering their industries with renewables. If you believe that, I don't know what to tell you.
You really... really.... really are wrong here. Reality vs propoganda needs to be known
few things you can read
https://archive.ph/J0bew
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/11/06/chinas-clean-en...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-14/trump-us-xi-china-tra...
https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/what-is-really-going-to-...
None of it actually addresses the points, and is quite literally propaganda when the CCP is the one who states what the internal numbers are and mean? (Which notably, is where the US is going very rapidly now too).
it specifically addresses the entire world economy is based on fossil fuels, and attempting to redo the entire worlds economy to use non-fossil fuels is not currently doable
- it is currently doable
- china is working on it
- they will succeed
- while we flip the two insane political parties in power every 4 to 8 years that each kills everything previous one did just out of spite if for no other reason
They’ll make some progress - while also burning massive amounts of fossil fuels, sure.
And maybe in 20+ years we’ll be closer.
But that is not the same as what was being discussed.
What are you reading that we're not? The PRC seems to be leading in building new green energy sources. It's not like I'm a fan of them - I live in Taiwan - but credit where it's due.
Leading is in no way actually replacing. And that isn’t even counting major economic factors like international shipping, where we are approximately 1% towards replacement.
hehehe yea, for sure that’s it
Yes I agree with you that it would be politically probably impossible, since it would, as you imply, require dismantling capitalism.
But, it's not like we need fossil fuels to farm, and there's already enough housing for all the humans. If we engaged in expropriation, it's certainly physically possible.
It wouldn’t require ‘dismantling capitalism’. Notably, none of the really big countries involved here are capitalist (even the CCP, which is very business oriented, is a authoritarian market economy, not a capitalist one).
It would require ignoring human nature. After all, why would the folks whose property gets expropriated go along with this? (And think for a second what you would do if you were on the other side of the equation.)
It’s all fun and games until it’s taking your stuff to give to a bunch of currently homeless folks.
> It’s all fun and games until it’s taking your stuff to give to a bunch of currently homeless folks.
Expropriation mostly means taking from corporations and giving to everyone, and maybe you're in a more developed nation but in the USA that would just mean giving it to nearly the majority of the people there. E.g. clearing out grocery stores and giving people food, and moving people from slums into empty luxury condos. Plenty of housing to fit the homeless as well, but they're a small slice.
If the PRC isn't capitalist, neither is the USA. Market dynamics drive everything in the USA, they have a concept of private property (no 99 year rule has triggered), and the means of production are owned by a capital class that uses it to exploit labor for further profit. Just because they have strong regulations and the government injects money all over the place doesn't mean it's not capitalist. It's just like a supercharged version of some highly socialized version of a European nation, plus an oversized secret police operation, but that's more on the political side than the economic one.
> It would require ignoring human nature. After all, why would the folks whose property gets expropriated go along with this?
Mostly corporations, so, capitalism over, so, nothing lol. If you mean their billionaire owners, I guess they would probably be keeping their heads down in this kind of situation. The idea is the improvement of quality of life for all people, even the billionaire class could hardly complain at a massive reduction in poverty and thus crime.
They've been stealing for the majority of people for so long I think it's only fair to expropriate it back.
But ok, how do you shift the entire world off fossil fuels without dismantling capitalism? What profit motive would drive someone to choose a more expensive energy solution that requires reconfiguring equipment?
You never answered my question. Why would they go along with it?
> Why would they go along with it?
It's not a relevant question, in the same way the desires of the Confederacy for independence were irrelevant when they lost the Civil War.
But also, I did answer it: Some would probably go along with it because of the obvious overall improvement to society that would result, which they would enjoy just as much as anyone else. After all, they already pay taxes so that roads exist and homeless are at least fed (and thus not harassing people as much). I said this in my previous comment.
It absolutely is a valid concern when the other party controls all the wealth, and guns, and governments! Unless you like losing anyway.
Do you think the civil war was a pleasant or productive one for anyone?
The British did it a different way re: slavery, and notably did not burn half their country to the ground - and still banned it.
Yeah we could. Just not to the extremely wasteful American standards of living. Even America can only support them because it controls the whole world's money printer.
That's easy to solve.
Just encourage them to take part in some low-cost digital alternative like Sports Predictions.
But that's a false benefit. You don't want to stimulate the economy for the sake of it, you want to stimulate the economy to the extent that it satisfies genuine human wants. It would be better if that other person's salary came from doing so, not from Making Number Go Up.
If someone drinks a cup of coffee, there is one less cup of coffee in the world. The money that other people get is just a piece of paper, it is not useful for anything. Wasteful consumption of real resources is not 'stimulus', it is just waste.
It's still a waste. If you saved that money for an emergency, you might not need to take on debt in the future. If you invested it, you might help start a business that people need. Or you might help yourself retire sooner.
Spending for the sake of spending is silly.