Overconsumption

The overconsumption is a political concept, developed by various currents of thought, in particular ecologist S or Altermondialiste S. This concept is not integrated into the Paradigme dominating (within the meaning of Thomas Kuhn) in economic scenes, in the direction where little scientifically satisfactory research was carried out in connection with overconsumption.

Concept

This concept recovers several aspects, whose the three principal ones are the following:

the current consumption of the developed countries would carry out, in the long term, with an exhaustion of the world natural resources (energy, raw materials, but also drinking water and ground water for example). This type of consumption (and development) could thus not, shortly, being generalized with all the population of planet; to see the ecological concept of Impressed, on the level of an individual or a country.
this consumption of the developed countries would be carrying very many disadvantages at the planetary level like: disordered states of the climate, Pollution S of all kinds (of water, by an excessive consumption of Manure and Pesticide S, air by transport too massively road for example), creative Overconsumption of drugs of very serious problems of Public health like (increasing resistance of the bacteria to antibiotics for example), etc With, among the consequences, the need for an additional consumption of care: a circle vicious settles. The increase in consumption would thus not be necessarily positive, and could appear strongly against-productive.
" diseases of abondance" (Obesity, diabetes, arterial Hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, Cancer S, etc) develop, and they would be mainly related to the new food spending patterns (sweetened, salted and fatty food excess, of factory feedstuffs less rich in trace elements and nutrients favorable to health, to replace very protective fruit and vegetables) in the majority of the developed countries (to a lesser extent in France and in Japan).

In the middle of this concept of overconsumption thus the concept of against-productivity appears, developed for example by Ivan It in the years 1970, and taken again in France by André Gorz, alias Michel Bosquet.

Limits of the analysis

Overconsumption is a concept very largely political, and its economic shutter is not the subject of a consensus in economic scenes. It was not carried out of research on this subject whose results are robust, in particular because of difficulty of defining objective criteria to categorize what would be, field by field, an insufficient, normal or excessive consumption.

A problem more targeted, and often quoted as in the middle of the concept of overconsumption, relates to the appreciation of the quantities of the world natural resources in a reliable way. Because the concept of overconsumption is centered to a large extent on the possible exhaustion of the natural resources, and the speed with which this one would occur. Are often mentioned the Pic oil, followed déplétion, and the exhaustion of the reserves halieutics. But how to announce if these resources will quickly be exhausted, if one cannot measure them with reliability? It is what says today the standard economic scene.

But the concept of overconsumption not limiting itself to a simple exhaustion of the natural resources, other sciences can possibly take over economic scene, to bring more precise details on this concept of overconsumption.

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