The world depends on โหลดสล็อตxo personal spending as an engine to drive economic growth. That appetite is pushing the environment to a tipping point, with the Earth itself in danger of being consumed. But there are glimmers of hope.

In 1890, the economist Alfred Marshall lamented the human tendency to consume too much stuff. “The world would go much better, if everyone would buy fewer and simple things, and would take trouble in selecting them for their real beauty . . .  preferring to buy a few things made well by highly paid labour than many made badly by low paid labour,” he wrote in his textbook Principles of Economics.

The same sentiment was expressed two years later by a member of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, a group of activists who wanted to reset the relationship between workers and shoppers during the first wave of global capitalism. “It does seem strange when we think of it, how lightly and thoughtlessly we go out shopping, how easily we let the money slip through our fingers,” wrote “Katy”, in an essay called “Shopping”.

There has been much anguish over the years about consumption, but little has changed. “The question of what colour in what room is consuming me,” reflected the essayist Eula Biss about buying a new house and scanning the Farrow & Ball chart. “I can’t admit to valuing paint that costs US$110 (S$149) per gallon. But I find this paint unbearably luminous.” Drinking mineral water from a cobalt-blue bottle, she admitted, “I wanted the bottle more than the water”.

Biss has a laconic honesty about her own vulnerability to the temptations of today’s consumer age. That makes a change. More often, when critics assail the status signalling behind fashion and frippery, they have in mind someone else’s bling. The sumptuary laws of the medieval and early modern ages cracked down on peasants and traders donning fancy hats and expensive robes, not to eliminate waste but to let the nobility monopolise privilege.