"What of the appetite itself?"

Think along with me here.

Picture in your minds the lives that your grandparents lived, however short or long it was.  Think about their material comforts.  How much did they travel?  How far and how often?  How much of a rich variety of foods did they eat on a daily basis?

If you are like me, even without additional prompts, you will be ready to conclude that your life is immensely more comfortable and rich compared to how the grandparents lived.

Globally, people enjoy a standard of living that is far greater than a mere two generations ago.

How much more material well being do we want, if we are not content and happy with what we currently have?  Is there a ceiling at all, or is our material want sky high with no limits?

More than 60 years ago, in 1958, the economist-thinker John Kenneth Galbraith raised the question that I have borrowed as the title for this post.  Galbraith warned and worried that this appetite "is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question."

Galbraith was not arguing against consumption.  But, he was farsighted to argue that we needed a change in our consumption patterns, "from those which have a high material requirement to those which have a much lower requirement.  Education, health services, sanitary services, good parks and playgrounds, orchestras, effective local government, a clean countryside, all have rather small materials requirements."

What is common to education, heath services, sanitary services, parks, orchestras?

Labor. Humans doing the work.

Now, think about the contemporary world.  Orchestras are endangered species because people do not want to pay for labor, and would rather stream music that can be reproduced at next-to-nothing costs.  Teachers and healthcare workers and being paid far less than those who want us to consume materials in various forms.  Societies seem to operate as if parks and clean air and water do not matter at all.

Instead of measuring what we truly value, we have settled on valuing something that can be relatively easily measured--the Gross Domestic Product (GDP.)  Nearly 70% of the GDP comes from consumption.  In such a context, "what's good for the environment can be not so good for the economy and vice versa. How do you struggle to reconcile that? What is the answer?"

What can we do about the appetite when we are awash with so much abundance that it is like most of us live in a Midas world.  

It is true that the planet needs us to stop shopping. The economy needs us to keep shopping. But ultimately, it's the planet that has the priority here. We cannot continue to expand the amount of consumption that each individual person on the planet does in perpetuity. So the answers have to be found, I think, in what kind of changes can we make to the economic system?

We will not be able to answer that question as long as one major political party denies that this is even a problem.  But, giving up is not an option either.  We have no choice but to keep thinking about the changes that we--individually and collectively--can make to the economic system.