>As above. Beware left criticism of mass consumption
>preferences, say I.
Neither Naomi Klein nor I am guilty of such. Or, more specifically, I - and I think she agrees with me - have nothing against wanting nice things. What I think is wacky is paying $150 for shoes that cost $2 to make. In the economic sense, the hallucinatory markup is a pure loss, since it's money that could have been spent elsewhere. I suppose you could argue that the $148 (less "normal" profit) is enjoyed by the consumer as a consumption of style and positional good services, but that seems a bit of a stretch. . . .
"Nice things" is way narrow. One person's consumption is another person's wacky. I can't bring myself to watch professional wrestling, but obviously a lot of people do. I think paying $2,000 for a stereo system is wacky, but people do so they can savor classical sonatas or indigenous music. Isn't there something about that in marx?
Maybe we're at the point in history when manufactured commodities of all types have become conspicuously cheap because of the high level of embedded technology. So we are led to focus more on the magnitude of fixed costs that make possible very low-cost mass production, especially when production becomes nearly costless. The IT share of the economy may be small, but the growth of productivity means the economy looks 'new,' even though it has always been 'new,' hence never new.
mbs