Restarting the Consumer and Controlling Waste

At the moment, I am reading End the Depression Now! by Paul Krugman. As far as I've read, he's been arguing for a Keynesian approach to relieve the current crisis and also unpacking why this has been so fiercely resisted. I completely agree with his argument thus far: I think that governments have to stop pumping money into banks who don't lend it, stockpile it against Basel 3 and use it to continue greasing the engines of financial markets. I completely agree that governments have to shift to fiscal policy, start spending, raise employment and income and the rest will follow.

However, the part that worries me is that this will only restart the wasteful consumer that has been our planet's scourge in the recent past. A colleague made a comment about unnecessary toasters (or maybe it was TVs) the other day and the part that resonated with me was the waste. We don't want a reinvigoration of the consumer who buys a new TV every other year and constantly trades in his cars. Waste and wise resource use is a huge problem.

So, how do we balance the fact that countries with strong productive and innovative fundamentals can and should be resuccitated with spending and the fact that we can no longer afford to add to our waste problems?

I'm not sure this is a solution but I am reminded that both John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx argued for the kind of life filled with "higher pleasures" of a sort. Mill, though a utilitarian, rated some pleasures higher than others and Marx argued that one day there would be in such abundance that all people would be blessed with leisure in their life. And I think about the take-off of the Internet and virtual realities, more and more people making home videos and self-publishing books. I wonder if maybe there's a way that allows people to continue to raise their quality of life without increasing the quantity of possessions. I know servers and computers still have environmental spill-overs but it seems to me that the burgeoning creative life found online may offer some hope to balancing the need to spend without being wasteful.

Not that everything online fits Mill's definition of "higher pleasures" by any means but it does offer an alternative path to self-actualisation and human development that may be less dependent on the consumption of resources and the accompanying waste.