Rethinking Consumption: What We Can’t Grow Out Of

Upon entering any Harvard undergraduate house you’ll be greeted by the mail room, where Amazon, Shein, and Sephora parcels tower high. Tens of thousands of packages pass through the University mail service each month.

Harvard undergraduates — like the rest of Gen Z — are reliable consumers. Last year, 30 percent of us reported shopping online at least once each day.

Ramped up per capita consumption is a phenomenon that exists across the industrialized world — but the United States remains a frontrunner. Last Thursday marked U.S. Earth Overshoot Day, the estimated date by which the world would have used more natural resources in 2024 than the planet can regenerate in a year if everyone lived like Americans. This huge acceleration in resource extraction should come as no surprise given that inflation-adjusted U.S. consumer spending is up 400 percent since the ’70s – even though the population has only grown by 60 percent.

What to make of these numbers? Two things can be said for certain.

First, if we don’t stop consuming at our current rate, we’ll drive our planet deeper into ecological crisis. From production to disposal, practically all material goods greatly burden the environment, and although we can make ourselves feel better by placing recycling bins in urban landscapes and CO2-offsetting our flights, that fact remains true.

The second thing we know is that if we suddenly stop consuming at our current rate, we’re bound to induce socio-economic crisis. Consumption typically makes up two-thirds of the American economy: A recent White House report declared that “as the U.S. consumer goes, so goes the U.S. economy.” This is the relationship most macroeconomics classes will hammer home on day one: Increased consumption leads to higher GDP growth, which in turn leads to a greater pie we can all enjoy.

Some might ask why growing the pie, rather than dividing it more fairly, is the right way to make us all happier. Some might also point out that without a healthy planet there is no healthy economy; if left to run its course, climate change will bring about economic calamity either way.

But what’s important to acknowledge — both by climate activists angry at patronizing economists, and by economists angry at self-righteous climate activists — is that the solution to overconsumption is not straightforward. It poses a serious and pressing puzzle to any of us who care about thriving human societies.

During the pandemic, we saw the full complexities of this puzzle play out. As global production slowed, skies cleared of toxic fumes and wild dolphins returned to waters suddenly free of shipping container traffic. At the same time, in the span of a few weeks, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. Those piles of Amazon and Sephora packages in the mail room also vanished.

But just because the puzzle of consumption — and the complexities of balancing growth and sustainability — are difficult, it doesn’t mean economics students shouldn’t be invited to ponder, debate, and try to solve them. In fact, not doing so means excluding them from highly topical discussions happening amongst economists, policy makers, and researchers.

For even though they don’t seem to have reached the gilded Harvard halls, theories of ecological, regenerative, and steady-state economics are gaining traction. These schools of thought share the belief that human prosperity should be the goal regardless of GDP growth — not GDP growth regardless of human prosperity, and at the expense of nature.

Macroeconomics need not be reduced to the science of growth. That’s below its pay grade. It’s worth remembering that linguistically, the word economics means “the management of the house,” derived from the same Greek root as ecology, meaning “the study of the house.” The two disciplines were never meant to be at odds with one another. Our fixation with growing our house, rather than managing it properly, created a false dichotomy between staving off either environmental crisis or economic crisis.

Let’s not give Harvard economics concentrators the impression that questioning the global economy’s dependence on incessant and growing consumption is a fringe, radical, or unintellectual position. Increasingly, it is simply common sense.

Maibritt Henkel ’25 is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Economics in Pforzheimer House. Mie L. Holm ’25 is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Economics in Pforzheimer House. Their column, "Rethinking Economics," runs bi-weekly on Fridays.

By Sami E. Turner