Last week in Economics class, we talked about the
economic process and began talking about economic systems. In simple terms, the economic process is
a cycle that works in the following way:
Consumers provide productive resources (such as labour, money, or materials) to producers, which in turn use those resources to make and provide goods and services to consumers.
I decided to talk about a topic that we didn't directly talk
about, but that directly impacts the economic process. I chose to cover the topic of consumerism. Before we can get into how consumerism affects/is part of the economic process, we must first understand what consumerism truly is.
You may be thinking that you already know what consumerism is: the illogical need to buy things you don't actually need, continuously. But what you may not know is that that's not all that consumerism is.
Consumerism is the ideology that a continuous consumption of goods and services forms the basis of a sound economy.
If you were to search the pros and cons of consumerism, you
would probably get a list that resembles the following:
The error in this type of thinking is that most of the cons happen
when consumerism turns into materialism. Materialism is the idea that material objects will give you life satisfaction, or will make you happy. That idea is blatantly incorrect, yet we see materialism within our society. An example of this would be the following video. While it's about Black Friday in the USA, it's still applicable, putting it in comparison with Boxing Day shopping here in Canada.
To connect all of this back to the economic cycle is quite
simple. If more goods and services are produced, then more goods and services are available to consumers. Then, businesses would need people to work for them in order to manufacture products, therefore consumers would provide that reproductive resource to them in the form of labour. That results in the economy being stimulated, which is good.
In conclusion, what we can say is that consumerism is good
for the economy, and can play a positive role in our lives just as long as it
refrains from turning into materialism.
Works Cited
“consumerism.” Investopedia.com. Investopedia US, A
Division od IAC, 2014. Web. 28 September 2014.
“materialism.” Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, LCC,
2014. Web. 28 September 2014.
Altmann, Gerd. A billboard of an upwards trending bar
graph. Photograph. n.d. geralt. pixabay.
28 September 2014.
The Salt Lake Tribune. “Shoppers go crazy on Black Friday“.
Youtube. Youtube, LCC, 26 November
2010. Web. 28 September 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zBWjlkKDpA>
Verlaan, Niek. An hand giving the thumbs up.
Photograph. n.d. niekverlaan. pixabay.
28 September 2014.
*the Economic Process cycle picture and the
pros and cons picture were created by myself*
