Elsewhere, U. S. A. by Dalton Conley

Author:Dalton Conley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307377975
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-11-29T10:00:00+00:00

1∗A luxury has a precise economic definition: It is a good (or service), the consumption of which rises proportionately more when income rises (the amount of necessities we consume also rises with income, but to a lesser extent, while consumption of an inferior good actually declines when income rises as better substitutes are afforded). No goods are inherently luxuries, necessities, or inferior

2∗Since we are buying so much new apparel each week, we have to clean out our closets to make room for the new stuff. Thus, exports of used garments have also skyrocketed. Schor tells us that in 1991, we exported about 130 million kilograms of used apparel to the rest of the world (mostly African countries). By 2004, we were offloading 500 million kilograms—over 3 pounds of clothes per person—a typical load of wash weighs between 5 and 10 pounds. (See Juliet Schor, “The Social Death of Things,” working paper, 2007.) What are we doing with the rest? Probably it is rotting in landfill. Of course, most of these garments were not produced in the United States but rather in East and Southeast Asia, so they are getting quite a world tour. Little did I know at the time that I bought a pair of used blue jeans in the Rwandan open-air markets that I was doing my small part to balance the world flow of cloth.

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