Yes ,Brian,you are probably of the same generation as I am.The generation born to parents who came through the Great Depression and whose motto was,"Waste Not,Want Not".

I took that motto to heart but a lot of my contempories didn't and the lesson has certainly been lost on later generations.

Never mind,the Limits To Growth will teach the lesson anew - painfully.

Nooo.ooo...ooo it dont take strength to stop buying cheap goods.
Little or no money are much more effective.

socratease

"if we believe this to justify our purchase of absurdly cheap
manufactured items, then how much better are we than the Australian
who excuses himself for having sex with a 14 year-old girl in Bangkok
because she needs the money to live?"
If you can't see the difference and you're prepared to buy those $12 shirts,
it begs the question of what you would do with that 14yo in Bangkok.
I think your analogy is seriously flawed but then again I'm not a moral relativist.

I think if you asked the Chinese, would they rather go back to
starving, as they were 25 or so years ago, not many would
volunteer. In fact there is now a whole middle class generation
doing pretty well, not everyone works in el cheapo factories.

As things improve, even those places are coming under huge
pressure to up wages and working conditions. In other words,
things are getting better for the average Chinese and they
still manage to save something like 40% of their wages!

For us there are benefits too. Ask the poor in Australia,
if they would rather buy a 12$ shirt or a 60$ shirt, espeically
when it comes to kids clothes.

Today we have more choice then ever before. We can pay the
price and buy industrial drills and other power tools, if that
is what we need at work. Yet if some pensioner wants to do
a bit of woodwork now and then, he'll now be able to afford
power tools that he could only previously dream of and they will
still do the job. I don't think that is such a bad thing.

In the 60s and 70s they used to refer to "Japanese junk",
as Japan built to a price rather then a standard. Now the
Japanese are ahead in quality on much of what they produce.
China is and will change too, it just all takes time.

Thanks for a splendid article steeped in ethics, Brian Holden, I'm sure you speak for many people.
I too am guilty of participating in this frivolous lifestyle, and buying products that are cheaper to replace than repair. Though obsolescence (and fashion) is another factor driving our disposable mentality.
What does frustrate me is that people balk at condemning the real villain, indeed this villain is so omnipresent, omnipotent and inviolable as to be unseen, more like a deity, or the air we breath, a kind of Lucifer-inspired pantheism: I speak of course of capitalism and its fatal dynamics.
We don't see capitalism critically; we've been condition to see it (in as much as we see it at all) in a binary political relationship with failed communism, rather than on its own remorseless terms.
The dynamic of capitalism is reducible to the "profit motive", though the celebrated entrepreneur is as helpless as those from whom surplus-value is extracted.
The surplus value derived from the means of production has to be converted into capital, which is achieved via the sale of commodities, whose cost necessarily exceeds the derivative purchasing power of that productive community. Ergo capitalism cannot function in a closed system; in order to forestall overproduction and underconsumption, it must expand its markets ad infinitum, both intensively (greater efficiency, innovation, competition) and extensively (by creating new markets). Yet we live in a closed system and this juggernaut must inevitably run out of fuel---which is all humanity, and all the Earth's resources are under this dispensation, is: fuel. Before capitalism reaches this theoretical limit, however, the "side effects" of this dynamic, environmental devastation and general strife, are likely to bring the whole thing crashing down.
We long since passed the point where morality had any relevance. The children in factories in China etc, are merely the logical progress of this amoral divinity.

My dear old mum used to say that "poor people can't afford cheap things". It's an adage I've always applied, and I still reckon she was right.