When the going gets tough the tough go shopping ...

Interesting article, this. It starts by reminding us of what is known:

there is a madness at the heart of this economic model with its terrible environmental costs. It's best illustrated by a graph used by the US psychologist Tim Kasser at a Whitehall seminar last week. One line, representing personal income, has soared over the past 40 years; the other line marks those who describe themselves as "very happy", and has remained the same. The gap between the two yawns ever wider. All this consumption is not necessary to our happiness.

And then moves to some interesting ideas which ought to be of interest to Christians and others of good will in Western cultures.

Kasser's graph has both hopeful and disturbing implications. On the hopeful side, this is good news: a low-consumption economy wouldn't mean misery. But what's disturbing is how we continue to shop when it doesn't make us happier. He argues that our hyperconsumerism is a response to insecurity, a maladaptive type of coping mechanism.

The malaise is, as some thinkers in spirituality and some theologians have been saying for some time, a spiritual one within western culture which needs more than the fixes currently offered or conceived in popular culture because it is that popular culture that is the problem, formed in response to the insecurity but adopting the maladaptive strategy just mentioned.

a win-win scenario; a low-consumption economy oriented towards facilitating the real sources of human fulfilment. Most of us dimly recognise that huge lifestyle changes are necessary, but we're waiting for someone else to initiate the process. It's a question of "I will if you will" - the title of a thoughtful report last year from the government's Sustainable Development Commission.Hearteningly, we know it can be done - our parents and grandparents managed it in the second world war.

Hmmm. Yes; we need to work towards helping people to recognise where fulfilment is and isn't found (and that means the uncomfortable task of showing that the ideology we call 'consumerism', really does have no clothes. That we have to help people take stock of the fact that shopping only brings a temporary relief and has an almost inevitable 'let down' once the purchase is made. The parallel with substance addiction is all-but inescapable (I guess that would make it, at least for some, a process addiction). But, as the article points out, sudden withdrawal may be catastrophic as it would amount to a precipitous drop in the velocity of circulation of money (this is my more economic paraphrase) which would amount to a steep deflation and economically would be rather like pulling the rug out from under the table we dine at: things would come crashing down and there would be quite a lot of suffering as means of support were withdrawn from the most economically precarious and concentrated in the hands of the most capitally secure. So the management of such a withdrawal would be needed, and -I would argue- a transition to an economy based on service rather than on 'stuff'. A message that Christians can back, along with many other spiritual seekers and religious adherants.
Some of the comments are interesting too. Someone called Steve Jones writes:

What the government is doing regarding climate change is passing the buck on to the individual.
It could easily ban incandescent light bulbs, air conditioners, insist that public buildings only be heated to 18 centigrade, give the subsidies the Germans do to those who invest in renewable energy, bring in strict laws regarding energy efficiency for new houses, stick an additional tax on electronic goods that don't go into proper standby, insist of aircraft fuel being taxed at the same rate as petrol and diesel, forbid subsidies from local or regional authorities to local airports or budget airlines, and a fair number of other measures.
Expecting the consumer to follow his conscience is a recipe for making people feel miserable and harrassed without significantly reducing energy use.

I think he has a point worth pondering more.
And there is the sting in what I mention above in relation to money and deflation: "Lower consumption means a much lower tax base because of the recent move to consumption taxes.", so we'd need to reconsider taxation and welfare: though I'm thinking that a land value tax would be a great help in this regard.
But the big achilles heel, as a number of comments point out in various ways is that in wartime Britain there was quite a big bearing down on civil liberties to achieve the lower consumption. It wasn't just propaganda that did it, probably not mainly even, after all, there was the black market ... I suspect that strategic taxation and careful regulation as mentioned by Steve Jones is actually quite important, without going into the kind of quasi police state that was wartime Britain.

Anyway, developing a spirituality which is robustly anticonsumerist without being a bad neighbour is quite important: taking in the insights of addiction treatment including 12-step programmes, being economically savvy and offering a fulfilling and celebratory goods-based downward mobility ... funny, I seem to recall all sorts of groups over the last 30 years saying this kind of thing: have we woken up and realised they might have been on to something, then?
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Eat, drink and be miserable: the true cost of our addiction to shopping