Consumption, Geographies of

Consumption has meant different things at different moments in time and has taken widely varying forms. The term comes from the Latin consumere, “to use up” (as in tuberculosis), implying that consumption means to make full use of and to destroy simultaneously. In societies lacking a social surplus, consumption equals production. Economically, consumption is how consumers satisfy their needs. In social terms, consumption lies at the intersections of production, culture, everyday life, and psychology. In contrast to production, which has been studied in exhaustive detail in geography, consumption has long been ignored or regarded as unproblematic. The reasons for this silence are not clear but may reflect, among other things, Marxism's emphasis on production and labor as the central acts of social life and, conversely, neoclassical economics’ sterile and asocial view of consumption. Consumption and production cannot be neatly separated and are closely intertwined: Most people work in order to consume, and everyone consumes in order to live.

Historically, the growth of mass production in the 19th century was accompanied by rising disposable incomes, mass consumption advertising, the ideology of consumerism, and, in the 1930s, Keynesian demand management. Consumption fuelled by debt was decried by moralists, often on religious grounds, as a violation of Protestant ethics, which focused on delayed gratification. In the late 20th century, changes in the world economy, including deindustrialization and the explosive growth of producer services, induced concomitant changes in consumption, including increasingly specialized niche markets and sophisticated consumers. By any measure, consumption is enormously important, as an economic act (constituting the bulk of the gross national product [GNP] of most countries), environmentally (e.g., energy use or the act of turning products into trash), and in terms of the lifestyles and self-image of much of the population. The geography of consumption is critical to understanding related issues such as travel and transportation, tourism, standards of living, and uneven development.