in Fast Company

"The desire for more is the most powerful drive in our culture. It's in the DNA of democracy and at the heart of the American Dream: Every person gets an equal chance to make it, and it's our responsibility to take it. Of late, that drive has produced an ethnography of excess -- books such as Juliet Schor's The Overspent American, Robert Frank's Luxury Fever, and even Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. These accounts of the rich and spendthrift point to one big question: What does all that income and spending add up to? A lot of nothing, it turns out. One of the more shocking measures of our "prosperity" is the fact that the United States spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than all of the goods consumed by nearly half of the world's nations."