About the quality of life.
A consumers’ vision
Why is every producer wrestling for stakeholder-value for stock-owners? Why is a consumer shopping and hopping to get lowest prices only? Because everybody is in a desperate fear for not having enough income. And in fact that is the reason why nobody is really interested in quality first! In quality of products and services, in the quality of the labour situation, of fair prices and so on, in sustainability, in quality of life!
But in fact our income is not an economical factor but a (human) right! In the same way as for instance two men, a sick woman and a little child on a Robinson Crusoe Island have to live of what those two man gather for food! In a globalized world we have to share our wealth in the same way among all people. Depending on what we need for our individual development: a reasonable income is a right! Thus between two dollars a day and ten million a year we’ve got yet a lot to discuss about what’s reasonable. Haven’t we? If we think about our big world-family as a creation or as a big bang (for dummies) doesn’t matter. One way or another we have to deal with it in a way of 21st century (mature?) consumer/citizens should!
But the word itself contains the solution already: REASON-able ! In the same way all social systems are developed on the basis of reasons for what we really need we have to complete that puzzle also for the last group consumers among us who are producers as well for 40/168 part of the week ……….. And that discussion is now in a current since two years. Everybody is now discussing about basic incomes and top salaries. But the puzzle is how we manage that whole spectrum in between? For that we need the word ‘reasonable’ to find reasonable solutions! I think. If those inter-human financial relations are better solved in the near future then only then everybody can really think about sustainability and quality in general. Not haunted anymore by values or prices alone!
Peter Daub
www.consumer360.org
www.vrijeconsumenten.nl
24 december 2007