Summary
What happens when you abandon consumerism? The BBC's Ed Butler talks to Pete Adeney, also known as Mr Money Moustache. He retired at 30 and is so frugal he thinks he will never have to work again. Plus, we go urban foraging in London, and a Danish food campaigner tells us what we should do about all that unwanted food left at the back of the freezer.
(Photo: A woman sews buttons in Mumbai. Credit: STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, the frugal life. When is it better to get by with less? |
| 0:12.9 | I don't like to think of it as frugality. It's more of a philosophy and living the good life. |
| 0:18.0 | Frugality just happens to be a very efficient path to a happier life. |
| 0:22.0 | And for those with a financial reason to say, could we perhaps do better storing our food? |
| 0:27.8 | Every second day has UFOs in their freezers. I beg your pardon? Unidentified flying objects in their |
| 0:35.8 | freezers? No. UFOs are the unidentified frozen objects. |
| 0:41.4 | Uncovering the X-Files about a life of thrift. Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:48.3 | Now there's long been talk about peak oil, the point at which the amount of hydrocarbons available to us starts an inexorable |
| 0:56.0 | downward decline. But what about peak stuff? In a surprising intervention earlier this year, |
| 1:02.1 | Steve Howard, the head of sustainability at the Swedish furniture giant IKEA, said that he |
| 1:07.9 | reckons the apparently ever-increasing clutter of products in our lives has hit a high water mark. |
| 1:14.4 | I don't think we're there yet. My comment about peak stuff was if you take it the total material impact of society in the West, it's probably just about peaked. |
| 1:23.1 | But then if you'd say, well, we exist in that world too. But what we'll make sure that we do is, you know, |
| 1:28.2 | we will always say we'd like to act in the best interests of our customers. Strange, you |
| 1:32.7 | might think, coming from a company that still wants to double its sales by 2020. Strange, perhaps, |
| 1:39.3 | coming from any major company. It is surprising because certainly American society and global society is |
| 1:47.4 | really predicated on consumption, materialism, the idea that more is better, that consumption is |
| 1:55.4 | good for the economy. That's Andrew Yarrow, a senior fellow at Washington's Aspen Institute and author of Thrift, |
| 2:03.1 | the history of an American cultural movement. |
| 2:05.7 | In today's program, we want to look at how ready we are culturally in the developed world |
| 2:10.4 | to adjust to this new frugal living that people are talking about. |
| 2:14.8 | The idea that peak stuff isn't just a future aim, |
... |
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