To better understand the idea of how income classes correlate to their consumption habits, the chapter provided a re-coding of the income levels to provide the follow four classifications: struggling, sustainable, consuming, over-consuming. The focus of the discussion was placed on the over-consuming class, and it would be interesting to take the time to make the similar investigations of the struggling, sustainable, and consuming classes alike. However, the investigation of the over-consuming class provided a new perspective on just how disproportionately able those with high incomes are able to consume on a grand scale. This consumption has been generally shielded from the impacts of these behaviors, but the advent of public awareness of the harmful impacts of global climate change are critical to moving those individuals from the over-consuming behaviors to the voluntary sustainable efforts that those with much less income are forced to behave at. North America and the EU contain the majority of the over-consuming individuals, which means that policymakers in the area of sustainable development and progress should place a particular focus on these areas of the world, and the lawmakers of these nations should understand their disproportionate impact that their citizens’ behaviors have had on the overall health of the planet. Further, they should begin to look at promoting voluntary adoption of less-consumptive behaviors that can both help the nation in its own sustainable development efforts, but help the international effort to combat systems-wide problem, chiefly anthropogenic climate change.
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