I'm supposed to be researching for my thesis, so of course I'm dreaming up all the other ways I could be doing social science.
I'm guessing that this one would be an economics paper.
So I was cleaning stuff off my desk (I do this very often), and for minimalism's sake I threw away a kleenex that had been barely used. Once it had landed in the trash I thought to myself that, faced with the same situation a few years earlier, I would have definitely pocketed the kleenex.
My family was very frugal growing up, a sort of self-imposed frugality, and kleenexes were the kind of thing we children only encountered at school. At home it was toilet paper rolls all the way, which meant that school-pilfered kleenexes (especially the extra soft Puff ones) were hoarded in our pockets and reused to death.
My behavior now is relatively wasteful, but judgments aside, I think my introduction out of "poverty" occurred sometime in high school.
The summer after my freshman year I attended an entrepreneurship camp at Stanford. We lived in the dorms and ate at the dining halls. For me this was the first time encountering all-you-can-eat-ness (aside from the buffets my father literally made all-you-can-eat) - and it was exciting, all this good American food. I had been accustomed to finishing everything on my plate, and while I still tried to do that (even nowadays), a few times I was overeager in my helpings and some of my food ended up in the trash. But I didn't feel bad because of the sheer abundance of food - nobody was going to miss a few bites.
And this taught me that being wasteful has very little to do how good or bad a person is but rather what level of material abundance they were accustomed to.
For those of us who have experienced a marked rise in our surrounding level of material abundance (often correlated with our disposable income), how eagerly have we adopted new (and greater) spending/wasting habits? I assume a direct relationship between all four factors: 1) surrounding level of material abundance; 2) amount of disposable income; 3) total expenditure; 4) total waste.
Of course, a research paper on this direct relationship would be like DUH. I would be more interested in the consumption trends of immigrant parents. I argue that they are less likely to adopt greater spending habits and even more less likely (more less likely!) to adopt greater wasting habits, despite a very marked rise in their surrounding level of material abundance. I assume that the age at which they arrived in the US makes a lot of difference, maybe education level, maybe number of children, maybe the culture which they still self-identify with (and the disparity between the level of material abundance in host and home cultures).
I wouldn't be able to include my father's data though. He is just a cheap bastard.