Any discovery which renders consumption less necessary to the pursuit of living is as much an economic gain as a discovery which improves our skills of production. (Kenneth Boulding) I. INTRODUCTION The total of resource consumption (throughput), by which the economic subsystem lives off the containing ecosystem, is limited - because the ecosystem that both supplies the throughput and absorbs its wastes products is itself limited. The earth-ecosystem is finite, non-growing, materially closed, and while open to the flow of solar energy, that flow is also nongrowing. Historically these limits were not generally binding, because the subsystem was small relative to the total system. The world was empty. But now it is full, and the limits are more and more binding - not necessarily like brick walls, but more like stretched rubber bands. The total flow of resource consumption is the product of population times per capita consumption. Many people have for a long time urged the wisdom of limiting population growth - few have recognized the need to limit consumption growth. In the face of so much poverty in the world it seems immoral to some even to talk about limiting consumption. But populations of cars, buildings, TVs, refrigerators, livestock, and yes, even of trees, fish, wolves, and giant pandas, all have in common with the population of human bodies that they take up space and require a throughput for their production, maintenance, and disposal. Nevertheless, some think the solution to human population growth lies in increasing the growth of populations of all the commodities whose services we consume. The will automatically stop population growth if only per capita consumption grows fast enough. Arguing that one term of a product will stop growing if only the other term grows faster, is not very reasurring if it is the product of the two terms that is limited. Will the average Indian's consumption have to rise to that of the average Swede before Indian fertility falls to the Swedish level? Can the eroding and crowded country of India support that many cars, power plants, buildings, etc.? Never fear, the same people who brought you the demographic transition are now bringing you the Information Reformation, a.k.a. the economy. McDonald's will introduce the info-burger, consisting of a thick patty of information between two slices of silicon, thin as communion wafers so as to emphasize the symbolic and spiritual nature of consumption. We can also dematerialize human beings by breeding smaller people - after all if we were half the size there could be twice as many of us - indeed we would have to dematerialize people if we were to subsist on the dematerialized GNP! The Information Reformation, like the demographic transition before it, expands a germ of truth into a whale of a fantasy. While all countries must worry about both population and per capita consumption, it is evident that the South needs to focus more on population, and the North more on per capita consumption. This fact will likely play a major role in all North/South treaties and discussions. Why should the South control its population if the resources saved thereby are merely gobbled up by Northern overconsumption? Why should the North control its overconsumption if the saved resources will merely allow a larger number of poor people to subsist at the same level of misery? Without for a minute minimizing the necessity of population control, it is nevertheless incumbent on the North to get serious about consumption control. Toward this end, a reconsideration of the meaning of consumption is offered below. II. CONSUMPTION AND VALUE ADDED When we speak of consumption what is it that we think of as being consumed? Alfred Marshall reminded us of the laws of conservation of matter/energy and the consequent impossibility of consuming the material building blocks of commodities. …