>Reminds me of a magazine article I read a few years ago about a family that decided that, for a year, they wouldn't buy anything that wasn't "consumable." That is, they could buy food and toilet paper and similar things that were necessary and got used up, but no clothing or housewares or anything else. The kicker was that they got all those other things by having them handed down from people who bought them. I was pretty annoyed that the writer didn't make the point that they only could do this because other people helped them to do it.

Isolated social experiment is impossible.