In short, consumption drives the economy. That this economic fallacy is still widely held and promulgated is a shocking indictment of the appalling state of what mainly passes for economic thought in our newspapers.
Consumption drives nothing.
It is, as the classical economists termed it, the extermination of value . Therefore consumption grows out of production and not the reverse. This is why the great consuming nations are also the great producing nations. You cannot consume what has not been produced. This is made clear by modern economists who point out that the real cost of growth is forgone consumption.