returning to Baudrillard

Now reading The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures by Baudrillard for the theoretical framework of my dissertation. A few phrases that made me pause...

'All societies have always wasted, squandered, expended and consumed beyond what is strictly necessary for the simple reason that it is in the consumption of surplus, of a superfluity that the individual - and society - feel not merely that they exist, but that they are alive.'

'...poverty consists, says Sahlins, neither in a small quantity of goods, nor simply in a relation between ends and means: it is, above all, a relation between human beings.'