Papers typically have ginormous abstracts that should actually broken into multiple paragraphs.
I suspect you think this because papers are generally written for a specialist audience in mind. I skim many abstracts in my field a day to keep up to date with literature, and I think they’re quite readable even though many are a couple hundred words long. This is because generally speaking authors are just matter-of-factly saying what they did and what they found; if you don’t get tripped up on jargon there’s really nothing difficult to comprehend. If anything, your 69 word version reads more like a typical abstract I see day-to-day than the more verbose version you had earlier; way too much filler to be a good abstract. For example, sentences like these ones rarely show up in abstracts:
This post summarizes and reviews the key claims of said agenda, its relationship to prior work, as well as its results to date. Our hope is to make it easier for newcomers to get up to speed on natural abstractions, as well as to spur a discussion about future research priorities.
Or, put more bluntly, papers really just aren’t textbooks or press articles. They are written to be understandable to specialists in the field, and maybe adjacent fields (a PRL paper would be written to address all physicists, for example), but there’s simply no effort made towards making them easy to understand for others. Look at what I consider to be a fairly typical abstract: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05078
It’s really just ‘We designed A. It works like this. We describe A and associated subsystems in detail in the paper. We characterise A by doing B, C, D, and E. The performance agrees with simulation.” There are bad abstracts everywhere, of course, but I disagree that they’re the norm. Many abstracts are quite reasonable, and effectively just say ‘Here’s what we did, and here’s what we found’.
The way the term ‘consumerism’ is used in your quote in the first bit does not seem to be the usual usage, so it feels a lot like equivocation to me. Consumerism is not consumption. Consumerism is not even just buying stuff that serves no purpose other than to make your life better. Consumerism is specifically buying frivolous stuff. Because of that, the first two paragraphs seems like useless window-dressing to me. No one is arguing that consumption is bad, I just ate lunch and it was delicious, now let’s move on from that strawman.
With regards to frivolous consumption, there is a problem with regards to the definition of frivolous. I think the best way to think about this is to recognise that human wants and desires are quite malleable. Because of this, things that don’t actually materially improve your life (eg. give you a good chance of living longer, free up significant portions of time, etc.) and instead are purchased primarily because buying the item gives a burst of pleasure, are fundamentally useless. Sure, having this item makes you happier, but so does just about any action that you can convince yourself is valuable. An example of such an item might be a fancy branded mechanical keyboard with just the right switches. There is no fundamental reason why such a keyboard would make me happier than, say, spending some quality time with my family, even though personally I do desire such items. The assumption in your quote is that frivolous purchases still provide conveniences, but I would argue many items really really don’t! Buying a new iPhone every time your contract expires does not provide any new convenience over, say, a battery swap. You might be able to have fun playing with new games, or features, but I had way more fun playing PS2 games with my friends decades ago than I have on any modern phone game; it really doesn’t matter. Neither do mechanical keyboards; if anything, the longer travel distance might worsen RSIs.
It is also important to recognise that due to the hedonic treadmill, you don’t derive long-term enjoyment from buying things. After a while you get used to it; losing the item would bring you sadness, but the continued existence of the item no longer brings joy. Because of that, buying a durable item (eg. fancy keyboard) is actually far more similar to activities that bring transient enjoyment (hanging out with people) than one might imagine.
Now, if there are no negative externalities, none of this would matter. After all, the universe is cold and uncaring, why not have some fun, etc. However, there are. I mean, there’s basically the whole climate thing going on, and the whole microplastics things, and producing more stuff has costs to society as a whole. However, even if we ignore that, if we zoom out a bit, there are costs. Society as a whole as some maximum level of productivity given by our total amount of technology, labour and human capital, land, and actual capital (eg. accumulated machinery, etc.). The more of this productivity is directed towards producing useless shit, the less we can direct towards actually making the world better, advancing technology, helping people, etc. Because of this, I strongly believe that if there is any consumption that provides utility that can be equivalently substituted by non-consumption, that consumption is a net negative for society. This is not to say I am a magical person of magical will-power. I buy shit that’s useless. However, I recognise that I bought a thing that brings be less joy and wonder than a walk through the park after a spring shower, and maybe I should remind myself to do that more often.