On NPR the economic temperature-taking every day seems stuck in an unshakeable assumption:
Consumer spending is the only real necessary ingredient of economic health for the US and for the world. No possible thinking beyond that is - thinkable.
But what if there are conditions in the world make thinking the unthinkable absolutely imperative and we are completely ignoring this?
What if consumer spending isn't ever going to be the factor it once was, say back in the 50s and 60s?
Perhaps I have had an out-of-body experience. In a sense.
My wife and I have moved our household several times since 2000. Living in the same place for a while, we had both accumulated stuff, despite not really being into conspicuous consumption. I had a lot of newspapers and files full of zeroxed things I was holding onto, and we had materials left over from a variety of music and theater projects. We spent a month just sorting through this and we probably wound up making midnight dump runs to over a dozen local dumpsters, in addition to spectacular piles of garbage bags for the regular trash.
This, before we packed our truck; a process which took way longer than it should have. The next time we moved it was still difficult. I complained that the process nearly killed me.
Then, her mother passed away. In the house left behind, were some 60 or so years worth of things that she couldn't bear to throw away. Her father had been a doctor and a chief of staff with the VA, and their moving was paid for, so they kept stuff and just moved it. The two car garage was stuffed with unopened boxes from the last move, in 1980. There was a room in the house that required gymnastic contortions to get into because it had become piled high with things just thrown in through the barely openable door.
It took a couple of years to get to the point where an estate sale crew could come in and organize it into a sale, so that the mass of it could be reduced.
All this has created a kind of out-of-body or perhaps an out-of-consumer perspective. Going through the households of my wife's mother as well as my own when she passed away a few years earlier, was like an exercise in a kind of archeology of the 50s and 60s.
My wife showed me a cute picture of her in an Annie Oakley costume complete with guns in front of a Christmas Tree back in the '50s. We unearthed the same guns and the same costume from a box in the garage. There were thousands of experiences like that.
It dawned on me that what made the amazing consumer explosion of the 50s was a post war hunger for not just normalcy, but a kind of roaring, full throttle normalcy on a high of release from the bondage of the Depression era and WWII. It was also made possible by cheap gasoline. By 1974, I had my first car, a 1967 Chevelle Malibu bought for 500 bucks. I paid a low of 19 cents a gallon and drove the hell out of it.
What made this all possible was that after WWII, the east coast financial powers-that-be at the time were concerned about how the wartime mobilization of the manufacturing sector was going to be maintained, and what might happen if they slowed down. This was frightening. The prospect was that the Depression might come back, this time with no war to create an economic stimulus.
What was created out of this concern was the re-tooling of the war machine into a consumer machine. The term "Madison Avenue" arose out of the effort to utilize the new science of psychology to get Americans to quit saving money and instead, spend it. Millions were poured into product advertising. All of us kids in the fifties could sing any number of jingles because they were meant to be the sort of mind worms that you couldn't help but repeatedly repeat. Campbell's Soup is mmm mmm good. See the USA in your Chevrolet.
Go with the Goodness of Cheerios.
Now, there are garages stuffed to bursting with the resulting consumer production in a dizzying variety of things people had to have and would do anything to get.
Now there are estate sale businesses that do nothing but evalutate the value of things and organize sales so buyers can come and get attached to the things in the garage all over again.
Stuff that won't sell in such a sale, winds up on the shelves at a church charity where it might get pennies on the dollar from people browsing there.
If you look at this a certain way, you see people making stuff and then selling it. Then it is on a shelf in a store, or in a warehouse for a while. It is trucked between venues. At some point it is sold. Someone has it in their house for some years. Then it is resold, maybe at a garage sale. Maybe it is resold many times. At some point, it may wind up in a landfill. If it retains value as an antique, it may be resold down through the years quite a few times.
How much of the economy of the world is derived from making and selling stuff? Warehousing? Trucking? Reselling?
America has been so into stuff that something like 5% of the world's population consumes something upwards of 25% of the world's resources.
Since the 1970s there have been people pointing out that this is not sustainable in the long term. Up until now, those people have been about as welcome as tattle tales at an illicit teenage beer bash. However, the basic logic of the 1973 work "Limits to Growth" remains irrefutable.
In the midst of a serious economic downturn, the first priority is to get things back to normal. Stimulus spending and encouraging consumer confidence (especially in the run up to Christmas) is certainly a logical short term way of dealing with it.
But in the long run, it would seem to make sense to wonder if downsizing our post war consumer fixation on purpose before it just runs out wouldn't be prudent.
The price of gas at the pump is low, but coming back up a bit. In the long run, nothing will change the fact that a resource that took tens of millions of years to create naturally (under conditions which may not be repeated) has been about half used up in a little over a single century. Inevitably, prices will rise back up.
Considering the major place oil has in the economics of everything from food to plastics to energy, the pace of innovation needed to replace this may take longer than anyone can guess.
It is worth speculating that anything we consume may be similar. Resources that are renewable, like aluminum or plastics could be recycled to a higher efficiency. We waste a lot of stuff because we like the luxury of throwing stuff away after only one use. We don't mind fancy packaging because it caters to our sense that humans have never had it so good, so why not enjoy it?
That is of course, an essential element in the psychology of marketing to consumers. We can't really let go of the fantastic seduction of it all.
Meanwhile, the storage locker business is booming. Storage units are becoming fancier and more are being built, accounting for at least some relief from the sagging construction demand for housing.
The question that we must ponder, each and every one of us, as well as the economic or financial leaders in the public or private sectors, has to do with what now.
What alternative can there be to an economic engine based on consuming stuff? Is there one? Will the stuff economy run for a while as the developing nations become consumers? Will that give us time to figure out the answer? What does the world of the future after the consumption of resources has played out look like? Will we ultimately find a sustainable balance that can provide the entire human population with health and happiness? Can we foresee anything about how we might chart a course so as to get there with the least possible harm to the planet or the population?
I have seen some work on identifying the resource shortage problems, but not much on how to get to the place we ought to be. The biggest problem, as we saw with the publication of Limits in the early '70s was that the discussion gets shouted down by the deniers, making it very difficult to think beyond the initial problem awareness. Somehow we need to get beyond the shouters and our fixation on short-term fixes.