This article about shifting consumption patterns was interesting, but I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, and if the things it talks about indicate much of anything, and if they do, what - http://www.nytimes.com/... Apparently as consumer demand goes down people do things rather than buy things; the general slant of the reporting seems to be that this is good for people but could be bad for the economy. If it is both, clearly some people are losing out economically, so that leaves me wondering what they are supposed to do. If they start doing things rather than buying things (because they don't have money anymore after demand for whatever they did fell through) does that cause a chain reaction and hurt someone else, and is the situations sustainable?
If anyone thinks that materialism is a major problem facing American society this article probably comes as great news; but for anyone who wants the economy to recover it might come as bad news; how should people who oppose materialism but would like to see the economy continue to grow respond to it? Is swearing off any interest in economic growth a reasonable stance to take, so long as people are emotionally/spiritually/morally uplifted by the things they decide to do when they stop buying things? Since the policy debate has revolved around restoring economic growth, and because it looks ( and is) totally crass to ask the unemployed to find happiness in non-material things when they cannot even feed their families, these are awkward questions.
As an aside, museums and movies do cost money, and crafting requires supplies, so a lot of the activities which people are taking up don't necessarily mean a total collapse in consumer demand, but they probably are a reduction.
I think it is good that people are "doing more" as the article puts it. Most likely they'll be more interesting and better socialized as a result, and it can't hurt to be able to find ways to make life pleasant in spite of the poor economy. Is it bad that these people aren't buying as many things? Obviously it is for the people who made and sold the things they bought, at least until those people find other work, whether created by the private sector or the government.
Does what this article talks about provide a framework for getting out of the recession? I don't think so, but I also think it's wishful thinking to ask consumers to end the recession entirely on their own; if they barely saved money before a recession, how can they be expected to save anything and increase demand during one? I suppose that's why the government should stimulate the economy. But once consumers have the capacity to increase demand to pre-recession levels, what exactly should they do so this doesn't happen again? For starters, it shouldn't have taken a recession to get people to spend more time doing things with friends and family; hopefully the economy, and life, after the recession won't be the same as they were before. But if no-one buys anything, then the recession won't end. In that case, would it be better to have a smaller economy in which people don't consume as much than to go back to high consumption and almost zero savings but also the risk of ending up in a recession again, i.e. through new bubble economies?
I don't think I have many answers to the questions this article raised; in some ways I feel like a smaller, but more reasonable economy would be a good thing, but how do we transition to that without leaving lots of people behind and generally stagnating? Would this lead to a lost decade or decades, and if so, would the loss be to everyone, the economy as something abstract, or only the people who did best before the recession?
The economic climate before the recession left a lot to be desired, with bubbles, low savings, inequality, &c. On the other hand, simply overcoming "affluenza" and radically restructuring the economy doesn't look promising, especially for the unemployed. It's certainly possible to get very self-indulgent and fanciful about extreme economic downshifting - Adbusters magazine is full of this fantasy for people who like spending ten dollars per magazine, and Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy does something like this - but while such thinking is probably always bound to come across as wacky, in a recession it seems just as callous as Phil Gramm's "mental recession" remarks did.
Finally, anyone who reads this should have read Krugman's column in the Times and Douthat's (if anyone reads this first, that's nice, but I encourage a look at priorities) on how the recession might end, or how something might be mistaken for its end, and on what recession means more broadly. Both were good reading.