The New York Times story on the Bush Administration's stoking of the mortgage bonfire demonstrates a couple of interesting points about home ownership in the United States. The first is the fact that there is no "market" when it comes to housing, if you are deregulating and advocating policies that convince more people to borrow beyond their means when it comes to a mortgage. While it is a complete hypocrisy within conservative thought, to believe in a market but toy with the conditions that regulate it, it is not limited to them. The lack of a broad range of ideas regarding property ownership, which excludes everything from Libertarian to Marxist thought, suggests that the only viable parties buy in on this notion of encouraging home ownership at the expense of reasonable consideration of debt.
The other major flaw in this thinking is that it is also a policy that leads us in pursuit of more "stuff." Jerry Seinfeld, when he was first a stand-up comedian used to do a bit on how we got our "stuff," and how often we did not know what our "stuff" was, or how we got our "stuff." The mortgage bonfire, as the NYT calls it is the ultimate example of a focus on consumerism and materialism. The Bush administrations policy, in complicity with both political parties, focused on living out the American Dream through the things we have rather than the relationships we cultivate with friends and family. Instead of making home ownership a possible outcome of the American Dream, it was made a goal of it, and like Seinfeld, we wake up with a stuff hangover that then leads us to ask, as the president is quoted as saying, "How did we get here?"
It is refreshing to see many families focusing on spending time together, doing things with one another, rather than accumulating more stuff. It would be great to see more people considering their spending more consciously, all the way up to and including home ownership. The American Dream should be about the quality of our relationships in our communities and the world, not merely focused on the material world.
Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
21 December 2008
03 December 2008
Freaky Friday
America's long-term short-term problem strikes again. According to a report from NYSE reporters there was a strong uptick in sales on Black Friday, one of many U.S. days dedicated to consumption. The article talked about how $41 Billion dollars over the Thanksgiving weekend, up over 7 percent from the previous year. How is it that this is possible, as people stare down the barrel of one of the worst recessions in U.S. history?
One of the problems has to do with the fact that we are so focused on consumerism; Rostow (The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto Cambridge University Press, 1960) suggested that this is the highest form of economic development. Whilemuch has been written on economic development since then, I would argue that few concepts have become so ingrained in U.S. economic policy, as well as in our popular culture. One indication of this was the push from the Bush administration after 9-11 to convince people to continue spending, literally as an act of patriotism.
Recently we had friends up from Habitat for Guatemala, and they spoke about how the impact of the problematic global economy is immediate in Guatemala--doubling transportation prices, increased food prices and increased housing costs. People have had to respond immediately to transportation problems, or have suffered right away from increases in food costs. Luis Samoya, Director of HFH openly wondered when we would see the impacts of the recession, while he was already seeing it in Guatemala.
Two things are notable here. First, we live so well that we can be in denial longer than countries who have weaker economies. By this I do not mean that we live within our means, but our expectations are that we can continue to live beyond our means, and that things will eventually get better--even as we see people losing their jobs. One of the quotes I saw on television was (paraphrasing) "that since things were going to get bad, now was the time to get as much cheap stuff as possible on Black Friday." Americans do not have an economic cushion, we do not save enough, but we have a reality cushion which seems to prevent us from acting for long-term good.
We also have economic measures that continue to focus on short-term consumption as being necessarily good. Housing starts, short-term worker productivity, home sales, car sales, buying goods, etc. (and the list goes on) all are ways of measuring how well we are doing according to consumption. In the mid-90s, a group of economists began using an adjusted, Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)
as a way to include other measures of well-being into our thinking, rather than just focusing on GDP as our measure of economic well-being. You have to wonder, if we were using more of these indicators of the quality of life in our society, such as credit for volunteerism and housework, leisure time, encouraging lower environmental degradation and pollution, would spending on more things on Black Friday be important?
We need to a) decide what a good life is, and b) be willing to make conscious and proactive changes in how we reach those goals, rather than salivating like Pavlov's dog the minute Black Friday comes along every year.
One of the problems has to do with the fact that we are so focused on consumerism; Rostow (The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto Cambridge University Press, 1960) suggested that this is the highest form of economic development. Whilemuch has been written on economic development since then, I would argue that few concepts have become so ingrained in U.S. economic policy, as well as in our popular culture. One indication of this was the push from the Bush administration after 9-11 to convince people to continue spending, literally as an act of patriotism.
Recently we had friends up from Habitat for Guatemala, and they spoke about how the impact of the problematic global economy is immediate in Guatemala--doubling transportation prices, increased food prices and increased housing costs. People have had to respond immediately to transportation problems, or have suffered right away from increases in food costs. Luis Samoya, Director of HFH openly wondered when we would see the impacts of the recession, while he was already seeing it in Guatemala.
Two things are notable here. First, we live so well that we can be in denial longer than countries who have weaker economies. By this I do not mean that we live within our means, but our expectations are that we can continue to live beyond our means, and that things will eventually get better--even as we see people losing their jobs. One of the quotes I saw on television was (paraphrasing) "that since things were going to get bad, now was the time to get as much cheap stuff as possible on Black Friday." Americans do not have an economic cushion, we do not save enough, but we have a reality cushion which seems to prevent us from acting for long-term good.
We also have economic measures that continue to focus on short-term consumption as being necessarily good. Housing starts, short-term worker productivity, home sales, car sales, buying goods, etc. (and the list goes on) all are ways of measuring how well we are doing according to consumption. In the mid-90s, a group of economists began using an adjusted, Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)
as a way to include other measures of well-being into our thinking, rather than just focusing on GDP as our measure of economic well-being. You have to wonder, if we were using more of these indicators of the quality of life in our society, such as credit for volunteerism and housework, leisure time, encouraging lower environmental degradation and pollution, would spending on more things on Black Friday be important?
We need to a) decide what a good life is, and b) be willing to make conscious and proactive changes in how we reach those goals, rather than salivating like Pavlov's dog the minute Black Friday comes along every year.
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