It’s sick, they tell us. We need an infusion of capital and credit to get back to the good old days of a steadily growing GDP, of booming sales on Thanksgiving Friday and Xmas, of low unemployment, and growth in average income and standard of living.
We need to get back to spending and spending and borowing and spending, to support all the products and services that are being offered. Consuming is good. Consuming is patriotic. We can measure the success of our lives by the quantity of waste we deposit in the land fill, of items bought and income earned.
“Here lies Joe Blow, a Good American Consumer. Old Joe bought 17 cars in his lifetime, 26 television sets, 237 pairs of shoes, 32 square yards of newsprint, 21 lawn mowers and snow blowers, three houses including one valued at 175,000 1986 dollars, and he raised his family to consume at a rate above the average. R.I.P. Joe Blow, a Patriotic Consumer.”
Is something wrong here? Are the most fundamental assumptions of our lives messed up?
Before we try to “fix” the economy, shouldn’t we be asking what kind of economy we ought to have? Someone, Socrates or Plato, said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Don’t we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to examine and test the assumptions underlying our lives and our economy?
Is a consumption-based economy good? Do we really want to go all out to stimulate a consumption frenzy? Or–should we chuck it all and get off here and try something totally different?
Remember: economists don’t tell us what is best or good; they look at the mechanics of what is, and assuming a set of parameters that are defined as desirable, try to tell us how to get there from here. They are not concerned with morality or goodness or human worth. They value things and people based on dollars and productivity and consumption.
