The Death of Consumerism

Reich begins to paint the new picture of our economy with a clarity that's been lacking as of late while addressing the underlying assumption of the new found love of Keynes:

The first assumption is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Middle-class families continued to spend at a healthy clip over the last thirty years despite this because women went into paid work, everyone started working longer hours, and then, when these tactics gave out, went deeper and deeper into debt. This indebtedness, in turn, depended on rising home values, which generated hundreds of billions of dollars in home equity loans and refinanced mortgages. But now that the housing bubble has burst, the spending has ended. Families cannot work more hours than they did before, and won’t be able to borrow as much, either.

It's what's been missing from all these haphazard calculations in talking about the recovery packages that Congress and the Treasury have been passing and it's a big part of the reason that everything remains frozen: people have changed. Americans have wizened far quicker than anyone thought to the new era of what Thomas Friedman calls the Climate-Energy-Era, the death of consumerism and the new birth of frugal living and conscientious buying. We're certainly not completely there yet and educational outreach will be needed to fully prep the public for the coming shake-up of a system built on living beyond one's means, but it's a good sign.

What's not so good is that all of the assumptions about what will get this economy moving again have to be rethought; freeing up credit won't matter if people are cautious about using it (as they should be).

People have gotten smarter. Now the economy needs to catch up.

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