Multiple Historians on: Saving the World, Without U.S. Consumers
If Americans don’t start buying a lot of stuff again, can the world economy be saved? What’s the global Plan B? These are fundamental questions at the summit of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations in Pittsburgh.
In previous global downturns, Americans have come to the rescue, getting out their credit cards and buying up what the rest of the world produces. “Our spending is currently equal to the entire economies of China and India added together and then doubled,” as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out, representing the single biggest chunk of the world economy.
But the American consumption option may not be available anymore and may also not be desirable. Is there another model, like the one outlined by the Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen? (At Dot Earth, our Times colleague Andrew C. Revkin has covered this discussion in depth.) Meanwhile, why have consumers in other countries — like China and Germany, which produce far more than they spend — failed to step up to the plate?
Positive and Negative Consumption
Lawrence Glickman a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, is the author of “Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.”
Throughout the 20th century and into this decade, commentators have predicted or encouraged a “return of thrift.” Time after time, however, restraint has lost against pent-up demand following recessions and depressions.
A major exception was World War II during which restraint on consumption was mandated by government policy, and strongly abetted by consumer activists, who were among the biggest advocates of rationing and the policies of the Office of Price Administration. Shortly after the war ended, however, America went on a massive and extended buying binge, whose parameters were largely shaped by a state policy favoring home buying, educational expansion, and an enlarged warfare/welfare state.
Historians are better at analyzing the past than predicting the future, but I think it’s safe to say that history provides little solace for those who hope that lasting restraint will emerge from the current recession. So much wealth has been lost in the last two years (especially in real estate and equities) that it may, in fact, take some time before spending reaches the levels of the early years of this decade...
End the “Throwaway” Culture
Regina Lee Blaszczyk is a visiting scholar in the Department of the History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of “American Consumer Society, 1865-2005: From Hearth to HDTV.”
Americans have always been consumers, spending their money on purchases and accumulating possessions that say something about themselves. Consumer society has never been static, but it has changed dramatically over the past 150 years. One central transformation that is relevant to the G-20 policy debates is the shift from the Victorian notion of a “treasure chest” consumer culture to the contemporary idea of a “throwaway” consumer society.
Like us, the Victorians wrestled with social upheavals that made them feel like their world was spiraling out of control. And they, like us, found comfort and connection in material consumption. Victorian consumers spent a larger percentage of their incomes on what they considered necessities, and they took pride in those purchases. People looking at old photographs of Victorian interiors sometimes recoil at the clutter: the patterned carpets, needlepoint pictures, horsehair sofas, and china bric-a-brac.
But what contemporary Americans might view as excess, our Victorian ancestors valued as badges of success. No one in Victorian America threw away a suit of clothes after one season. No one rushed out to buy a new parlor set after a few years...
Read entire article at NYT
In previous global downturns, Americans have come to the rescue, getting out their credit cards and buying up what the rest of the world produces. “Our spending is currently equal to the entire economies of China and India added together and then doubled,” as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out, representing the single biggest chunk of the world economy.
But the American consumption option may not be available anymore and may also not be desirable. Is there another model, like the one outlined by the Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen? (At Dot Earth, our Times colleague Andrew C. Revkin has covered this discussion in depth.) Meanwhile, why have consumers in other countries — like China and Germany, which produce far more than they spend — failed to step up to the plate?
Positive and Negative Consumption
Lawrence Glickman a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, is the author of “Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.”
Throughout the 20th century and into this decade, commentators have predicted or encouraged a “return of thrift.” Time after time, however, restraint has lost against pent-up demand following recessions and depressions.
A major exception was World War II during which restraint on consumption was mandated by government policy, and strongly abetted by consumer activists, who were among the biggest advocates of rationing and the policies of the Office of Price Administration. Shortly after the war ended, however, America went on a massive and extended buying binge, whose parameters were largely shaped by a state policy favoring home buying, educational expansion, and an enlarged warfare/welfare state.
Historians are better at analyzing the past than predicting the future, but I think it’s safe to say that history provides little solace for those who hope that lasting restraint will emerge from the current recession. So much wealth has been lost in the last two years (especially in real estate and equities) that it may, in fact, take some time before spending reaches the levels of the early years of this decade...
End the “Throwaway” Culture
Regina Lee Blaszczyk is a visiting scholar in the Department of the History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of “American Consumer Society, 1865-2005: From Hearth to HDTV.”
Americans have always been consumers, spending their money on purchases and accumulating possessions that say something about themselves. Consumer society has never been static, but it has changed dramatically over the past 150 years. One central transformation that is relevant to the G-20 policy debates is the shift from the Victorian notion of a “treasure chest” consumer culture to the contemporary idea of a “throwaway” consumer society.
Like us, the Victorians wrestled with social upheavals that made them feel like their world was spiraling out of control. And they, like us, found comfort and connection in material consumption. Victorian consumers spent a larger percentage of their incomes on what they considered necessities, and they took pride in those purchases. People looking at old photographs of Victorian interiors sometimes recoil at the clutter: the patterned carpets, needlepoint pictures, horsehair sofas, and china bric-a-brac.
But what contemporary Americans might view as excess, our Victorian ancestors valued as badges of success. No one in Victorian America threw away a suit of clothes after one season. No one rushed out to buy a new parlor set after a few years...