Growth and overconsumption

I posted this already on Pandagon here, but had to remove all the links because it was being held up in mod purgatory, so I'm reposting it here with the links. Hope people find it useful.

It was inspired by something Amanda said in her post:

Here’s what’s sick about the whole thing---it wasn’t good, but spending is still up. That’s our economy for you---so growth-oriented that you don’t even need to shrink for there to be a problem. It’s bad if you simply don’t grow at a ridiculously huge rate. I fail to see how anyone could observe this attitude and think that we were facing anything but disaster.

My first response, and Mnemosyne's reply, are here and here, respectively.

Here's the linky part:

Mnemosyne: I've actually listened to "The Giant Pool of Money" twice, as well as the sequel, "Another Frightening Show About The Economy". I don't recall much mention of consumer overspending on that program: TGPoM struck me as more of a primer on what Mortgage Securities were, and why so many were created. Ironically, an article in the Columbia Journalism Review that lauds the program as highly as your brother does illustrates where the program falls short: TGPoM never mentions the deceptive techniques that mortgage originators used to convince people to take out insanely bad refinancing options.

Incidentally, that CJR article and this one by Michael Lewis (his first book was Liar's Poker, about his time on Wall Street in the late 80s) flesh out how mortgage CDOs were created in far less polite terms than the This American Life crew use.

Still, none of these pieces above are about what I was questioning: The assumption that consumerist spending is out of control (and is generally unhealthy for the economy), and the assumption that wanting growth in businesses is somehow a screwy way of running things.

we were leaning more and more heavily on consumers to bail us out, and with wages stagnant since the 1970s, it was all going to come to an end eventually.

This post by Krugman got me thinking that the "leaning on consumers" meme, while true to an extent (consumer spending was a greater proportion of demand with respect to GDP in 2007), doesn't illustrate any truly radical change in consumer spending over the long run (the increase in spending was less than 5% higher than it's average over the last 30 years). I also dared to wander over to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and this short paper (it's really short: seven pages with mostly graphs and two tables), which also does an amazing job of showing how our spending has changed over the last 40 years, has a longer timeframe than Krugman's article but shows consumer spending changing only by 5% over that timeframe, from 62 percent to 65 percent.

So basically, the economy has always leaned heavily on consumer spending. While doing this research, I remembered an article by Elizabeth Warren (now, thankfully, chair of the TARP Oversight Committee) that did a great job puncturing the notion that Americans are "buying too much crap". Shorter version: Home prices, as what's essentially a shadow private school system, and medical expenses are causing middle class families to be leveraged to the teeth (absolute necessities have gone from 54 percent of household income to 75 percent). That BEA paper also shows the nitty-gritty details, and verifies Warren's account.

The scenario of the newspaper industry that you linked to seems like a good example of what Amanda was talking about with respect to unreasonable growth expectations (though I think she misapplies it when it comes to retail, for the reasons I give above). I'm not sure what the answer is there, though it would make more sense for the stock price to drop, rather than the businesses to "eat their seed corn", so to speak. Also, fact that it's the Fourth Estate makes it more troubling than if it were a more routine industry in its last days.

This next part isn't from the original comment, but I think it ties in well: A friend of mine, Marc Meyer, gave his argument for why he doesn't recycle (you can read it here; .pdf file), and it boils down to "recycling is just a way for us to feel better about consumption. It's a sham". So, where I disagree with Amanda is in saying "we consume too much" (not true in the retail consumption way: 5% more than the 30 year average, and mostly on things like housing and health care), I disagree with Marc when he essentially says "we always have, and that's why we shouldn't do anything". If things like buying "less crap" take off, better stuff will be discovered, adopted, and then made and offered (i.e., not crap, though the definition of "crap" will almost certainly change), just as food in London improved as better cuisine was introduced by immigrants during the last two decades. Expectations that our economy will no longer be consumption based at all, however, are bound for dissapointment.