The purpose of art (visual, music, stories in various formats) as far as I’m concerned, is communication. The message communicated could be how things are, how they really are, or how they should be, but if there isn’t one, or if the message is designed to be incomprehensible for those who aren’t in on it (like most modern art), then it isn’t really art, or at least isn’t really useful. The reason art is important is that most people’s beliefs are based on their life experiences, and new knowledge that doesn’t correspond with those life experiences tends to be discarded. I can post all the non-fiction essays and arguments, and all the spreadsheets I want here, but very few people have enough of an open mind to wade through them, understand them, and alter their beliefs based on them.
A story or other work of art, however, can serve as a kind of artificial life experience, one that broadens perspectives beyond what any given person experiences directly themselves. Properly disguised, fictional stories, songs, and visual art can therefore change more minds than carefully researched collections of facts, because the recipient of the message comes to the new perspective on their own, as if it were their own idea, not something forced on them by someone else. Such epiphanies don’t bruise the ego. I bring this up now because there is a message that needs to get out there, given the economic conditions Americans are likely to face in the next few years: that they can be happy, and live fulfilling lives, without going deeper and deeper into debt to spend more and more money on more and more goods and services that they may no longer be able to afford.
People certainly have been getting the opposite message, over and over again – from the advertising industry. The message is that all kinds of non-material needs – status, belonging, fulfillment, even sexual gratification – can be attained, and only attained, by the purchase of some good or service. And that embarrassment, humiliation, exclusion, and social failure can only be avoided through such purchases. This isn’t stated in a straightforward way. Rather the message is presented in a series of stories, images and sounds.
And Americans have responded. The material lifestyle of the past two decades, particularly in the growing suburbs where most middle-income and affluent Americans live, has been dominated by the idea that more and bigger is better. The average new home built in 1970 had 1,500 square feet of floor area, compared with nearly 3,000 today. The “Econobox” cars of the 1970s have been replaced by large SUVs. The globalization of trade and production has substantially reduced the cost of many goods, relative to what many Americans earn. As a result, used clothing has become virtually un-sellable in the United States and is typically shipped abroad, while a tidal wave of ever-cheaper stuff has been filling American homes, leading to a growing mini-storage industry. Televisions have grown in size even as motion picture screens have shrunk. The average American is eating a few hundred more calories a day, as portion sizes have expanded.
Projecting this trend forward, one might assume that in 50 years most Americans thought to be in the middle class will drive their own buses, live in 10,000 square foot houses with 10 bathrooms, and own personal warehouses to store stuff that is used, at most, once a year. In social science, however, linear projections are seldom accurate over the long run. In fact, the “more and bigger” trend has gone into reverse several times in American history.
One hundred and twenty years ago, as the industrial revolution threw up a new class of wealthy people and made more and more goods affordable to all but the poor, there was another “more and bigger” burst like that of the past 20 years. In the Victorian era, virtually every square inch of the typically very large homes was full of lots and lots of things. These large houses, however, became white elephants once middle class Americans could no longer afford the domestic help required to clean and maintain them. And once everyone had lots of things, having lots of things was no longer thought to be a lifestyle to aspire to. In reaction, you had the Arts and Crafts idea, with smaller but more meticulously crafted homes (bungalows), and fewer but higher quality and more unique things. The 1915-built rowhouse I live in, in fact, has a few design touches similar to the Arts and Crafts bungalows.
There was another cycle from 1950 to 1985. The burst of wealth and productivity after World War II, the creation of a large scale mortgage market and subsidy, and the development of inexpensive materials like plastics and artificial textiles once again brought more and more space, and more and more stuff, within the means of more and more Americans. In the folklore of the 1950s and early 1960s, before people began fleeing from the cities, one reason they were moving to the suburbs was to obtain a separate bedroom for each child, an off-street parking space for the large family car (with tail fins) and – most importantly – more closets. By 1970, George Carlin pronounced that a house was just a place to put your stuff, and Alvin Toffler (in Future Shock) predicted that people would soon own their own helicopters, and use clothes just once and throw them away, based on a linear extrapolation of the trends of the time.
The energy crisis, the environmental movement, and the deep recession of the 1970s threw that trend into reverse. Older things with more natural materials, “you couldn’t build it today” housing, and smaller spaces once again became more popular. It was, among other things, the beginning of a return to the cities movement that continues, and least among a subset of Americans, to this day. Since I was born in 1961 and was age 12 to 18 from 1973 to 1979, the 1970s were my formative years. This may explain my point of view. Those who became aware of the wider world in the 1990s must have a radically different idea of what life is like; I have a feeling that they don’t know what might hit them.
Today, most Americans perceive that a less-space, less-stuff lifestyle means less affluence and a lower quality of life. But as the arts and crafts era ideas indicate, that isn’t necessarily so. People need to be reminded of this because the “more and bigger” ethic is environmentally damaging, economically wasteful, and incompatible with life in a place where space is at a premium – like New York City. Worse, it not only elevates the material over the social and spiritual, but it also devalues material things themselves – because they aren’t special or meaningful anymore. Americans haven’t just become extreme materialists, they’ve become bad materialists.
The environmental damage of the more-and-bigger ethic is clear. Americans aren’t just filling landfills with things that are bought, little used, and discarded. They are also locking themselves into vehicles that require more gasoline to move, and houses – mostly empty – that require more energy to heat, cool, and light. Since houses and motor vehicles are expensive, these decisions will be costly to reverse, so the demand for energy falls little when the price of energy rises. Clearly, the trend toward more and bigger cannot go on forever without a huge increase in the supply of energy, and supply constraints have already emerged. And even if those constraints were removed, the environmental consequences of using that much energy, not only in the United States but also across the world where people are trying to emerge from poverty, could be dire.
More and more of people’s money has been going to things that may be nice to have but really don’t add much to one’s life. In the language of economics, the “marginal utility” of the additional stuff and space is less than the “marginal cost.” And while some Americans are wealthy enough that their level of spending doesn’t really matter, most are struggling to keep up. The share of income going to savings is way down, and so is the share of income going to charity. People are working longer hours, and are deeper in debt. Clearly there is some kind of psychological compulsion to live in a way that seems, to me, to be economically irrational.
Recently the “more and bigger” trend has become radically more expensive. For the past two decades, the United States has run an enormous trade deficit with the rest of the world. In effect, poor but growing countries such as China have been lending the United States money so its consumers could import — without exporting as much in return. The result has been an explosion of consumer debt – credit cards, second and third mortgages, leasing cars rather than buying them. Not only are people not saving in order to live the lives they believe they must, but they are going deeper and deeper into debt to keep up. Eventually this whole financial edifice was bound to collapse. And now the collapse is happening. Credit is being restricted to the level of debt that can actually be paid back, and the American standard of living is about to be cut back with it.
Those who read the news have heard any number of stories on how Americans are being forced to reduce their lifestyles to adjust to the higher cost of energy and the decreased availability of loans. According to the Washington Post “Energy and food prices are soaring. The housing market continues to collapse. Government revenue is falling, and taxes are rising. Airlines are jacking up fares and fees while reducing service. Banks are pulling credit lines. Auto companies are cutting production once again. Even investment bankers are losing their jobs. The tendency is to see these as separate developments, each with its own causes and dynamic. Fundamentally, however, they are all part of the same story — the story of the global economy purging itself of large and unsustainable imbalances that for a time allowed many Americans to think they were richer than they really were.”
“Is all this the end of the world?” this source continued. “For the richest country on the planet, certainly not. But it does represent the end of a decade or more during which Americans were permitted and even encouraged by the rest of the world — and by their own leaders — to live way beyond their means. As a result, the United States has gone from being the largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor. For the first time since the early 1980s, Americans will have to endure several years of uncomfortably slow growth and uncomfortably high inflation as the U.S. economy regains its balance and creates a foundation for more solid and sustainable growth.”
So people are going to be much worse of in a consumption sense for some time. The question is how are they going to feel about it? People have been manipulated into tying their self worth to their spending for so long, the coming economic adjustment may lead to extensive psychological harm. That’s where a new vision is required, one that allows people to decide that much of what is no longer attainable wasn’t worth having after all and, in fact, was something of an embarrassment. If nothing else the next generation needs to be warned to avoid the choices made by those older, and allowed to feel that they have not been denied a decent, comfortable, and rewarding life, a life that they can be proud of.
What is the near term future of America today? One person posted this on The Housing Bubble Blog recently, one of many, many stories like it popping up all over the country.
“The housing crisis hit me closer to home. I learned over the weekend that my parents are headed into foreclosure. They’re only a few days away from the 60 day late mark. My parents don’t have a toxic mortgage or anything but they do live beyond their means. My dad’s almost 62 and he’s been out of a job since Dec. 2007. Like typical boomers they have no savings or retirement plans whatsoever.”
“Somehow my parents went through life and never learned how to save or trim expenses. They have all the bells and whistles. They have two cars, use lots of gas, eat lots of fast food, have the most expensive cable package, live in a 3 bedroom house for 2 people, buy lots and lots of cheap imported trinkets from Wal-Mart; give their grandchildren toys everytime they seen them, tivo, netflix, tru-green lawn service, cell phone, cable internet, internet home phone, and the list goes on and on. If they pared every expenses down to the bare minimum they could ’save’ the house on my mom’s salary but they simply are not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to do so. And trying to explain this to them makes them vehemently upset.”
“I’m not in a position to help them out financially right now because I use every extra penny I have to pay off my private student loans.” The loans are variable rate, and might explode at any time. “If I wanted to reduce my extra principal payments I could easily cover their mortgage every month but I don’t know if I want to. They’ve got 25 years left on their mortgage. Long term, when they live solely off social security, they won’t be able to afford the mortgage anyway.” The commentor plans to help his parents as best he can once they accept that things have to change.
Others on that blog, and elsewhere, report similar situations with other friends and relatives, maxed out on credit cards, not paying all their bills, unsure how they can live once their credit is cut off, owing far more than their house is worth having borrowed against it multiple times and spent the proceeds. Multiply this situation by millions and you have the Untied States of America.
And the only response thus far has been for the government to promise some of the future earnings of younger Americans to people overseas, borrowing money to send stimulus checks so those no one is willing to lend to anymore can keep spending. And with that money spent, we are back in the same situation we were a few months ago – sinking. Do we keep sending checks to keep the spending going, promising the future income of today’s young Americans as the collateral?
How have Americans, the hardest working and most talented people in the world, come to this? This is a nation Benjamin Franklin, apostle of thrift, would not have recognized. A bankrupt nation full of bankrupt people, economically desperate despite affluence.
Somehow the constant stream of “I want for me now” messages has to be countered. People need to understand that once basic needs are me, upsizing one’s material lifestyle is as likely to lead to misery as to joy. It’s a one-way ratchet, with every new good or service soon taken for granted on the way up, but sorely missed on the way down. And if the way up is funded with borrowed money, the way down is inevitable. Unless someone else is sacrificed so people can go on living in the way they are accustomed, and feel entitled to. The next few years could be a lot nastier than they need to be.