chicagodads

Our economy is changing. That, of course happens every generation or so. I grew up in a service econ; my parents in a manufacturing econ; my daughter, supposedly, in a knowledge econ. Nobody knows whether or not that is true. The “information superhighway” was to come to fruition a decade ago. But that bubble, as they say, has burst.

I’m at the laundromat right now (Saturday night), wishing I didn’t have to spend money before I spend more money traveling across the states. On the “idiot box” is a truly inane movie called “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It’s a unqualfyingly bad Disney movie about a young college student (I think?) who is bribed by his dad to come home for the holidays. Families, apparently, don’t even work without greed.

And that’s the problem with our financial system. It’s not so how the economy manifests itself in each twenty year seaon, but in what these ‘economies’ are based on. For the last fifty-to-sixty years the underlying factor in the way we make and share money has been through massive unrelenting consumption. We work for the manufacturers, they give us a certain amount of money, we buy their goods, we can’t afford to keep buying their goods with the money they give us, so we build a line of credit so that we can continue to buy what we don’t really need in the first place. It all doesn’t add up.

What makes me (and I suppose a lot of people) fearful is that things can’t and won’t last like this for long. The transition that we have to undergo is in some ways easy - change our habits: buy less; pay off our creditors. But then changing those habits would mean less stuff bought and therefore, less money to pay wages. Our entire economic system is so tied-in to these habits that being healthy means more people will be laid off quicker. But if we don’t change our habits, the ultimate price may be delayed, but it will be much, much larger and explosive. And a legacy of debt is not how our children should remember us.

So, yeah, Merry Christmas.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS