Consuming against best interests of self and society
Michael Laxer at Rabble Ca was writing about Canadians but what
he says applies to North Americans including, in a big way, the middle class of
contemporary United States of America. Here’s some of what Laxer wrote.
Consume despite off-shored domestic economy
“This era of the new consumerism,” he says, “has been built
in large part by shipping the production of many basic consumer and
technological items ‘off-shore’ … [and to places with lax] labor laws.
At the lower end of the income
spectrum, this has had a depressing effect on wage growth.
It has also greatly diminished the
importance to the economy of the manufacturing sector’s relatively high paying
jobs.
It has meant that the economy as a
whole has become tremendously reliant, not only on the profit-motivated
corporate impulse to push production costs down in order to maximize return and
availability of product; but also on the societal impulse of people to acquire
these products ─ even when the products are not actually affordable, in both
personal and broader ways.
Consume despite less income
“In 1980 the ratio of household debt to personal disposable
income was 66 percent; that ratio is now in excess of 150 percent, amounting to
an increase in this ratio of 127.28 percent.
“In the same period, incomes of all family units in rose
from an average of $61,900 to $72,700 (2010 constant dollars), amounting to an
increase of 17.45 percent.”
“Individuals are in debt ─ in debt to an extent never seen in
(the country’s) history…. Much of this debt is invested in the ultimate
middle-class dream of personal home ownership, a debt backed by the government
as a dangerous, ‘tax-payer’-insured form of speculative stimulus.
“And that is only one side of the equation, only one side to
the story of how credit has been used to artificially sustain a middle-class
consumerist illusion on a continent that for decades has increasingly turned
away from the production of commodities.”
Consume using debt as collateral (debt on debt)
Spurred on by government-facilitated easy credit, [North
American consumers] also use credit to create lifestyles that would otherwise
be unavailable to them.
They are borrowing well beyond what used to be the
prime component of personal debt, home ownership. In many cases, they are doing
this by using their home equity as security.
Source
Final fantasies: The illusions of personal debt and Canadian
consumerism
(Michael Laxer), August 22, 2012,
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2012/08/final-fantasies-illusions-personal-debt-and-canadian-consumeris______________________________
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