Yglesias on a “good economy” versus a “promising economy”:
Reading Paul Krugman’s pushback against recent optimism about the economic situation it occurs to me that the whole debate over “green shoots” or “glimmers of hope” is a little bit mis-framed.
I think what everyone agrees on is that the situation is out of free fall mode and that’s good. This is basically what the green shoots amount to. But the metaphor of a green shoot implies not just something that’s good, but something that’s promising.
Later, he mentions something about attaining a level of growth that isn’t necessarily sustained by American consumer debt-spending. This got me to thinking about how things will be different, post-recession. I’m not so sure that things will, in fact, be all that different.
After 9/11, we all thought things would change — that Americans would somehow unify. In those days, we all looked back at media coverage of shark attacks, for example, and laughed at how culturally frivolous we had become. That was all going to change, we thought.
My point is that debt spending probably won’t change all that much. The economy depends upon consumer debt, whether we like it or not, and selling expensive crap to people who can’t really afford it is the cornerstone of 21st Century marketing, with or without a recession. And although I don’t have data to back this up, I seriously don’t believe that people who are being impacted by the recession are striving for a new and different way of living after it’s all over. I tend to believe that too many people are hungering for a return to the way it was before. The way that got us into trouble in the first place. I hope I’m very wrong.
