I had a fun time with this week’s essay, “The Excesses of Affluence.” My research took me to strange and exotic places I’ve never set foot in before — like Mikasa, a store that sells stemware and china, Claire’s, a shop that caters to the tween girl demographic, and Dollar Tree, an emporium for cheap, plastic goods imported from China. The unifying theme of these visits — along with stops at the Goodwill and the Henrico County landfill — is America’s addiction to hyper-consumption.
Americans buy far too much useless “stuff,” to borrow comedian George Carlin’s phrase: stuff that either wears out quickly or stuff that we lose interest in. This deluge of possessions fills ever more space in ever bigger houses, supports a burgeoning self-storage industry, feeds Goodwill and other charities, and winds up in the landfill. The waste is all the more mind bloggling when you consider how little it contributes to the sum of human happiness.
But the accumulation of stuff has a price: The debt service of American households has reached 14.53 percent of disposable income, a record high achieved during an era of persistently low short- and long-term interest rates. Simultaneously, the United States ran an unsustainable $818 billion balance of trade deficit last year. At some point, foreigners will withhold their cash, U.S. interest rates will rise, the consumer debt burden will spike to incredibly painful levels, and the era of frivolous, excessive hyper-consumption will come to a wrenching end.
Until then, excessive consumption of cheap and unnecessary material goods will require excessive consumption of energy to manufacture, transport and store them, which translates into more pollution. If the global warming scare doesn’t get you, maybe the brown cloud (pictured above) emanating from China will. Not only have we outsourced our manufacturing to the Middle Kingdom, we’ve outsourced our pollution. But pollution respects no national boundaries. There’s no escaping it.
And what does this accumulation of junk buy us? Only fleeting gratification — a sensation more than offset by the anxiety caused by too much debt (just see all the ads for debt reduction and consolidation when you type “consumer debt” into Google) along with the steady degradation of the environment.
This is not a problem that government can solve. The addiction to hyper-consumerism calls for moral reform. One individual after another, one family after another, must take it upon themselves to make more responsible decisions, one after another.