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Things Are Getting More Expensive. That Could Be Good.
The end of artificial cheapness
Things have been too cheap for too long.
I know that’s a weird thing to write in the middle of a period of sharp inflation. God knows I complain about it all the time — my family is tired of listening to me grumble after I get home from the grocery store.
But it’s true: things are probably too cheap, and it’s a problem.
The American consumer economy has, for decades, been oriented toward making stuff cheap at the cost of our other priorities. It’s such an ingrained value in our society that I hadn’t even thought about it before I read George Packer’s excellent book The Unwinding, which he wrote in response to the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath.
In the book, Packer talks about how goods used to be more expensive during the golden age of American capitalism. This was because workers were pretty well paid, and the goods were built to last. But, over time, the people who run our economy began to think of Americans as consumers more than producers. Cheapness was the order of the day. Packer explains the transformation this way:
Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters. The small towns where Mr. Sam had seen his opportunity were getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there, too. The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company’s bottom line.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that making sure stuff is cheap is more important than having access to quality products, more important than dignified work, more important than sustainability, more important than building a fair society.
In many ways, the cheapness that we enjoyed over the last few decades was artificial. Somebody was paying the price for the things we were consuming. It just wasn’t the American consumer.
