socratt, it’s probably not a great idea if we all cut our spending back to near zero. But I agree that we really could have used a serious change in what we spend our time doing, and many would have accepted and even welcomed that. However, the folks steering the economic ship are doing everything they can to minimize any change.
It’s a bit like those few months after 9/11, when people would have accepted making common sacrifices in efforts to make us safer. Instead, most people were encouraged to spend like nothing happened.
Clearly, we cannot forever keep consuming material goods like we we have. With China and India on the road to match our consumption, we must all consume less in material goods. That’s OK in most respects. I know I am most happy with better quality, not more quantity, in almost all aspects of my material consumption.
That means we need to continue expanding our ability to entertain and enrich each other. And nurture a small but very important sector of our economy devoted to advancing our technology. I am not much interested in mandatory restrictions on the hours that people can work, but I do think that 200 years from now people will look back at us and consider us deprived of recreational time. We should consider cultural changes that make less time at work more acceptable. (But full-time retirements will probably have to be cut back. We can’t have a younger generation doing nothing but taking care of the baby boomers as they play golf and need diaper changes.)
