Forward to the Past

Over the past twenty years the productivity of North Americans has declined, while the standard of living has continued to go up.

Back in the fifties, Americans produced more cars than anyone else, built the Interstate highway system, built planes, boats, televisions, stereos, refrigerators, boots, tools, atomic bombs, washing machines, as well as putting up houses and everything else. Then an erosion of jobs began, taking industries away from North America and moving them to low-paying countries. First transistor radios in Japan, then other countries such as Mexico, Indonesia, and Taiwan. In the last 20 years or so, China has become the major producer of our consumer goods. Meanwhile we have lost most of our industrial base, along with all the jobs they provided. Those jobs have been replaced with burger flipping jobs or part time jobs, including the "Wal-Mart Greeter" jobs.

The reason we didn't react to the decline in productivity is that our standard of living has not declined along with it. Actually, our standard of living, measured in consumer goods, has gone up, not down. This seems to fly in the face of logic. The less we produce, the more we have. We now have more cars than people, more TV's, bigger houses, with more bathrooms and garages than ever before. We go on more vacations to more exotic places, we own bigger cottages ever further from their home, and we have more toys such as RV's, boats, planes and motorcycles.

How is it all possible? Well more credit is available for one thing. We know not where this credit originates, but we do know that when we go down to the bank to get a mortgage, we are approved more easily than before, we lie about our income more easily, we get lower down payments and lower monthly payments for anything we buy. So part of our easy life is easy credit. Another part is our inheritances. Those hard-working and frugal (that ugly word!) parents who made it through war and depression are dying and leaving surprisingly large sums of money to their children who promptly use it to leverage more credit to ratchet up their standard of living once again.

I'm not going to go into why we even want a higher standard of living. I'm going to assume that it's natural and even without the inundation of commercial advertising, we would still want to have more, bigger and shinier stuff.

Maybe something needs to be done at last. Let's consider the latest market crash, and bankruptcy of Chrysler, General Motors plus the millions of jobs lost and houses foreclosed. We need to get serious about reducing our standard of living. Or it's a sign that we need to start being more productive - meaning building things, or at least creating jobs that are more productive than Wal Mart Greeter.

Actually, would it be so bad if we went back to the standard of living of our parents? High school kids would not automatically have their own cars. Wal-Mart Greeters would not be living in three-car garage, six bathroom mansions. In the summer we would go to the nearest beach, not the furthest one on Earth. I should not have to go through the whole spiel, since at least some of us remember life in the fifties and sixties. By today's standards, the way we lived in the sixties would be considered utter grinding poverty. But if we went back to the material level of comfort of those times would we really suffer all that much?