Economy: An Epidemic of Entitlement

Because my work takes me in and out of lots of different universes, I'm often treated to happy coincidences and overlaps in subject matter. Lately my work on two separate projects has served to underscore what many of us have long sensed about the hollowness of our consumer culture. I'm simultaneously interviewing employees for a large investment bank and working on a magazine article about people's spending habits. So that has meant talking to more members of the financial industry than most free-spirited yokels like myself would typically enjoy. But through these conversations, it kind of feels like I've been taking the temperature of our enonomy -- or, if you like, our economic soul.

One might expect these denizens of Wall Street, these grubbers-after-luchre, to defend the status quo. Yet I've been rather startled by much of what they tell me. Four points stand out in particular:

1. Our economy is really circling the drain. Expect things to get worse, and soon.

2. What's happened (subprime, credit crunch) is attributable, basically, to irrational exuberance, unchecked greed, and a belief in limitless growth with no consequences.

3. At the very root of our economic woes lies . . . television! Yes, several financial professionals have confessed to me a conviction that television has rotted out our ability to be realistic about what we want and need. Many of you will, of course, have felt this way all along -- but to hear the folks in the belly of the beast come to embrace this rather old-fashioned notion must be indicative of something . . . and I wish I could say that that something were progress (methinks it's the opposite). An interesting sub-point here, as pointed out by one of my financial advisors: We're used to acknowledging that TV advertising creates "needs" that we didn't know we had, but the boob tube has moved into more insidious terrain in recent years. Now the programming is just as troublesome. "We see intimately into the lives of people who have much more than we do, and that gets normalized in our minds," she said. "We think we should have everything that the people on TV do -- not just that it would be nice to have, but that we actually deserve it."

4. This leads to what more than one of these experts has called "an epidemic of entitlement." Maybe we're awakening to the fact that we're hooked on stuff, addicted to consumerism, but you know what? The entitlement germ has settled in. And as Daniel Lanois sings, it's "hard to have and then have not." Once your thinking has been changed in these subtle but effective ways, and you've come to believe in needs that are really just desires, a radical shift of thought and behavior is required in order to try to undo the damage. Step One: Kill your television? This advice was given to me not by some hippy-dippy granola out in Sedona, but by a New Yorker with "CFP" after his name, who goes to work every day in a suit and tie.

Of course the largest point here is this: individual behaviors (and neuroses and attitudes) affect the bigger picture. If our economy stands now on wobbly legs, it's not necessarily just because of enormous geopolitical events, Wall Street shenanigans or even massive trade deals; of course these factors have their place, but let's not misunderestimate the role of individual decisions which, in aggregate, can conspire to weaken a whole economy, especially one whose very foundation is no longer built on manufacturing anything but rather on the pathological consumption behavior of its people and on the moving-around of money. Flimsy foundations, indeed.