Economics of Consumption, U.S.

Poverty

Despite the ability of many Americans to access markets in everything with a click of the mouse or the swipe of a card, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the 2008 poverty rate at 13.2 percent of the U.S. population. Many U.S. families live just above the income level considered minimally sufficient to sustain a family with basic housing, food, clothing, and medical needs, and they move in and out of poverty from year to year. Forty percent of the U.S. population has been in poverty since 2000. The ability to meet basic consumption needs in the United States is unevenly distributed, with minorities and urban residents at higher rates of poverty. Both the absolute levels of poverty and the fact that the burden falls on the poor is underreported in media, almost making the problem invisible. In the United States, one can avoid poverty altogether by simply avoiding pockets of poverty and pretending that they do not exist. Media, advertising, and marketing dollars are directed toward the hyperconsuming, sovereign U.S. consumer.

Sovereign U.S. Consumer

The sovereign U.S. consumer is potentially the most sought-after customer on the planet; relied upon for world economic security; pampered and abused by marketers; seduced and plundered by banks and financial institutions; prodded, poked, and analyzed by researchers; and treated simultaneously as brilliant diviner of taste and unwary sucker. The U.S. consumer makes up approximately 18 percent of the spending in the world. Consequently, changes in U.S. consumption are important to the world economy. Nowhere was this more evident than during the worldwide financial crisis of 2008–09. The financial crisis was due in large part to the housing crisis and subsequent credit crisis in the United States. U.S. consumers who had been living on money borrowed from inflated home values had gone on a consumptive binge for nearly seven years, then suddenly recoiled and left the marketplace. Consumers, fearful of the future, stopped buying and started saving, businesses cut production and stopped borrowing, and banks ceased lending. With decreased borrowing, lending, and investment, consumption continued to decline globally.

Marketplace ramifications for employment around the globe are dependent upon the U.S. consumer. The types of jobs dependent on consumption have changed. Information technology and communications advances have eliminated many desk jobs and have made existing workers more productive. This means that unless new jobs are created or population growth reverses direction, the decline in U.S. consumption implies a global glut of goods with no one to buy them and, simultaneously, a surplus of workers. The irony of the economic situation of the early 21st century is that the Keynesian solution to replace missing consumer spending with government spending has met with substantial resistance. In order to keep or replace the U.S. consumer, marketers resorted to the most extreme forms of exploitation, via invasive entreaties into personal privacy, hidden fees, deception, courting and entrapping younger and younger children, and infantilizing all forms of public and private discourse in order to sell more goods.

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