Jul 25 2008
My letter to the New York Times
A few days ago I read a column by conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks. In “The Culture of Debt”, Brooks digs into the current economic downturn – the subprime mortgage debacle, the credit crunch – and points a finger not just at the political and corporate elites, but at ordinary Americans who have racked up obscene levels of personal debt. Brooks writes,
America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded.
Some of the toxins were economic. Rising house prices gave people the impression that they could take on more risk. Some were cultural. We entered a period of mass luxury, in which people down the income scale expect to own designer goods. Some were moral. Schools and other institutions used to talk the language of sin and temptation to alert people to the seductions that could ruin their lives. They no longer do.
If you follow Brooks’ bony finger, you’ll see he points directly at “a day of now the reckoning” which is now dawning. Foreclosures in every neighborhood, anxious people lining up at their banks. Quite a comedown from a market that hit record territory just a few months ago.
And then Brooks made an interesting observation:
The turn in the market punishes many of those seduced by financial temptations. (Sometimes capitalism undermines the Puritan virtues, but sometimes it reinforces them.)
This is what struck me – got me imagining what it would be like if we were all more or less individually dedicated to reducing our out-of-control spending, the use of our gas-guzzlers, our wasteful attitude towards natural resources…what would that look like? I wrote:
David Brooks (“The Culture of Debt,” column, July 22) makes a compelling case for a return to Puritan values as a curative for the hemorrhagic economic fever now bleeding out of most every American home. The very market that was fueled by hyper-consumerism now may punish us and force a return to a “culture of thrift,” Mr. Brooks suggests.
The immediate impact of his suggestion is an avalanche of questions: What would a modern puritanical economy look like? Can we be prosperous without spending on credit? How much punishment would it take to overturn decades of irresponsible social behaviors?
These are interesting questions, no?