A flat-lining economy doesn't make us better people.
We're so lucky to be in a recession. Frugal living is healthier. Hard times are forcing us to cut back on restaurants and late-night entertainment for the simpler pleasures of home-cooked meals and evenings with friends. Instead of shopping as a way of life, we're learning to appreciate the goods we already have. The recession is helping us rediscover our roots and focus on the things that matter most: our families, friends, and communities. And recessions are green, to boot: less consumption will be less damaging to the environment.
These sentiments can be found everywhere. The recession is "good for the soul" according to some bloggers. It's a "corrective balance to the profligacy of the past decade," says the Globe's own editorial page. Commentators call it a necessary purgative for lives that have become spiritually bankrupt and for a culture marked by mindless consumerism. Unemployment, homelessness, and insecurity may be painful, but ultimately, we're told, they'll make us better people and the world a better place.
Nonsense. Recessions don't make us better people; they make us worse. An economic downturn won't be good for the environment; it will hurt it. If we really want to save the world, strengthen communities and families, and elevate people's souls, the best thing we could do is to get the bulls running again.
To some, the Great Depression has become a time of gauzy nostalgia, misremembered as the good old days when people cared for one another and placed their faith in God and country. Certainly there are heartwarming stories of folks who rose to the challenges of adversity. But anecdotes notwithstanding, it was a miserable time for most. Worldwide, slack economic conditions helped plant the seeds for the discontent that led to World War II. Those same conditions gave rise to fascism and anti-Semitism in the United States. People starved, 1.5 million families broke up as men left to seek work, and more than 200,000 children became vagrants.
So much for the salutary effects of recessions on family life and communities.
Recessions don't make us healthier. Morbidity and mortality figures, for instance, track closely with incomes. The richer you are, the longer you live and the less often you get sick. Recessions don't strengthen neighborhoods. Crime, for one, is far higher in areas where incomes are lower. Nor do recessions help kids. The brains of poor children, according to a University of California study released in December, are fundamentally different, "similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult." And frankly, unless your solution to environmental degradation is to wipe people off the face of the earth, the only way to clean up the planet is to have a strong economy. Whether it's wastewater treatment systems, smokestack scrubbers, or renewable energy, green living requires spending money on research and new technologies. Booming economies can generate such resources; those mired in recession cannot.
One can grant all this, however, and still wonder whether our wealth has somehow caused us to become morally impoverished. I understand the critique, typified by Carrie Bradshaw's Manolo Blahnik obsession. But Sex and the City was television, and TV is not real life. I would dare say the critics damning rampant consumerism would not level the critique at themselves. It's always everyone else they deem crass and shallow, yet I have no idea who those people really are. Up until the market crash, for example, charities were predicting the largest infusion of giving ever from the high-income baby boom generation. That's hardly selfish. Yes, people with extra cash like to buy things, but they also spend more on education and other opportunities for their kids. Again, that's not selfish.
Decades ago, psychologist Abraham Maslow argued there are "hierarchies" of human needs, ranging from the basic (such as food) to the exalted (such as art). It was only when people had comfortably achieved those basics -- when they knew they had housing, safe communities, etc. -- that most could then begin to realize higher needs such as love, self-esteem, and eventually self-actualization. If Maslow is right, recessions could rarely make us better people. During them, we're too preoccupied with simply getting by. It's only during the good times, when economies are humming, that we can ever become fully human.
Originally published in The Boston Globe Magazine, February 1, 2009.
