Too many stores? (21 Feb 2008)

In a recent Slate piece, Daniel Gross considered whether America has too many stores and whether the current recession (or near recession) will spur an anti-retail backlash.

Developers opening new malls this year clearly timed the economic cycle poorly. And the cultural cycle isn't helping matters any. The extreme consumption of this current gilded age has inspired a backlash. In December, hedge-fund bil­lionaire Ray Dalio ran full-page advertise­ments in newspapers urging Americans to eschew Christmas gifts and instead make donations to charity. Maybe he's just run out of things to buy. Or maybe he's surfing the zeitgeist. "There's a glut of stores," says Judith Levine, author of Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. "Our physical, intellectual and emotional and psychological space is filled up with consumption." Levine laments the wholesale transformation of open spaces into enclosed retail environments (like, say, Barnes & Noble superstores, where you can buy Not Buying It). And the in­cessant bombardment of advertising may be inspiring a backlash that pushes people to consume less. The anti-con­sumer freegan movement—urbanites who try to get by through recycling, scrounging, and foraging—are taking it to the extreme. These modern Henry David Thoreaus have opted out of the whole rot­ten capitalist system. Working 60 hours per week and chasing job promotion "for the sake of buying the latest crap off the Sharper Image store shelf is no way to live," says Adam Weissman, spokesman for Freegan.info. (Hey, dude, one might say the same about diving into Dumpsters in search of day-old bread and discarded futons.)

Clearly, Gross is skeptical of just about anyone's anti-consumerism, as most commentators (me included) tend to be. It's not that we aren't inundated with advertising and retail spaces. Of course we are, and these things are virtually inescapable in America. The problem is that anticonsumerism becomes an identity pose that is either manifestly hypocritical or deeply reliant on the same individualistic values that support consumerism in the first place -- one advertises oneself as an anti-consumer, making that one's brand on the marketplace of social approval. Not to get all poststructuralist, but when you found your self-concept on not shopping, you are in effect deeply invested in shopping. In some ways, you'd be better off making your shopping as unconscious as possible, which is actually one of the chief gripes against consumer society -- that it makes us take shopping as an activity for granted. We are already inside consumerism, and it's virtually impossible to construct an identity outside of it -- it's the only viable language of identity that we learn in the West.

Since experiences have been reconceived as products -- by the tourism industry, by retail psychologists who want to sell -- its hard to undertake any activity that doesn't feel like shopping, that doesn't feel as though it has been mediated to us via marketing. This is bad enough, but it seems to have broader ramifications, in that stores in and of themselves become a soothing sight, destinations and havens independent of any particular shopping need. Their presence becomes reassuring and familiar, a reliable guide to the sort of place you are in, and the sort of place you want to be. We understand places, then, mainly through retail (and what it tells us of demographics), rather than any other natural or geographic considerations. So the need fulfilled by the rapid proliferation of stores is not merely a matter of the specific things they sell but the marking function the stores serve in telling us what sort of place we are in. And shopping in such stores can be as much about endorsing those demographics and belonging to them as actually buying anything.

Cost of children (23 October 2006)

Economic determinism at work: My disinclination to start a family has always seemed to me a deeply personal decision based on my gut reactions to things like baby talk and steaming piles of human feces. But it may be that my reactions are colored by economic realities: In this LA Times editorial, Jacob Hacker applies the argument he presents in The Great Risk Shift, which is summarized in a series of posts on the Washington Monthly's blog, to the costs of raising children and the fact that households of single people now outnumber those of marrieds.

The family used to be a refuge from risk. Today, it is the epicenter of risk. And, increasingly, families are a source of risk as well. Because it takes more work and more income to maintain a middle-class standard of living, financial shocks are more threatening for families. What happens when a woman leaves the workforce to have children? What happens when a child is chronically ill? What happens when a spouse loses his or her job? And what happens when families fall apart?
We are not used to thinking of children as an economic liability, but the facts are clear. According to 2005 calculations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, raising a child to age 18 will cost almost $237,000 for a middle-income family. And that leaves out the upward-spiraling college tuition that is now a required ticket for admission into the middle class. Fully one-quarter of "poverty spells" — periods in which family income drops below the federal poverty line — begin with the birth of a child.
Spouses, of course, do not equally share the investment of time and money that raising children entails. Women still mostly care for the child — and bear the greatest cost. Their careers are most likely to be disrupted by family events. If they work, their jobs are most likely to be low-paying and with poor benefits. And they are most disadvantaged when families fall apart.

In short, raising a kid is expensive and extremely risky and could result in your spending many sleepless nights wondering how to pay bills and avoid the dire poverty you've set a course for. Perhaps if we had a society that truly valued family, we'd have governmental protections like they have in France, where they also have a rising birth rate and are free from hyperbolic worry of demographic disaster.

Of course we are encouraged to embrace the ideology that families are made by love, not money (which even a cursory knowledge of the history of the family disproves), and that it's callous to think of the expense of a child, to put a price tag on the miracle of life. People who prefer to treat themselves -- with free time, hobbies, solid nights of sleep, financial security, the luxuries of dining out or taking in cultural events without the stress of penny-pinching or baby-sitter hunting -- instead of make sacrifices for children are regarded suspiciously as selfish monsters (probably liberals and hence hedonistic sybarites) whose lives will ultimately lack meaning. Women are suspected of ignoring their "biological clock" and suppressing their natural maternal instinct, though as Brad Plumer explores here the maternal instinct is something of a recent invention. "In her new book, Laura Kipnis points to a related concept—the idea that mothers and infants 'bond' at birth. According to Diane Eyer, the whole notion is actually something of a scientific fiction, first pushed in the 1970s, when a large number of women where entering the labor market for the first time and messing up cultural conceptions of a woman's place in society. Many people still believe that mother-infant "bonding" exists—articles are still cropping up in the news about how painkillers and the like affect the process—but to a large extent it appears to be invented." Plumer cites this passage from Kipnis's book, The Female Thing:

With the industrial revolution, children's economic value declined: they weren't necessary additions to the household labor force, and once children started costing more to raise than they contributed economically to the household, there had to be some justification for having them. Ironically, it was only when children lost economic worth that they become the priceless little treasures we know them as today. On the emotional side, it also took a decline in infant-mortality rates for parents to start treating their offspring with much affection—when infant deaths were high (in England prior to 1800 they ran between 15 and 30 percent for a child's first year), maternal attachment ran low. With smaller family size… the emotional value of each child increased; so did sentimentality about children and the deeply felt emotional need to acquire them.

As children become more expensive, the more acute becomes our need to feel that they are worth it emotionally. The amount we love children, then, may be correlated to how much hardship they give us, how gratuitous they are to our material well-being. To use a totally trivializing comparison, this is like when I blew my allowance money on a copy of the truly awful Frankie Goes to Hollywood double album Welcome to the Pleasure Dome because I swallowed the hype about it. (I learned some hard lessons about the British music press and the costs of juvenile Anglophilia, but that's another story). I had to pretend I liked it harder and longer because I spent so much ($14 in mid 1980s teenage dollars) on it.

But if Hacker's right, the ideology of treasuring children and yearning for them only goes so far; for bourgeois folk like me, it may stop when children are no longer merely a personal inconvenience but a threat to our accustomed station, when having a kid means surrendering our class prerogatives. In response to the threat children pose, we may begin to exaggerate the other nuisances they present to solidify our resolve.