Overall, the Peck reading was pretty depressing. It turns even more depressing, however, when combined with the Cohen video and reading. When trying to draw positive side-effects from the economic meltdown, Peck says that it may lead to "a necessary end to an era of reckless personal spending." This spending is, however, the very thing that Cohen argues has been the underpinning not only of the entire structure of our economy, but of our conception of citizenship as well. Cohen argues that in order to avoid post-war depression, concerted efforts were made to reorganize the economy based on an idea of "consumers as citizens" - the idea that someone who always strives to buy the next best thing is doing good for the nation as a whole. This conception of citizens now underwrites much of our economic existences and even our political pursuits.
Contemporary American conservatism is largely borne out of an idea that the market can organize society better than the government can. The conservative view of the market, however, is made up of two jointly all-powerful groups: producers who provide supply and consumers who each provide demand based on their own preferences and interests and, in aggregate, support the most efficient and beneficial expenditures of capital. This economic aspect of citizens as consumers is an aspect that has been largely overlooked, even in this class. As Cohen demonstrates, it is impossible to separate the conceptions of consumer and citizen while obtaining any full conception of either.
As a result of this tie between citizen and consumer, however, one of the main beneficial side-effects of the economic downturn turns out to simply be another bad omen of the economy's weakness and a sign that the problems with the economy may not be saved by simply enacting a stimulus or tax cut, but could require a full societal effort to refound our economy, and our society, on a radically different conception of the economic role of a citizen.
Citizen Competence in American Democracy
I agree that the Peck reading was quite depressing and frightening, but maybe not too surprising. I never fully understood all the mechanics of the stimulus package, but I assumed that if the government is injecting money into the economy, then they are borrowing it from somewhere else; and I never quite grasped how in the long-run this would dig the country out of recession, but instead assumed that it would only put us back into deeper debt. Maybe Peck is not directly referring to deficit spending, but I believe that my initial feelings towards Keynesian theory align with his negative conclusions about the American economy. So, although frightening, I can't help but agree with Peck's dark foreshadowing that this recession is going to take years to get out of, and to disagree with Cohen's solution of deficit spending.
ReplyDeleteThe idea behind the stimulus (and pretty much all deficit spending approaches) is that injecting government money into the economy in the short-term will increase consumption. Some parts of the stimulus, such as the "Cash for Clunkers" program, aimed to directly incentivize individual spending, thereby increasing demands for goods and the overall economy. Other parts aim at businesses and try to coax them into expanding operations and create jobs. If a stimulus works perfectly, it increases the economy enough that the added benefit to the economy contributes enough to the overall tax basis that it is a net positive for the public budget. And there has been wide agreement among economists (including the Office of Management and Budget, Congressional Budget Office, and the Council of Economic Advisers) saying that the stimulus did actually help to soften the recession.
ReplyDeleteBut the implementation of the stimulus does show that even the current administration is still tied to the idea of a consumer as citizen, even if they wouldn't consciously agree to put it in those terms. We are still very much entrenched in a mass consumption-based economy, and changing that seems to be the only solution apparent to Peck. But this solution would require a fundamental shift in our understanding of consumers and of citizens, which would probably not be an easy shift, at least in the short to medium term.