We’ve now seen a belated dawning of awareness that – outside mining – the Australian economy is pretty stuffed. Or sluggish, if you prefer. But the commentariat have finally caught up with LP bloggers.

Anyway, it’s interesting to consider the significance of a blog in The Economist of all places floating the possibility that:

people may just be sick of buying new stuff. Or at least of buying the kinds of new stuff that the consumer economy of recent decades has been based on producing.

The post references an interesting piece in the New York Times, arguing that there may have been a structural shift in the US economy, driven by debt aversion. “The old consumer economy is gone, and it’s not coming back.”

The obvious counter argument to the proposition that there has been a secular shift in consumption habits is that, as the Economist blogger says, “more useful data would have to come from behavioural economists who work on consumer motivation”. Or sociologists!

Yet, if we think back to the generation that grew up during the Great Depression, it’s clear that shifts in behaviour and attitudes driven by economic adversity persist after that adversity passes.

There’s also a confluence with – at least among some parts of the populace – a return to ideas of making and repairing stuff, a resistance to the culture of planned obscelence, coming together with technological improvements in the quality of goods. Cultures of slower living, of household production: both are emerging.

David Leonhart in the NYT thinks this all implies the need for a different sort of economy, one where consumer spending isn’t the engine of growth. The issue I see with the sort of Schumpeterian predictions of new vistas for capitalism to conquer emerging out of economic crisis is that these vistas simply aren’t on the horizon. In a sense, both mass and niche production and financialised mayhem have been tried, and failed.

Interesting times.

NB: Thanks to Mark for drawing the Economist link to my attention.

This year, my New Year’s resolution is that everything in my house must be either useful, beautiful, or both. If successful, I will waste less money and leave a smaller eco-footprint, simply by cutting out unnecessary spending on unnecessary products.

But I’ll be honest: while those are two goals that I very much aspire to, the only reason I am confident of keeping to it is because of a third reason, which is the joy I get from having things that I love, and the relief I feel once I finally rid myself of things that I don’t love. It’s a strategy that usually works well for me. I don’t do well with being told what to do, even when I’m the one doing the telling. So I’ve given up doing that, and instead look for better, more enjoyable alternatives. Rather than force myself to eat less dessert, for example, I buy better, more satisfying desserts that don’t leave me wanting more when I’m done.

Christmas is of course an excellent time to do this, providing an immediate source of both good and bad examples. The satisfaction that comes from a genuinely useful or beautiful item compared with the disappointment of taking home something that you neither want nor need has provided the necessary motivation.

So this year, rather than going down the self-control route in order to deal with the guilt of over-consumption and an always messy house, I’m just going to celebrate great purchases to positively reinforce the idea that bad and pointless ones bring no joy. Hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll also be over the guilt of hanging on to things I don’t like or need.

So sorry, Clive Hamilton, this year I’m going to embrace my inner materialist and celebrate glorious stuff. There are many things that are sometimes used (or abused) as happiness substitutes: food, drugs, gambling, shopping, sex… But there’s no sense in denying the intrinsic pleasure that one can find from these things when they’re simply enjoyed for what they are. Sometimes it’s guilt or self-denial that can lead to feelings of dissatisfaction and overconsumption in an attempt to find the pleasure.

Satisfaction usually comes from fully enjoying something, and only doing it for as long as it is enjoyable. It works for all the other things, so why not the purchasing of material goods? Below are some things I acquired throughout the year that make me happy to know are mine. Some are gifts, some were wonderful bargains, one in particular made a fairly large (but tax deductible) dent in the credit card. But none of them involved guilt, annoyance, mixed feelings or remorse. All of them have me swearing off ever buying something that’s not quite right ever again. Not when there are so many good things to buy instead.

Bernard Keane has a very informative piece in Crikey today wrapping up all the hysterical coverage of Kevin Rudd’s Christmas fiscal stimulus spendathon. Random vox pops on tv news shows and a News Limited online survey, naturally, prove that the payments will be saved rather than spent, thus confirming Malcolm Turnbull’s talking points, of course. Forget Treasury estimates that 70% of the stimulus will be spent.

What’s going on here? I think partly we’re seeing the 24 hour news cycle at work – anything that happens has to be pronounced instantly a success (boring) or a failure (exciting!) on the basis of scant anecdotal evidence and off the top of the head commentary. God forfend that we could wait for the December retail sales figures. But the media/politics/commentariat bandwagon will have moved far on by then. An alternative hypothesis from Keane:

Much of this commentary seems to be a reflection of resentment toward the Government — a resentment made sullen and cranky not merely by Kevin Rudd’s persistent high polling figures but by the Government’s failure to provide any basis for criticism. In its bank guarantee and early stimulus, the Government has stuck close to not merely the advice of the Reserve Bank and Treasury but most economic commentators. Quite what the Government was supposed to have done to ensure the entire stimulus would be spent isn’t really clear — perhaps just dispatched a small brown envelope filled with unmarked $100 bills to every retailer in the country, although then they probably would have saved it rather than spent it.