Anne Applebaum has a fantastic piece in today's Post (she is on fire with her analysis right now) - her argument is that we have forgotten how to live frugally and therefore the economic crisis is hurting even more than it otherwise would. She uses the recent snowstorm in London -- and people's reactions to it -- as a metaphor (similar to her use, a couple of weeks ago, of the flight-landing-in-the-Hudson metaphor).
33. What things have I forgotten (or never learned) how to do because overconsumption has made life too easy?"Trudging around snowy London, it was impossible to escape another thought: Surely what's true of the weather is true of other kinds of unexpected change, too. People who no longer remember slow economic growth, for example, might not be able to cope with negative growth, let alone a severe recession. In London, it hasn't snowed much for 18 years, so no one owns a snow shovel -- and if they do, they don't know how to use it. In the United States, the economy hasn't really collapsed since 1929, so no one knows how to save string and tinfoil -- and if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with them. A whole set of skills, from cooking with leftovers to recycling bottles (not because it's green, but because it's thrifty) has been lost during two generations of prosperity, in much the same way the British have forgotten how to drive their cars through slush. The last time I went to have some shoes resoled in Washington, the cobbler told me he wasn't going to be in business much longer, so low had the demand for his services sunk. Does anyone know how to repair toasters anymore? What about television sets?
As I say, things look different to people in different places: I have no doubt that in those newly successful societies where folk memories of hardship live on -- Indonesia, say, or Ghana -- plenty of people still fiddle with broken toasters and televisions in their spare time. That's why, when recession hits, they'll be better off than those of us who have forgotten how to shovel snow -- or, indeed, have thrown away the snow shovel altogether."
