I’ve been studying and pondering economic issues since about 1990 when I was a grad student at Pratt in Brooklyn. Over the years, I came to many conclusions that have come to disastrous fruition in the past year.
I’m an architect by education but have spent the majority of my professional career as a university professor. In the early years of my teaching, I wrote several papers exploring the economics of housing with a focus on the steady rise in house size and the corresponding decline in the personal saving rate. It could not have been clearer to me that bigger houses and rapidly declining savings were connected, and as I said, I fully expected it to end badly, very badly. In those papers I coined the term, “inflation of needs” to describe the overstuffed lives we were adopting and paying for by spending down savings. During this time, our economic growth was mostly fluff – stuff that no one really needed. It didn’t seem prudent to build an economy around inflated needs.
The economics of the trend toward bigger houses, more stuff and less saving was only half of my concern. These ever bigger houses were being built in soulless tracks sprawled across the farmland that once ringed our towns and cities. The whole operation was ugly and depressing. I began to think of our country as one big “economy of waste” with true “quality” as the element most lacking in our lives. Our government and the media would laud our rising “standard of living” – a quantitative measurement of the things in our lives, but what I desperately wanted was a shared national interest to improve our collective “quality of life.” Instead we flocked to the store promoting “Always Low Prices,” filled our carts with imported junk sold in multi-packs and now find ourselves wondering what went wrong?
The plan for a decade now has been to write a book titled, “A Search for Quality in an Economy of Waste.” The book would describe the problems just outlined and more importantly, I planned to detail a path for a better more sustainable higher quality of life for us all. Like many want-to-be authors, my book hasn’t happened, but a blog seems more accessible. The title, well, I think it is time to focus on the positive, so waste is out. The new focus of my effort is “The Value Added Economy.” So here we go.
