Yesterday I took a good look at the statistics for this blog for the first time in a while. It turns out that I’ve got readers from all sorts of places. The majority of you are Americans, unsurprisingly (I’m based here in New England). But to my amazement, apparently over the past year this site’s gotten hits from 66 other countries. A lot of those are from Canada, the UK, and India. But it also looks like there’s someone in Singapore following regularly, for instance, and I’ve gotten a smattering of hits from places like Ivory Coast, Moldova, and Iraq. Pretty awesome.

This site is pointless without its readers, of course, and thus I owe everyone who’s followed it over the past two-and-a-half years a debt of gratitude. The truth, however, is that readership has seemed to hit a bit of a plateau recently. If you’re reading this, consider it a request to invite your friends to check out the site and sign up for email updates on the left-hand side of the page.

This may be obvious, but it’s worth saying again: Although Fruit Tree is labeled a “Baha’i economics blog”, and a lot of what’s discussed revolves around the Baha’i Faith, this site is not for Baha’is per se. The whole point of starting the blog was to attract everyone who feels that spirituality, ethics, and civility need to be play a role in our material lives. So please keep that in mind when you think about whom to invite to join in.

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Just as a follow-up to the last post, here’s Mario Monti, the Italian prime minister and one of the key players in European sovereign debt drama, on Fareed Zakaria this past Sunday:

I believe the reason why democracies are very poor these days to handle this is that democracies, like markets, have become much too short-termist. The combination of very important media of frequent elections, of even social networks, which tend to polarize people towards more extreme positions. The combination of these factors has the consequence that, in democracies, politicians — professional politicians tend to reject or only to embark into solutions that imply short-term costs and longer term benefits with great reluctancy only when they are faced with an actual huge crisis. So the problem, to me, is how it’s possible to reconcile classical electoral democracy, which, after all, we love, with a longer term perspective. So I think democracy, in the long-term, in our countries will survive if it comes to be associated with leadership, will not survive if democracy plus media brings to us more and more followship rather than leadership.

Once again, this is more than just about Greek politics. Democratic failures are happening everywhere, with differing levels of severity. Monti gets that the world has changed, and that these changes have made these failures more common and more costly. But the car still needs a driver. For democratic failures to occur, it helps to have a the morally flexible politician to espouse a cause which he/she knows isn’t in the interest of voters, and a morally lazy voter not to demand something more honest.

I originally wanted to write a single blog posting on this topic, but it started to get really long. So I broke it up into  three parts. Here’s the first one below. I hope you enjoy.

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Over the years I’ve heard a lot of people – very often Baha’is – assert that our current level of consumption is not sustainable, whether on the level of the country or of the whole world. The phrase “overconsumption is the problem”, or some variance of that, often comes up in our discussions about what’s wrong with the economy. I thought I would write a blog post on what exactly I think this means, and share my thoughts on where this idea has merit and where it doesn’t.

Why am I writing this? It’s for a couple of reasons. First, I have always felt that usually when people make statements like these, they lack specificity and actual scientific thinking, and because of that they’re just not very useful. Second, my sense is that in the current economic environment – our ongoing recovery from a devastating world recession, talk of the need for consumers to start spending again, environmental problems, higher gas prices – the question of consumption is naturally on people’s minds. That the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought certain critiques of capitalism  to the forefront certainly has helped.

First, let me lay out exactly what I think the “overconsumption” idea is actually referring to. I think we’re talking about at least three different commonly-expressed themes here:

Overconsumption theme #1: “Eventually, we are going to run out of natural resources if we keep consuming them at this rate.” This is the idea, for instance, that as Chinese people (or any other people) become wealthier over time, they will all drive gas guzzling cars like we do, and this means we’re doomed to a fate of either running out of oil, horrible climate change, or both.

Overconsumption theme #2: “Economists’ view of the world encourages selfish, voracious consumption, which is bad for the economy and, more generally, society.” This is the notion that the economists and their discipline are selfish and cynical, and that this has resulted in a corrupt economic system.

Overconsumption theme #3: “We’re bombarded by messages urging us to consume, and promoting the notion that happiness comes from the collection of material things. All this leads to is misery.” In other words, this is the notion that the promotion of a “consumerist” style of living is bad for society.

I think there are various degrees of merit in these. Let me tackle #1 only, and I’ll leave the other two for future posts. As always, I would be very intent on reading what this blog’s readers think in the comments section. Continue reading →