Redefining "Thrift"

Frugality.  Thriftiness.  These terms are being redefined by the NY Times as "dead weight". 

As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.

Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming ’80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990.

Never mind those government types that encouraged banks to give loans to those who couldn’t afford them.  Never mind the investors who spend too much money on too much risk.  No, you, dear person living within your means, you are the reason we’re in this mess. 

I’m sorry, but this reasoning is utterly upside down.  Instead of trash-talking responsible living, perhaps a recession is what we need to pare back some of the overspending we’ve been doing, personally and federally. 

(In fact, some economists say that we would normally have mini-recessions now and then that would serve to do these corrections little by little if the federal government didn’t manipulate monetary policy to keep them away.  Now, after other poor government decisions have come to a head, they’re all hitting at once.)

One of these excesses is arguably federal pensions.  The world is finding out (again) that a one-size-fits-all social security program means when we fail, we all fail since all our eggs are forced to be in fewer baskets (sometimes just one).  Japan is seeing this.

Japan’s aging population is not helping consumption. Businesses had hoped that baby boomers — the generation that reaped the benefits of Japan’s postwar breakneck economic growth — would splurge their lifetime savings upon retirement, which began en masse in 2007. But that has not happened at the scale that companies had hoped.

Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. That could serve as a warning for the United States, where workers’ 401(k)’s have been ravaged by declining stocks, pensions are disappearing, and the long-term solvency of the Social Security system is in question.

Other countries, like France and Germany, have had to come to terms with this in the past, and now it’s our turn. 

Spending our way out of overspending is not the answer.  Letting the market roll, with its ups and down, would hurt far, far less than the climbs and crashes we’re having to get used to.

Filed under: Economics • Government

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