Performative frugality? How the economic stage is set right now

 July 18, 2022

Do we have economic problems? Yes. We do.

It's harder to explain what those problems actually are, on the level of human behavior and concerns. What we're really talking about is, in my perspective, at least three things.

Economic diagnosis in this way has something to do with the Internet, so I'll make a point on these three things. Not as an economist – I'm not one – but I do think that to lock down progress on economic analysis, every now and again, someone has to lay down what they understand to be what the economists are saying at this point in time.

We've got a big consumer debt crisis, of course; not just property-related debt but also education-related debt. That's definitely part of how the economic stage is set right now. When has there not been consumer debt in the economy? Of course there always has. But the level of debt out there is pretty high; of that we cannot deny.

The situation of the American farm is not great either. Regardless of the morality of betting on the success of a harvest, I hope we're all hoping that the higher food prices are used to improve the American food system overall, and not going to pad a few pockets in the middle of the system. Did value-added benefit the farm? I can't tell.

The third thing is kind of interesting for a different reason. There seems to be a demand problem. It seems like from the perspective of brick-and-mortar stores, consumers are not telegraphing their desires. Ergo, from their perspective, they can't tell what consumers want.

Which leads to an interesting question: are we living in an age of performative frugality? To refine this, it is true that a lot of people, especially the young, are not that well-off. On the other hand, there are really rich people these days that are "slumming it" because they can afford it. Because poverty is for them a kind of "novelty" and "adventure"? So they say - because they can escape it whenever they want.

Back to the recapitulation: do we know what Internet consumers in the middle class really want to buy? This is an open question, I gather: should the market really be addressing unusual consumer demands, or is the disparaging look from them at what is available for sale to consumers really a desire for a higher quality staple goods? Common sense would suggest that the proper state response would be to raise the bar on baseline quality rather than try to fragment the market into a bunch of novelty products. But again, I am not an economist. This just seems like the picture that the economic analysts are painting for us, at the moment.