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"Saving for a rainy day," Livingston writes, "is a soul-crushing emotional trap" Illustration by Jack Teagle
Editor's Rating: 
Against Thrift:
Why Consumer Culture Is
Good for the Economy,
the Environment, and Your Soul
By James Livingston
Basic Books; 257 pp; $27.50
The nation’s unemployment rate sits obstinately above 9 percent. The housing market is still underwater. Consumer confidence stinks, the stock market is schizophrenic, and the big banks have been humbled. We aren’t in another recession, according to the professionals, but it sure feels as if we’re stuck. To cure this listlessness, the following treatments have been applied: bailouts, stimulus packages, programs that aren’t called stimuli but really are in intent, blue ribbon panels, verbose op-eds, foreclosure assistance, short sale assistance, even interest rates that are essentially zero. And still, here we are in an ever-deepening rut, with elected officials bickering about the next steps.
Into this malaise and debate comes James Livingston, a Rutgers University historian, whose new book, Against Thrift, argues that the magic bullet for the nation’s problems is for consumers to spend more—a lot more—and rub out the phrase “saving for a rainy day” from the American lexicon. Today, he says, is that rainy day.
Livingston is a lively, argumentative writer. He assails the “pathetic” thinking of Republicans, Democrats, economists, philosophers, and journalists while sounding like the guy at a dinner party who dominates the salad, entrée, and dessert conversation with a stubborn will to prove everyone but him is bananas. Which does not necessarily mean he’s wrong. Livingston reserves his harshest abuse for the “new Puritans” among economists, government leaders, and commentators who regularly admonish us to stop being slaves to consumerism and recommend practicing austerity on an individual level. Though others have made similar arguments, Livingston modestly compares his theory to Galileo’s heresies in 1610. “Practically speaking,” Livingston writes, “the facts and figures I will cite to demonstrate my case are invisible to most economists, just as invisible as the moons and phases Galileo measured were to most mathematicians and physicists of his time. They’re invisible because in theory, they’re preposterous, even impossible.”
One key complexity in Livingston’s argument is that private investment by business is not the kind of spending that creates jobs and spurs growth. All the clamoring about companies needing lower taxes because the resulting increase in profits will drive them to build more factories and create more jobs is, Livingston writes, a two-syllable word that includes the letters b and s. He argues that all the surplus profits—such as the ones still accruing on the books of America’s biggest corporations—are really invested in speculative bubbles like the ones that helped cause the Great Depression and the current global crisis. (He has a 19-page appendix with numerous graphs to bolster his points.)
