Spending, The Millennial Generation, and Life (Retirement) Goals, Some Bourgeois Consumption Commentary

Last night I had a discussion with my wonderful mother (Beth Miehls) about an article she had recently read about the millennial generation.  This is the generation that started with my birth in 1981 and encompass everyone born up to the early 2000s.  Thus there are hipsters, young business types, and a lot of over-educated bartenders.  

The point of the article that Beth read was that The Millennial Generation (Gen Y from this point on) has spending patterns that favor experiences over accumulation of material wealth.  Basically she was making the point that Gen Y'ers spend more of their money on travel and high end food and drink than on houses and cars, etc. because we have some type of conscious or subconscious economic preference for living well rather than owning well.  This concept is causality in neoclassical preference theory rearing its ugly head in the hegemonic bourgeois culture yet again.

I am not arguing with the basic premise here.  Gen Y has lead spending in the microbrew, localvore, eco-tourism, etc. movements.  But are we making a choice to do these things rather than spend on accumulation?

It is quite possible that Gen Y'ers are spending their money in ways other than accumulation of long term material assets such as property because these things are not available to us.  The baby-boomers (to their credit) have a higher life expectancy than any American generation before them and already own much of the property, and hold most of the high-paying jobs.  Life expectancy for American males was in the low 60s in the period leading up to the Golden Age of Capitalism (pre and durnig WWII) and has steadily increased post war.  The average American male can expect to live into their mid 70s today.  Living until 75 means that the average baby boomer (our parents) will hold their property for 15 years longer than their parents did.  This, combined with many other economic factors means that the mean property sale price in the US has increased from $19,300 in 1963 to  $272,900 in 2010 (US Gov. Census), far faster growth than the rate of inflation during this period.  *



Is my generation choosing to pay for experiences? or has the longer lives of our parents (thankfully I might add in the case of my parents, as we get along well and love each other) priced Gen Y out of the ability to buy land, houses and cars and forced us to spend our money on good beer and travel instead to give us a reason to get out of bed in this bourgeois culture of consumption?




*I haven't even started to discuss the collapse of credit markets as a factor here, which will deserve its own post when I return to this topic.

The Downside of Reliability

According to a JD Power study released this week, cars (all brands) that are reaching market in the United States are getting increasingly reliable (the number of major problems is declining). 

At first glance this is clearly good news for the consumer.  Reliability has been a major point of competitive struggle throughout the history of the auto industry, in fact it was a major factor that allowed the Japanese automakers to gain such a strong foothold in the US market in the 1970s and 80s. 

A clear downside of cars not breaking as often is the lack of consumer spending that will result as less people need to fix their vehicles.  In a similar contradiction to the realization problem, no individual wants their car to break, but it benefits the rest of society economically when any given individual is forced to spend money.

 In the current economic climate of uncertainty and low consumer confidence (ever since the collapse of 2008) discretionary spending cannot be counted on to lead recovery.  Something like a broken car on the other hand, it seems a good way to force people to spend, perhaps even to go further into debt....Debt spending got us into our current mess, can it not lead the way out? People need vehicles to get to their job interviews.....or drive to the unemployment office. The less people have their cars break, the less they will be forced to spend fixing them.  Maybe reliable cars will help to make consumers more confident to spend elsewhere?  But for now,  it seems recovery will not be lead by auto mechanics becoming wealthy. 

The entire tone of this post is meant to be somewhat sarcastic.  The bigger picture point here is that historically US consumer culture has been one of "consume and discard".  Just perhaps,  quality is starting to matter as much as novelty to Americans in the automotive industry?