The American Economy Is Creating a National Identity Crisis – The New York Times

Europeans often describe the United States as a great place to buy stuff but a terrible place to work. They understand the appeal of our plentiful and affordable consumer goods, but otherwise they just don’t get it: the lack of real vacation, the sending of emails after business hours, the general insensitivity to work-life balance.

That may be just a casual observation, but it identifies something deep and problematic about the economy that the United States has built over the past 40 years.

Since the 1980s, American economic policy has insisted on the central importance of two things: cheaper prices for consumers and maximum returns for corporate shareholders. There is some logic to this: We all buy things, after all, and more than 50 percent of Americans own at least some stock.

But these priorities also generate an internal conflict, for they neglect, repress and even enslave our other selves: our identities as employees, producers, family members, citizens. And in recent years — as jobs become increasingly unpleasant and unstable, as smaller towns and regional economies are gutted, as essential industries like the pharmaceutical and telecommunications sectors engage in outlandish profiteering, and above all, as economic inequality becomes the trademark of our nation — the conflict seems to have reached a breaking point.

It wasn’t always this way. For most of American history, it would have been strange to suggest that buying things — as opposed to making them — was deserving of high regard or to suggest that the availability of cheap goods should be a major goal of economic policy. Most Americans were small farmers, craftsmen or merchants, and a person’s economic identity was typically that of a producer or a landowner. Macroeconomic policy, such as it was, consisted of trade policy and the protection of the liberties necessary to do business (such as protections from monopolies).

That changed over the course of the 20th century. Broadly speaking, it was the story of the rise of American consumer culture, the decline of farming, the spread of mass production to household goods and the birth of advertising. But the specific prioritization of consumers and shareholders in economic policy dates from the 1970s and ’80s, in what amounted to a mostly well-intentioned project gone too far.

During the ’70s and ’80s, many critics of corporate America argued that elevating the interests of consumers and shareholders would introduce rigor and discipline to big business, while curbing some of its abuses. The giant American corporation, the argument went, had become too big, too distant from its consumers and stock owners. Consumer activists like Ralph Nader drew public attention to the many ways in which consumers were routinely mistreated. A particularly vivid example was Ford’s decision to select a design for its Pinto model that it knew was prone to fires; Ford made the cold calculation that producing a safer car would cost it more than the lawsuits it would face.

In addition, the shareholder-rights movement of the ’80s — driven by corporate raiders like Carl Icahn — accused corporate management of squandering money. What the movement considered waste included indulgent pet projects and the hiring of cronies, but also things like generous pension funds for workers. Economists urged that management’s only goal should be the maximization of shareholder profit. The 1987 film “Wall Street” captured this ethos in Gordon Gekko’s famous speech about shareholder greed, which was “good” — the salvation not only of American businesses but also of America itself.

By the 1990s, these ideas had become a kind of national gospel: Focus on consumers and shareholders and all else will follow. This simple, disciplined formula is not without appeal, and it has been wildly popular in the tech industry, which loves metrics. But at its center is a glaring omission: the fact that the American people are not just consumers and shareholders. We are also employees, business owners, family members, citizens. And the hard fact is that there is no such thing as prioritizing one thing without neglecting others.

By now it has become obvious that the formula has gone too far, contributing to much of the social and economic dissatisfaction in the country — from the perpetual low-level fatigue with our consumer culture to the growing rage against callous corporations. In the service of our selves as consumers and shareholders, we have hollowed out many of the aspects of life that we care most about.

For an individual person, the lengthy neglect of significant parts of one’s identity can lead to psychological harm. The same goes for a whole nation. Fortunately, there are signs that the country is starting to change. For the first time in decades, large numbers of voters in both parties are demanding candidates who have radically different economic priorities. And even in the corporate world, there are encouraging hints of resistance, as when chief executives publicly ask whether maximizing shareholder value really serves the country in the long run.

Life without a simple formula is, of course, harder and more confusing. But there is no coming to consciousness without difficulty and pain, and what the United States desperately needs is a vision of economic health more consistent with what we know makes life worth living.

Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia, a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”

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