Much of the American economy is dedicated to the proposition that middle class life should be as convenient as possible. We spend the majority of our moola on getting better quality of the same goods. And so the supply responds with the new and improved. That's been about 67% of our GDP. With any luck, that number will decrease marginally and our savings increase. Marginally though, we still are going to have to figure out a way to issue credit or else the rest of the emerging world will ignore American finance. It's a halfway done deal anyway, but there's still 2012.
Today's little lesson is about the entirely predictable consequences of new and improved consumer cycles.
I left my clothes in the washing machine too long and they got sour. So I had to wash them a second time. This would happen to you if you happen to be one of those fortunate slobs like me who has so little closet space that there is a specific balance and significant fraction of your clothes that you need to keep in the dirty clothes cycle. 40% of my clothes are hanging in my closet, another 15% in my dresser. Then 25% are in a large box in the garage for the off season. 2% are at the dry cleaners and another 2% have gone into the single sock singularity and will never be heard from again. I do have the advantage of being married, so 0% of my clothes are at various girlfriends houses - this is at a 20 year low from the peak in 1989 of 12%. That leaves about 16% of my clothes in the dirty clothes cycle, adjusting for the specific accounting of the offsite dry cleaning. This is approximately 3 1/2 loads.
I have a full hamper of dirty clothes, and one full basket of clean clothes that have not been put away. (I was going to say folded & hung, but there's only a 60% chance that they will end up so organized.) I have another load that is wet and in the dryer awaiting my push of the start button, but blogging is so much more interesting. I have an interest in keeping that many clothes in the cycle. I'd have to do more storage, folding and hanging and laundry if I were to reduce my dirty clothes cycle.
As fascinating as all this is, and I'm sure there are great analogies to monetary policy in there somewhere, it's not the reason I began writing this. Rather the offhanded comment that the Spousal Unit made that since we use Gain, they might not be so sour. Gain is cheaper than Tide and smells green. Not green as in environmentally correct, but as in that urban sense we have of artificial colors and flavors. Gain smells green like Big Red Soda tastes red, and Lysol has a kind of blistering yellow presence. But if I were one of those poor unfortunate souls who wanted to be a scientist for the sake of great discovery, I might have sadly only discvering the inside of a chemistry lab for detergent additives at Proctor & Gamble. Not a bad profession, mind you, but terribly obscure. The career making move for me might be the concocting of some new additive for Gain that would fight the sort of bacteria that gather on clothing after they sit wet in the washing machine for two days. You know, that sour smell. Upping the green smell content might fool us slob husbands and our tidy wives, but to the ethical chemist.. well, he'd know. There's real bacteria in there. And just like with the new class of pump liquid soaps that we now spend five bucks on to wash our hands more clean than brain surgeons and astronauts, there's probably a good sized market for an additional five grams of anti-bacterial active ingredients in your laundry detergent bottle.
GAIN WITH ANTI-BACTERIAL ADDITIVES !!
Well I wasn't a marketing major, but you get the point. The new ingredient would change the marketplace and the smartest people would come up with 'reasons' that it needed to be in your detergent - although the breakthrough is operating on the same two principles as ever. A) We can make more profit. B) Your life needs to be easier. It's easier for me to suggest that A gets more obscene than B, but that is an untested assumption.
Clearly the commies and leftists would suggest that 'A' is the greater sin, or perhaps the root of all evils and the un-Americans and Jihadis tend to believe 'B' is the greatest problem. But I posterize a more colorful palette of thought. In fact I think both are OK so long as they don't reinforce themselves into a cycle worthy of ridicule, like my dirty clothes cycle. The fact that my clothes are in organized disarray and for the sake of my expanded wardrobe, it is in my interest to keep some of them 16% of them necessarily dirty indicates some inefficiency, some excess.
I'm going to suggest at this moment an 'Asian' or 'third' or 'balanced' way. There is clearly something wrong with the system but nothing wrong with the incentives that power the system. It's just that they are out of balance. Sixteen percent of clothes staying dirty, because I'm too lazy to provide adequate washer -> drier liquidity can generate the weird science of anti-bacterial detergent and the attendent mendacious marketing. Or I could just expand my closet space and reduce the number in the cycle to 10 percent.
Which solution to this problem I select depends upon my cultural favoritism. I might admire chemists and demand the detergent. Or I might admire carpenters and expand my closet. Or I might admire self-improvement and increase the throughput. Or I might admire child labor and make my kids do it. Or I might admire a revolutionary pose and rant against all parts of the the clothing cycle at once. Down with closets & washing machines! In which case I would probably lose my wife and end up upping the girlfriend stash ratio as well as the fraction of my clothes just somewhere around the house and unaccouted for. Or I might admire austerity programs and argue for fewer clothes. Or I might dig on Christian charity and give more to the Salvation Army.
Today's mind poker is this, now that I've done some thinking and listened to Fareed Zakaria's 92Y presentation (the whole thing, not just the YouTube excerpt): What's the point of innovation? I mean, after all it's just a cultural choice in solving something out of balance in the cycle. It doesn't necessarily need to be the detergent chemist who gets the marginal improvement in responsibility.
Zakaria is of course the author of the instant best-seller The Post American World. His (end of history) position is that there were three great periods in modern history and the second, which is the domanation of America in the 19th and 20th century is coming to a not-too screeching halt, but a halt nonetheless. His oughts, include recognizing the world-altering significance of the BRICs ascendance into the ability to have .. oh 67% GDP consumer economies. He calls it the Rise of the Rest, something smart people will rejoice in. My take on Zakaria is that in preaching to the choir of Bush discontent, he elides a great deal and also makes some fundamental mistakes in his interpretation of the Rise of Rest. I've also bought the Post American book so I'll get into more of that later. But my point stands. If America stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world, why should we be fascinated by the fact that others are learning to stand up? The tallest building, the biggest shopping mall, the largest oil refinery are all outside of America - but that's all so 20th Century. If Argentina is experiencing 8% GDP growth and in 20 years they'll be what California was 10 years ago, why is that a great call for celebration? Unless you're Brazilian. I say what happens in Brazil stays in Brazil, and I don't necessarily have to have a conniption simply because Brazilians have washing machines and now participate in the global household chemicals market.
Deeper still is the matter of American exceptionalism, which I say still counts for plenty. Zakaria himself admits that nobody should be overly concerned about China's authoritarian communism because the model is doomed to fail. Why then should he single out obiter dicta of the head of the Phillipines saying that China is their big brother? The thing is not to be overly impressed with the rest of the world catching up to America but being very concerned about what sustains America beyond what it has accomplished - because if the future of America is to 'ride the Axiom' becoming fat and lazy until the rest of the world becomes habitable... well that's just contrary to the spirit our constitutional democracy nurtured in the first place.
If we are in an absurd cycle, we have to figure out very specifically what our cultural priorities are. That will become the incrementally profitable economy we Americans will grow. Those cultural values will clash in a global market when 16% of something looks absurd. So ahead of us lies a greater war than ever because in 50 years the world will have 5 Europes. Maybe that's why they are teaching passivity in school.
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