There are a lot of reasons to read Why We Want You to be Rich, by Donald Trump & Robert Kiyosaki, with a cautious eye, but I am forever grateful to it for its intriguing, illuminating mention of how economists forged America's post-WWII path forward.
If The Donald & Mr. Kiyosaki are to be believed, the economic gurus of those long-gone days determined that the best way to secure America's continuing financial power was to develop a consumer-powered economy. My guess is that the assumption was that the products we'd be buying would be made in the U.S.A., providing a constant demand that would keep our factories humming & Americans gainfully employed. We would learn the hard way that there's a difference between focusing
on producing & on purchasing. The manufacturer wants to make the
most sought-after product at a price that will lure buyers & keep
them coming - quality was assumed.
And purchasing was getting easier & easier. Forget our nation's once honored reputation for thrift & savings. Soon after WWII, our nation had taken the first steps toward an unparalleled spending binge. In 1946, the first modern-day credit card was introduced in New York City. It was a success! Three years later, the Diners Club card was introduced & quickly grew from covering 28 NYC restaurants & two hotels to more, much more. It took until 1958 for American Express to introduce its own card, but it revolutionized how American paid for goods & services.
As our spending soared, so did our search for "bargains." By 1954, the trend away from quality toward low price was clear enough to be featured in an "all-star cast" film - Executive Suite. Oh, Americans ridiculed "Made in Japan" products for their inferiority & shoddy workmanship, but our manufacturers saw the writing on the wall & started pulling money out of research & design and plowing it into their marketing & advertising budgets. The stock holder became king of the American economy; Wall Street became the arbiter of our economy's health.
At the same time consumers were getting comfortable with skimping on quality to get a better deal, our mighty manufacturers were filled with their own bravado. Especially the Big Three auto manufacturers, the back bone of America's economic might.
The Volkswagen Bug, considered a novelty car, didn't fill Detroit with fear - they were American auto manufacturing, the best in the world, producing the cars sought back home & around the world. It didn't worry them when fledgling businesses like Lockhart Lumber - my Dad's itty bitty lumber & mill work shop - purchased a VW truck instead of GM ~ to them, American-made cars were & would always be the gold standard of automobiles. Smaller, gas-efficient cars were a novelty, no threat to American muscle cars.
When Mim & I drove down to our first Apollo moon launch in late 1969, we marveled at low gasoline prices. Am grateful to have appreciated how affordable it was to get from Bryn Athyn to Cape Canaveral, even driving a Ford Van (not known for awesome mileage per gallon).
Detroit started making smaller cars in the '60s, but their heart (and research) was in it. Then, the oil crisis of 1973 hit & Detroit was left out in the cold - the cars designed to get the best mileage, the ones that sold like hot cakes, were from overseas.
Overnight, "made in Japan" was no longer synonymous with inferior goods, while "made in Detroit" became linked with "gas guzzler." Who wanted the swaggering looks of a car that ate up gas that jumped 40% from the first of the year to the last? American auto manufacturers, who'd refused to put any research & design dollars into smaller, more fuel efficient cars, now pulled out all the stops to roll out their own gas-efficient cars; their speed showed in the final product, with many of the "new & improved" cars suffering from design & manufacturing problems. Now, it was America that was getting the reputation for shoddy design & poor workmanship.
Americans were well-trained consumers - they flocked to imports. They'd been trained to be purchasers & they'd learned their lessons well. Price, not quality or prestige, was their main motivator - how much did it cost & how many miles per gallon did it get?
The bravado of the Big Three automakers - their blindness to need supplanting style - doomed Detroit, although the blame was placed squarely on the shoulders of unions. They made incredibly bad business decisions, simply to save a few dollars per car. Ford kept mum about problems with the Pinto's gas tank, which it knew was vulnerable to explosion when hit in a particular way. 1991's Class Action, a fictionalized account of the debacle, sets out a pretty grim view of an American corporation putting profit over personal safety. Today, it is GM that is mired in a similar disaster - it took them ten years to issue recalls of cars they knew had ignition switch problems. Like the fictional auto manufacturer in Class Action, they figured it would cost them less in legal action over deaths & injuries than it would to fix the problem up front.
We have become a nation of consumers & desperate manufacturers willing to do whatever it takes to maintain profitability. Human lives are just part of a financial equation. I doubt this is what those economists envisioned back in the late 1940s, deciding that encouraging Americans to flex their purchasing power was the best way to remain our manufacturing supremacy.
American consumers matter to our corporations, but actual Americans are given little, if any, value. It's our buying power, not our personal safety or well being, that matters. We've become a nation that equates the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of things, rather than using those things as a means to the end of happiness.
Maybe it goes hand in hand with the dumbing down of America that's occurred since 2000. As a nation, we seem to have drifted away from the idea that the happiness referred to in the Declaration of Independence is tied to our ability to think & speak freely, to our freedom to pursue & express our own truth. What happened to embracing liberty & free speech, to being a magnet for people of many different faiths & political beliefs? When did capitalism become synonymous with American democracy? Did Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt envision an America where the rights of people would be compromised & the rights of faceless, heartless corporations become inviolate?
Look around. We've became a nation of committed consumers & corporations hallmarked with swaggering braggadocchio. Our national dream of liberty & justice for all seems displaced by a fixation on the rise & fall of the stock market index & an unquenchable thirst for acquisition of stuff.
Who will put the brakes on & restore a semblance of good old-fashioned American common sense? Would anyone let them?
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