Mom, Dad, and Hellzapoppin

The sophisticated sector of our society, e.g., the media, don’t much like simplistic analogies. Like, for instance, the notion that our smallest collective, the family, may be like our greatest, the nation. Yet this morning such an analogy arose in my mind. The occasion was a headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Gas Savings Not Spent Yet.” The essence here is that despite good numbers on December retail spending from private associations, national numbers from the Commerce Department indicate 0.9 percent decline in retail and food services spending as compared to November spending. And this despite a huge drop in gasoline costs?

The key word in the headline is that word Yet. The sophisticated understanding of people is based on an artificial notion of pure economic rationality. When people have extra money, they will spend it. If they don’t now, soon they will. Nothing else matters except having money or not having it. There is no future or social dimension present at all.

But if we use a “simplistic analogy,” our economic life today is comparable to the life of a family where mom and dad are at each others’ throats and hellzapoppin. A sign of that is a story on the next page: “House Votes to Block Immigration Policy,” just a day after a frosty meeting between the President and the Congressional leadership to discuss cooperation.

In a family in uproar, the children won’t be jolly. Consumer confidence is based on many things, not least the bigger atmosphere of the social whole. And there we have Mom determined to undermine Dad and vice versa. It’s barely safe to play, with half a mind, behind the couch, while in the kitchen things are heard to break on the tiled floor.