ABSTRACT
“It’s the Consumer, Stupid,” reads the headline of an op-ed piece in the New York Times. The argument is simple and straightforward: unless Americans reacquire their capacity to buy, buy, and buy, our economy will not revive and unemployment will remain high—tragically high. According to the author of the article, James Livingston, “we consumers need to save less and spend more in the name of a better future. We don’t need to silence the [industrious] ant, but we’d better start listening to the [feckless] grasshopper” (October 26, 2011). How, we might ask, are we to spend if we are in serious debt or, worse, unemployed? Don’t we have to save, if we have the money to save, in order to pay off our debts? And what does Livingston propose in order to increase jobs and lower unemployment? He doesn’t stay for answers. “Business investment, he argues, is not the key to growth,” but we are not told how jobs in the private sector can be created without business investment so that more people have money to spend. He has nothing to say about government spending to stimulate the economy.
