Peacock Syndrome - America's Fatal Disease

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” - Aldous Huxley

...

The herd has been mad since 1970 and with the post economic collapse of 2008, some people are recovering their senses slowly, and one by one. The country was overrun by flocks of ostentatious peacocks displaying their plumage in an effort to impress their friends, families and work colleagues. What set the flaunting American peacocks apart was the fact they financed their splendid display of plumage with $0 down and 0% interest for seven years. The lifestyles of the rich and famous miraculously became available to the poor and middle class through the availability of easy abundant credit provided by the friendly kind hearted Wall Street banks and their heroin dealers at the Federal Reserve.

The United States has experienced a four decade long “expenditure cascade”. An expenditure cascade occurs when the rapid income growth of top earners fuels additional spending by the lower earner wannabes. The cascade begins among top earners, which encourages the middle class to spend more which, in turn, encourages the lower class to spend more. Ultimately, these expenditure cascades reduce the amount that each family saves, as there is less money available to save due to extra spending on frivolous discretionary items. Expenditure cascades are triggered by consumption. The consumption of the wealthy triggers increased spending in the class directly below them and the chain continues down to the bottom. This is a dangerous reaction for those at the bottom who have little disposable income originally and even less after they attempt to keep up with others spending habits.

This cascade of expenditures could not have occurred without cheap easy credit, supplied by Wall Street shysters and abetted by their puppets at the Federal Reserve through their inflationary policies. Real wages are lower today than they were in 1970. Coincidentally, the credit card began its ascendance as the peacock payment of choice in 1970. There are now over 600 million credit cards in circulation in the U.S. in the hands of 177 million fully plumed peacocks and peacock wannabes.



Monthly Payment Nation

“Consumerism re­quires the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts (including the more insidious arts) of persuasion. Under a free enterprise system commercial propa­ganda by any and every means is absolutely indis­pensable. But the indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings.” - Aldous Huxley

...

In 1970, 37% of households consisted of 4 or more people and we somehow managed to get by with one four door car per household. Today, only 24% of households consist of 4 or more people. There are 113 million households and over 250 million passenger vehicles, or 2.2 per household. So, even though the number of people in our households has shrunk dramatically, we needed 120% more vehicles to transport our vast quantities of stuff. Not only do we have more vehicles, but the size of these symbols of gluttony has doubled and tripled, with fitting names like: Tundra, Navigator, Titan, Yukon, Suburban and Hummer. Every soccer mom with two kids needed a 20 foot long, 6 foot high Yukon with an 8 cylinder engine, getting 12 mpg to shuttle around little Aiden and Chloe to their ten scheduled weekly activities. It wasn’t only automobiles that Americans went gaga over. The average home size in 1970 was 1,400 square feet (we drive cars bigger than that today). By 2009, the average home size reached 2,700 square feet. God knows we need 12 rooms for our 2.4 person households. The expenditure cascade started as a trickle in 1970 but became a raging uncontrollable waterfall by 2008.

/Much more. A good read... http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=18895

(Edited to add one more paragraph - since I think the Huxley quotes are now public domain).

In the early 2000's I got caught up in this and ended up spending more money than I rationally should have. I still cringe when I think about it becasue I had never acted spent with abandon like that before(or since). Its very interesting to see a framework underpinning the effect.

You know what they say...Write about what you know.

At one time, I had 14 M/Cs and Visas that I never asked for. "Because of my excellent credit" (Discounting the fact that I had a huge IRS lien at the time) I deserve more! I was and still am a musician (read unemployed with no bennies) and the dumb asses gave me 100K worth of plastic. I told them I made a whopping 15K a year and they sent me cards with 15K limits?

Oh well...................

Some flaws, though: how could he write this without citing Veblen? Also, the conspicuous consumption Velben noted was a property of the liesure class: here, the author laments its democratization, so it would have been useful to cite him.

Also, the reason for the growth of the two-car family isn't "conspicuous consumption:" it's the two earner, two commuter family.

Finally, it's proposed that, once again, it's mainly lower-income people who were most at fault. I am not buying that: if you want to cite statistics, why not cite the average income of persons with a home in foreclosure?

The reason is that that number does not, as far as I can tell, exist. Yet it has been the upper middle class emulation of the wealthy, as far as I can see, that has cost much more than the lower middle class emulation of the uppers.

Does anyone have any data on this? It's a recurrent meme: "loosened standards" "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" are often given as reasons for the housing meltdown, but from where I sit there are many more upper middle class people who took out 500k+ mortgages who cost people much more than the poor folks living in the poorer parts of town.

The spending frenzy is a big distraction from the systemic failures of our system...Never forget after 9/11 - Dim Sum told everyone to go shopping.

The spending frenzy is a component of our mass culture industry
The neo-Marxists who migrated to the US from Europe in the late 1930's wondered why the revolutions started in the east did not follow to the West and the US - their conclusion was the movie industry which allowed an individual to take their frustrations into a movie theater and work them out vicariously vice going out into the street and protesting. (Habermas)