A broken growth model

I wrote a paper once on the Frontier mentality in America, applying Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis to the issue of groundwater use on the high plains. Once a land area is conquered/settled/cultivated, its resources are then mined. If they can grow back, they will usually be harvested faster than that, and often exhausted. This is not an America-only phenomenon, but it seems to be built into our way of life and generally was exported to or copied by the rest of the developing world.

This is because the general system in the US is capitalism, which favors achievment (sort of), but also creates competitiveness, and therefore growth, in that someone will always be trying to produce more, faster, and (especially) cheaper. People realized that they could get along with an inferior product if the price was cheap enough to make it trivial to re-buy (and besides, buying feels good!).

Whether it was a cause of this consumer behavior or an effect of it, the business model of most companies (which, here, is a blanket term for, really, all producers, distributors, and sellers) certainly enables this over-consumptive behavior. I'm thinking of an article I saw on MSN Money, where the author discusses a fur coat her mother had bought in the '50s. The author had taken the coat from her mother's closet and still wears it regularly during winter months. In 2008 dollars, her mother paid around $1300 (I would link and cite the source, but Internet Explorer is a little infected right now. It's mentioned on the Ethical Style blog). She compared this to a coat she'd bought at H&M for like $70 that she was already going to throw away.

The thing is, that's H&M's business model. They will sell shitty shit cheap and people will have to buy a new shirt (although, admittedly, also a different one) every couple of months. It doesn't encourage repeat customers, if they care about quality, but it does ensure that repeat customers will be frequent ones. This is, in some ways, the frontier mentality. Sales must expand, volume must increase. This is the same strategy that automakers, especially the big Three, have been using. Everyone knows that there isn't any incentive for a carmaker to build a car that lasts for any significant period of time. It has to either go out of style, or be built so cheaply that it will only really run well for a couple of years.

The implications of this are several. For one, it makes cars ubiuqitous. Used cars get sold cheap because their value disappears as soon as they are driven off the lot, and the car becomes not a goal, privelege, dream, or any such higher thing to reach for. It becomes a necessity. This necessity for cars has been built into every aspect of society, it seems. Even the most pedestrian-friendly downtown areas are completely plagued with parking garages, and the cities with the best public transportation can't seem to shake traffic.

But the problem extends beyond the cities, where suburbs and subdivisions are designed so that you have to do two miles worth of driving to travel the distance of one. Dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs, not to mention dangerous crossings over winding four-lane roads filled with blind spots make walking anywhere impossible, and I'm always amazed that anyone who jogs out there is alive. Somehow, the designers of these subdivisions have managed to destroy the community and accesibility that come with either a small town or a dense city, while not quite leaving any real wilds or country - only golf courses and the thin strips and lines of forest between shoddily-constructed (or at least hideously designed) houses.