The Christmas receipts are in, and they don't look good. The Wall Street Journal puts the carnage in handy graph form:
Note the big fall in luxury goods. People aren't spending just to spend anymore. Consumption is looking less like a hobby. People are buying more things and less stuff. Felix Salmon comments that "for many years, America's retailers were successful in making people want to go shopping, even if they didn't end up buying anything. Now, shopping is something to avoid where possible, and it's interesting that Amazon -- the shop for people who hate going shopping -- managed another record year."Salmon may be right that more sustainable consumption patterns will be a good thing in the long-term even if they're painful in the short-term, but boy are they going to be painful in the short-term. The other day, I quoted Krugman saying that "you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people." Right now, we have neither. Which is why all manner of economists are advocating an economy sustained in the short-term by massive government spending. Without that, there's nothing sustaining the economy at all.
Note the big fall in luxury goods. People aren't spending just to spend anymore. Consumption is looking less like a hobby. People are buying more things and less stuff. Felix Salmon comments that "for many years, America's retailers were successful in making people want to go shopping, even if they didn't end up buying anything. Now, shopping is something to avoid where possible, and it's interesting that Amazon -- the shop for people who hate going shopping -- managed another record year."Salmon may be right that more sustainable consumption patterns will be a good thing in the long-term even if they're painful in the short-term, but boy are they going to be painful in the short-term. The other day, I quoted Krugman saying that "you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people." Right now, we have neither. Which is why all manner of economists are advocating an economy sustained in the short-term by massive government spending. Without that, there's nothing sustaining the economy at all. 
