Or, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.

There's a brand new talk, but its not very clear
Oh bop
That people from good homes are talking this year
Oh bop, fashion
Its loud and tasteless and I've heard it before
Oh bop
You shout it while you're dancing on the ole dance
Floor
Oh bop, fashion

Some things don't change.

Part of my unease has to do with the argument of some experts that what’s needed is a short-term return to the consumer spending habits of 2003-2004 in order to boost the economy, then a managed, gradual “slow landing” to a much heavier emphasis on savings over spending to give the economy time to shed excess capacity in a sensible, graduated manner. That’s roughly the equivalent of expecting occupied Iraqis to universally throw flowers and parades to welcome the American military. Desire isn’t so easily managed, nor for that matter is fear. This vision of the way forward is made possible partly by mainstream economics’ lack of interest in culture, in psychology, in history, authorized by a belief that people are collectively easily pushed one way or the other by signals and incentives.

If eventually we settle into a new austerity, that is likely to be partly performative, an identity that we try to communicate to others for some of the same reasons we might have tried to communicate fashionability, luxury, discriminatory taste: because in our local worlds, that identity accumulates some kind of social capital. (Or it protects us from attack.) . . .

The Good Life also needs good booze and good food. It needs extravagance and flights of fancy in architecture or the design of everyday objects. The Good Life can’t be bounded everywhere by a mean kind of utility, by a cool external judgment of need and want. Desire can’t just be penned up into an interior reserve: it sometimes must leap out into the material world, to hold and to act. The prophets of thrift throughout the 20th Century were also always preachers on behalf of the intense disciplining of human subjectivity, to the management of time and the control of sensation and the rationalization of beauty, to a Taylorism of the soul. That we’ve given those thrifty, controlled disciplinarians up for their opposite numbers, a crazed frenzy of Dionysian racketeers who pretended to rationality while they engorged themselves, is a good sign that it’s time to rethink how and when we desire, to recognize the ways that social production enabled by innovative technologies have enriched us far more than SUVs or 4-bathroom suburban mansions. But it’s not a reason to stop wanting.

I think that it's useful to make a distinction between humanity's long climb out of poverty, with its ups and downs, and fashionable cultural behaviors, with their even more fleeting ups and downs. This is a cycles within cycles view, ephemeral fashions overlayed on long wave development cycles, that doesn't deny the immediate significance of culture and psychology for economic performance, or confuse one thing for another.

Culture and fashion are about status, social signaling. We are primates and we care about status, our relative rank as individuals among peers, and the relative rank of our peer group against other groups. But, in general, this has no effect on the long wave trajectory of humanity. The world is too big, too diverse, to be greatly affected. Whether we revert to a Puritanic aesthetic and all wear drab clothing and pinch pennies or not the long wave will proceed.

This may be cold comfort in the here and now. What we now call a crazed frenzy of Dionysian consumption will look like deprivation in some future, but some of us are likely to expire before that future arrives. We are exceedingly bad at prediction. We can anticipate such futures, but only in broad outline and timing.

What endures is the frenzy. Some behavior will always earn that label, but the specifics are situational, and the status value of frenzy is not fixed. Sometimes frenzy is fashionable, sometimes not. Are those who are frenzied about social production and consumption fashionable or lame? That depends on your small circle of friends within which you compete for status, and the relative power of that circle of friends against other circles. It is often beneficial to be aware of fashion and have skill in signaling, but it isn't useful to confuse such behavior for anything of enduring value or ultimate significance.