Skipping out

We're supposed to go and watch the movie that we were supposed to spend the weekend making. Not going.

I think you can tell how that turned out. A catastrophe, really, a ghastly banality. Pointless and confusing plot, hackneyed, disjointed dialogue, no real relationship with the genre (politically incorrect or religious movie), shaky camera-work, and deliberate mangling of what could have been a good minimalist soundtrack. The only upside of it is that I ducked out on Saturday after the planning session on Friday night made it clear that our partners in crime were robbing us... of any chance of having input into the process.

Oh well.

I have been thinking about the Great Depression again. Anne's going back to the US to look for work - she'll have more luck there than here, I think - and the whole thing is reminding me, melodramatically, of the Joads. Lost the farm, out of money, off to California to drink the dregs of the wine made from the grapes of wrath.

Say we end up there again, for real. Wheels of industry ground to a halt, bulldozers stalled, a quarter of the population out of work. Mass hardship.

The upside of it is that it would probably clean the Augean stables of government-finance corruption. But the downside is much bigger for most of us.

How big of a downside, though? The good news, if you can call it that, is that living standards are a lot higher today than they were in the 1920s. Electricity, for example, is ubiquitous, while it took a government program of rural electrification to light up areas of the country in the 1930s. People have more stuff, which means that they have more to lose before they hit rock bottom.

We can cut back on most of our consumer electronics, for example, and most of our fancy clothes before not feeding ourselves. And think of houses and cars - more people (maybe too many people, even) have them now than then. Would it kill us to save costs by carpooling more, renting out half of our oversized homes? And do we need a Kindle, or can we just go to the library or second-hand bookshop instead?

My point is that in the worst-case scenario, average living standards have a ways to drop before becoming dangerous to our health.

There are a few caveats. The first problem is that the most vulnerable populations - inner-city blacks, migrant farm-workers and day-laborers, the service-sector working poor - will be hit the worst. They were already pinching pennies, skipping health-care, and barely getting by. For this to work, upper-middle class incomes would have to fall much further, while lower-class incomes were maintained better.

The second problem is a spatial one. It's easy to cut back on transport costs when in a compact place - you take the bus, carpool, or walk instead. Likewise, it's easier to entertain yourself without buying expensive consumer goods, as there are more people around to do things with. However, development has for a long time been skewed towards suburban growth and spatial atomization. People living further and further apart, and further and further apart from their work, shopping, and recreation. This is a terrain that creates dependence upon electronic widgets and automobiles; once built in on a sufficiently large scale, this pattern may prove amazingly difficult to reverse.

On the other hand, I recently read an article about a Texas bank that was destroying 16 foreclosed houses rather than trying to sell them. Perhaps, if enough overgrown and overpriced exurban houses are foreclosed, we can get whole swathes of suburbia demolished, and restart again in a sensible way... Less cars, less blinking and buzzing widgets, smaller houses, and more people meeting up in the library, on the train, in the park, the museum, the corner bar, and talking about how strange things used to be.