While many economists study the sorts of things that most people think of as “economics” — inflation, unemployment, international trade — others delve into topics that seem to stretch the assumed limits of the discipline.
The economics of holidays is one such subject. As anthropologists try to discover the social and cultural functions of practices like feasts and fasting, economists look for economic behavior.
For example, one economist has argued that Lent developed as an inventory adjustment mechanism. He reasoned that by late winter in medieval Europe, with very rudimentary storage technology, village food stocks inherently included many items that were on the verge of becoming inedible. It made sense to eat up this food, even in a burst of gluttony, before it went to complete waste. Once the feast was past, however, people had to eat very austerely until the first produce of the new crop season was available.
People made a religious virtue of necessity, it was argued, relating a rational seasonal pattern of food consumption to the liturgical calendar. The concentrated eating of remaining perishables became carnival or Mardi Gras. The ensuing stinting on food became Lent.
Some make similar arguments about Thanksgiving and other end-of-crop holidays. Before the development of canning, preservation of foods other than grains and root crops largely meant salting, pickling and drying. Not all foods stored well. The end of the harvest was the period of highest food availability for subsistence peasants. It made sense for people to eat large quantities of foods that would otherwise rot.
In that sense, humans were little different from deer, bears or other wildlife that fatten up when food was plentiful to better survive a long period of scarcity.
Practices developed as a rational resource allocation response become embodied in cultures. Old farm kids like me still retain a strong association between the end of the harvest and Thanksgiving. But for most Americans, that linkage is as quaint and outdated as rain dances. Thanksgiving is now a time for families or friends to meet and eat together.
In our wealthy technological society, even the ostensible rationale for Thanksgiving becomes obscure. The United States is one of about 25 rich nations in which there no longer is any visible association between the size of the harvest and the availability of food. This differs from the experience of most of the world’s peoples and most of human history.
For Native Americans and New England colonists, a bountiful harvest meant a good winter. A poor harvest meant suffering and even death. That remains true for many globally, but not for citizens of wealthy nations.
Indeed, many of us fail to recognize how good we have it. If an alien from another world had arrived on Labor Day and planted itself in front of a TV set for the rest of the 2004 campaign, it well might have concluded that our nation was in dire straits. One party portrayed most households as straining to make the barest ends meet, buffeted by unemployment, outsourcing and high medical costs. The other party portrayed households as straining to make ends meet because of the scourge of overwhelming taxation.
Both portrayals were, of course, a caricature of the financial state of U.S. households. Yes, many feel financial pressures and many resent taxes, but the physical level of living for most in our nation is extremely high compared to those in poor countries or to our own ancestors.
People may complain about the challenges of modern life, but if offered the chance to switch places with their grandparents or even their parents at the same stage of life, few would take the offer. We may feel stress because our culture urges us to spend more than we earn, but most of us have easier lives than our parents in terms of the goods and services we can afford.
While such comparisons may be consolation to some, it is not to many others. Economists long argued that while human needs are finite, human wants are not. Even as consumption levels rise, people still want more. Few achieve true serenity and acceptance of what we have.
This broad idea that available resources always are scarce relative to human wants is the foundation of all economics. Economists and psychologists also have identified more specific reasons for our discontent. They note the level of satisfaction that humans express about their standard of living varies only slightly with their absolute level of consumption. Humans don’t tend to tick off all their needs and wants being fulfilled or going unfulfilled. They rather look at their level of consumption relative to that of others around them.
The proportions of people expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their level of living are not very different in New York City compared to a village in the Peruvian sierra even though the absolute level of use of goods and services may be 50 times greater in Manhattan than in an Andean village.
Enjoy your family and turkey today. Don’t worry about economists’ explanations.
© 2004 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.