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The media has been painting a gloomy picture of the US economy. There is a credit crunch (people who need credit can’t get credit), a housing slump (people who need to sell their homes can’t), and consumers are holding back in spending their money during the holiday season.
Friday was black Friday—the traditional start of the holiday shopping season. Statistics say that about 25% of retailers’ sales comes in the month before Christmas. Black Friday was dubbed that to indicate that Friday is usually when retailers start seeing their accounts in the black (rather than red).
I’m not an economist nor an expert in capitalism. It seems that the best measures of an economy is how well people spend their money. Shortly after 9/11 President Bush urged Americans to go shopping and spend their money to show the terrorists that they will not break us. It was shortly after 9/11, that car manufacturers began offering 0% interest on their cars as way of enticing buyers. In other words, the more materialistic and consumeristic we are, the stronger our economy.
Scripture speaks clearly against the pursuit of things and materialism in general. Jesus illustrates the futile pursuit of things in Luke 12 with the parable of the rich fool. I’m not sure if most Christians find it disturbing that our society (and us as Christians) are so ingrained in a culture of consumerism and materialism. We will soon the American church utter trite slogans that “Jesus is the reason for the season” yet there will be a mismatch between the words out of our mouth and our actions.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts that we need to have limited budgets on how to spend our money during this holiday season and it seems that it would be better to have new statistics to measure the strength of our economy. How about if we base our economic strength on the saving rate of our consumers? How about if the strength of our economy was measured not by how much people spend but how much they didn’t spend? What if we measured our economic strength by how much people give away? What if generosity, rather than consumerism were the measure of an economy?
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