The article utterly sucks. It's essentially a clickbaity rendition of the banal rant about American consumerism.<p>The arguments are poorly constructed, even when there is a point to be made. The sentence "Americans haven't always acted like this. We've entered an age of overabundance." is followed by a a graph showing that Americans consumed more than major European countries at least since 1990. (And I don't think that graph is purchasing power parity adjusted)<p>Apart from the confusing graph, most of the numbers in the article don't have a corresponding European version for comparison.<p>What has happened to the Manhattan Institute? I kinda thought their senior fellows were better than this.
I've thought a lot lately about how American's don't have the benefit of living somewhere that has been continuously inhabited (by non-nomadic people) for thousands of years. I can't go have fun in a local town center because I literally have no local town center. Living in the middle of suburbia as a youngster means everything within walking/driving distance is paved and closed by 9:00pm. There isn't much to do except spend time inside and to make it enjoyable we buy things to spend time with.<p>I would have loved to live European-ish but I wish it was more practical than it seems.
The data should also take into account average income or something similar. A quick search in Wikipiedia[1] shows that average wage in the USA is $65k, and the UK is $47k, a ratio of ~1.38. Before the pandemic, the consumption per capita ratio for these 2 countries was ~1.33. Basically, people who earn more tend to spend more but not disproportionately so. So the actual trend is not as extreme as that plot makes it out to be.<p>This is not to say that there isn't an underlying problem.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...</a>
I largely agree with the author, but why isn't the ire directed at the companies that offshores everything in the first place? We'd be in a much better position if we hadn't outsourced the manufacturing of all our most most needed items to china I'm the past 30 years