In recent days, U.S. leaders have sought to shift focus from the health impact of the coronavirus to its catastrophic economic effects. The stock market has plunged amid fears that covid-19 will trigger a global recession, public places have shuttered to prevent the disease from spreading further and unemployment is rising dramatically as businesses go under from the lost revenue.
Late on Wednesday night, the Senate unanimously approved a $2 trillion relief package, part of which provides cash payments to adults and increases unemployment insurance benefits, along with offering a bevy of assistance for businesses. The House is likely to approve it on Friday.
This plan is an acknowledgment that our economy relies on consumer spending to function. Today this seems obvious, but it was only in the late 19th century, during the boom-and-bust cycle of the Gilded Age, that consumers and consumption became understood as the central drivers of the economy and that policymakers began crafting public policy to support them. After reform-minded economists, laborers and politicians spent years making these changes, stimulating demand became a primary response to prevent developing recessions. Today, this thinking should guide Congress as it continues to act to mitigate the economic damage of the covid-19 pandemic. Its efforts can’t just look to bailout businesses, large and small, but must continue to put money directly into consumers’ pockets as quickly as possible. If demand dries up, the economic catastrophe will be even worse.
Before the Civil War it was by no means obvious that consumption and demand served an important economic role. Instead, observers judged economic growth by measuring and maximizing production; early 19th-century policies like a high protective tariff were designed to stimulate manufacturing. Certainly, consumption was always part of the economy, and average people bought everything from textiles to household tools. Yet economic writers distinguished between “productive” consumption on investments or tools, which led to greater output, and “unproductive” consumption on luxuries and comforts, which was seen as wasteful. They often conflated the term “consumption” with “destruction” because they believed these betrayed classical republican virtues. Francis Wayland, the author of America’s most popular prewar economics textbook, wrote that, “The annual consumption of an individual is the sum total of all the values which he destroys.”
This framework — seeing consumption as almost immoral — was common in an economy where scarcity was the norm. But after the Civil War, the United States economy depended increasingly on mechanized production, and so consumers and consumption became more central to economic growth.