For the New Year, Jenny, Orion and I took a trip to Washington Square Mall. This marks the first time I’d been to an indoor-style mall since, I dunno, months? Years perhaps? The last time I can definitely remember visiting a mall with a roof was when Jenny and I bought matching cel phones at the Verizon in Lloyd Center the day after we returned from China. So: July 5, 2007?

I’ve made more than a few visits to Bridgeport Mall however, which despite not having a roof is definitely a mall. I’m not on some anti-consumer high horse here. I like consumer goods.

Washington Square was sufficiently crowded. But not crazy-crowded. It seemed like shops were doing pretty good business. But I couldn’t help playing a mental guessing game: which of these stores is gonna go outta business first? As much as I love the Lego store it might be hard to argue for its continued existence after another year of economic carnage. I hope Build A Bear dies before Orion learns of its existence.

Weird to imagine, also, that this particular economic activity undergirds America. And, by extension, the whole damn planet. I can’t help but wonder if the dismal performance of our retirement funds doesn’t actually reflect a realignment of fantasy to reality. Everyone talks about how many more “points” a particular market will slide — what “percentage” of pain will we endure before housing prices, stock prices, commodity prices, wages, etc. etc. resume their expected trajectory of up, up, UP!

Over the last eighteen months I have come to wonder whether the “correction” to the American economy won’t so much be fractional as geometric. As in, maybe we’re not overvalued by n percent, (where n < 100); maybe we’re overvalued by a factor of n (where n > 1).

Seeing first hand how “middle class” people live (happily and prosperously!) in places like Malaysia or China, and thinking a little bit about peak oil and other probably-not-unrelated scarcities, I wonder how much fat we can actually cut here in America.

Answer: a lot. I once knew a person who lost half her weight: she went from 300lb to 150lb. She was an entire person overweight. We might be talking about that kind of financial weight loss. If our standard of living declines by a whole magnitude, we’ll have whole different conversation about wealth and money and possessions and jobs and time and priorities. Our household budget can withstand a pay cut of, I dunno, 30% maybe. But what if we had to live on a third of what we have? Not just a third of the money but a third of the stuff: a third of the house, a third of the car, eight hours of electricity a day, a hot shower every third day.

That’s still a pretty luxurious lifestyle in most of the world.

Despite all of which, Orion really loves the mall. (He has a little more experience than I, because Jenny has an occasional Mommy Boot Camp at Lloyd Center.) Lights and people and that huge huge cathedral ceiling, perfect for games of airplane, much to the horror of onlookers (including Jenny). We didn’t spend any money on Orion at all and he had the time of his life. I hope I get to take this memory to heaven: holding my six-month-old son face-forward against my shoulder, zooming through the crowd at Nordstrom, while he shrieks for joy at the top of his lungs.

What if Americans aren’t buying American cars because they aren’t buying any cars?

What if no one else on Earth is buying cars either?

What if this has nothing to do with gas prices?

What if mortgages are failing because the houses are mainly vinyl shacks built fifty miles from economically-productive cities?

What if the cost of owning a car was too great for most families, even if gas were free? (And what if gas prices went up again?) What would happen to the value of those vinyl shacks then? (And why haven’t all the mortgage-company bailouts fixed that problem yet?)

What if cars are a fantastically stupid thing around which to organize America’s productive activity? What if we talked about organizing it around something else?

Of the two big life changes we’ve made in the last year — buying a house and having a baby — the really stressful one (so far) is turning out to be the house. One of the fun aspects of our particular house is our refrigerator, the previous owner’s “beer fridge,” unhelpfully located about ten vertical feet away from the kitchen. Which is to say, our only refrigerator is in the basement, and cannot be moved upstairs without deleting a few walls. (Among the previous owners’ skills was a knack for building walls in what should be an unfinished basement). Because the previous owners didn’t leave their kitchen fridge, this means a lot of trips up and downstairs at dinner time.

Anyway, long story short, we need a new fridge. This expense has been a long time coming, and Jenny did a good job researching refrigerators and picking a suitable new model. We have learned that one of the reasons home ownership is so damn stressful to me is that I have an almost religious dread of spending more than about a hundred bucks, so I can’t be trusted to do something like shop for a refrigerator. (This is true even for purchases of things that I really like purchasing — like bicycles or computers. It takes me months to get up the nerve to finally buy something like a new bicycle.) And when you own a house, you spend bucks by the thousands. Ouch.

But the weird thing is that I’m not a frugal person. At all. I don’t clip coupons or reuse tea bags. I like buying my groceries at the chichi yupippy organic grocery. I drink the expensive beer. I have no qualms about picking up the tab when I’m with friends, or spending any amount of actual money on any number of impulsive purchases. In some ways my behavior is anti frugal. I hate shopping and buying things so much that I’ll pay a premium to procure them from somewhere that streamlines the shopping process. I’d rather walk into the Levi’s store and pay whatever price they ask for the exact jeans I always wear (model 527, size 32/32), than dig through the extras bins at TJ Maxx or wherever to save big $$$.

My particular tight-fistedness was the source of a certain relationship friction — not so much because we disagreed about the expense (we really need that fridge), as because it hurts me so much to acquire an object. It makes me grumpy. But in our, ahem, discussion about the new fridge I had a realization. Jenny likes nice things. I don’t mean she has high tastes or likes spending money, but just that, if she needs to own something, she would just as well that thing be nice.

But that’s not actually the realization. The realization I had was that my ideal relationship with possessions would be to have none at all. Like, literally. I suppose I really really need a pair of shoes and some sweatpants or something, but otherwise, it would be nice to have no responsibility for any physical objects whatsoever. So when I actually do really need something (and, as it turns out, modern life requires more accessories than a pair of shoes and some sweatpants), my inclinations is to buy them as easily, and, more importantly, as disposably as possible.

So when Jenny and I have a “fight” about “money,” we aren’t really fighting and it isn’t really about money. We’re having a conflict of worldviews about the importance of physical objects.

Of the two attitudes on display, Jenny has the more grown-up. Responsible adults can’t conscionably sit on the floor and eat from plastic plates (← I am describing my bachelorhood here). She has come by her attitude honestly and organically. Which is to say, she has always been like this, and she knows it.

I don’t know if I’ve always been like this, and I’ve always felt conflicted about it. As a teenager and young adult I was recklessly acquisitive. For example, when I got my first real paycheck at my first real job (as an archaeological fieldworker in North Dakota), I spent the whole thing — $800 — on a single shopping spree at an outdoor store in Billings, Montana. At literally the same time, I harbored fantasies about losing all my possessions in a disaster.

This whole thing is a little bit mysterious to me. It’s like those cartoons where Sylvester has an angel cat on one shoulder and a devil cat on the other. The little Acquisitive Angel is saying “Paul, buy a new backpack! You have the money! You deserve it!” and the Destructive Devil is saying “Don’t be a sucker, that’s just more crap you’ll have to schlep around. Carry your stuff to work in a paper bag! Why the hell not!” When I was younger, I guess the angel was winning. Maybe because, when you haven’t owned nice things, it’s fun to buy those things you’ve always wanted. As I age, the devil has pretty much taken over. Probably because by this point in my life I’ve owned already owned all the things I’ve ever wanted, so there’s no fun left in buying something new.

Jenny and I recently (re-)read Beverly Clearly’s Henry Huggins (because we’re having a son? because Cleary is from Portland? dunno why, really), which prompted a discussion about the prices Henry paid for things in (presumably) 1950. Life in 1950 was a lot cheaper but conversely money was a lot harder to come by. For example:

In the first chapter (“Henry and Ribs”), Henry pays a 10¢ bus fare. This was well before Tri-Met but we can actually make a direct comparison. He rode from the YMCA downtown to his house on NE Klickitat (or rather, that was his intention until he was ejected), a two-zone fare that today would cost $2.05. (You could make the argument that NE Klickitat in 1950 was on the edge of town, so it might comparable to a three-zone fare today, but I won’t make that argument.)

In the third chapter (“Henry and the Night Crawlers”), Henry wants a new football that costs $13.95. It sounds like a pretty nice football — perhaps like the Wilson F1100 Official NFL Game Football that Amazon.com sells for $79.99.

A ten-year-old with two football’s worth of money could buy one football, and then ride the bus across town 139 times (and still have a nickel left for soda) ... in 1950. A ten-year-old in 2008 could buy the football, and then ride the bus not-quite–across town 39 times (with one penny left over).

So on the one hand, the ability of a young boy to move freely about Portland, Oregon is 28% what it was 58 years ago. On the other hand, his ability to purchase a football is 5.7 times greater than it was 58 years ago.

Or, proceeding from the assumption that the prices of things reflect in some way their actual value — and not to put too fine a point on it — we, as a society, have traded about 70% of our kids’ literal freedom (in the sense of “freedom of movement”) for a five-fold increase in their ability to accumulate stuff.

Rereading Henry Huggins for the first time since the 1970s throws into weird relief how the world has changed since my own childhood. As a kid, I recognized in Henry’s adventures a lot of my own behavior, and that of my friends. In particular, I never felt like I was reading some historical document of childhood from ancient times (something I felt when reading, for example, Peter Pan). Henry was doing things that were recognizably real-world 10-year-old things to do, in either 1950 or 1979. There were differences but they were of degree, not kind: Henry lived in a city where I lived in the country; he rode the bus freely around town and I rode my bike freely around the countryside; he collected night crawlers to sell to fishermen and I collected golf balls from the irrigation ditch next to the country club to sell to, well, golfers who lost their balls in the irrigation ditch.

Could you imagine a kid in 2008 doing any of these things?

(A Quick Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation)

• P_g = price of a gallon of regular unleaded at the Chevron near our house = $4.22
• P_m = price of a gallon of Alpenrose 2% milk at New Seasons = $3.89
• P_r = price of a gallon (16 cups) of cooked white rice at New Seasons^[1] = $0.35
• D_fg = mileage of our 2008 Subaru Forester (standard transmission) during a typical week of commuting = 24.5 mpg
• E_g = energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline = 31,000 kcal (aka “calories”)
• E_m = energy equivalent of a gallon of 2% milk = 1952 kcal
• E_r = energy equivalent of a gallon (16 cups) of cooked white rice = 4256 kcal
• p = energy I burn in one hour riding my bike on a flat road with no wind at 15 mph^[2] = 704 kcal
• D_pg = my mileage if I could somehow consume a gallon of gasoline = (E_g/p) × 15 = 660.5 mpg
• D_pm = my mileage on a gallon of 2% milk = (E_m/p) × 15 = 41 mpg
• D_pr = my mileage on a gallon of cooked white rice = (E_r/p) × 15 = 90.7 mpg
• C_fg = cost to drive the Forester one mile = P_g/D_fg = $0.17
• C_pg = cost to ride my bike one mile if I could somehow consume gasoline = P_g/D_pg < $0.01 (greater than half a significant digit [$0.005]
• C_pm = cost to ride my bike one mile powered by milk = P_m/D_pm = $0.09
• C_pr = cost to ride my bike one mile powered by rice = P_r/D_pr < $0.01 (less than half a significant digit [$0.005]

Notes

^[1] Assumes 2 cups of cooked rice = 1 cup dry rice weighing 8oz
^[2] A pretty leisurely speed for me under those conditions, so I might actually burn fewer calories than this, i.e. get better “gas mileage”