Let's be real honest with ourselves: not every house needs a lawn mower.
I'm standing on the cusp of professorhood, which will entail moving to a yet-to-be determined place and a lot of other big boy stuff like buying a home. When one buys a home, only three options exist vis-a-vis the lawn. One can disregard it, allowing the front lawn to resemble the Serengetti. "Professionals" (i.e., 20 illegal immigrants sharing a Social Security number) can be hired to do landscape maintenance.
Or a lawn mower can be purchased.
For no specific reason I have always associated the purchase of a lawn mower with being old.
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Being an official adult. Renting for the past 10 years has allowed me to circumvent this to some extent, but soon there will be a reckoning. But why do we all buy lawn mowers? Given the infrequency with which it is used, one lawn mower per three or four homes would more than suit America's lawn maintenance needs.
Juliet Schor explored this idea in The Overspent American (a must-read), discussing the problems of materialism, consumer culture, and debt. She concludes with some proposals such as shared neighbor/community ownership of little-used, expensive things like lawn mowers. It makes sense, right?
If only being a good, sensitive, sustainable, zero-emissions 21st Century anti-consumerist were so cut and dried. Let's wave a magic wand and get every group of four families to share a lawnmower. That's great – unless you stand on an assembly line making lawn mowers. Demand will drop precipitously and it'll cease to be profitable to build the product outside of China or Mexico. And we NPR-listening Good Liberals are supposed to care about that too.
The point is simply that our society and economy are so entirely dependent on debt-financed consumer spending that every effort to make good decisions – conserving, reducing waste, increasing efficiency – has negative economic consequences. As consumer spending falls (which is great! Let's all shop less!) the entire nation shudders because it's all the US of A has left to fuel its economic engine. Buy, buy, buy. Spend, spend, spend. When you run out of money, charge it and keep spending. It's your goddamn duty as a patriotic American to shop 'til your fingers bleed.
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Our Leader (and his dad) tell us that when recessions hit, the right thing to do is "go shopping more." We jury-rig idiotic election-year panders like sending out rebate checks – remember those?
– in the hopes that they'll be spent at the mall (which, like the economic crack that "stimulus" checks are, worked to boost consumer spending for about five minutes).
The baby boomers built a world in which neither they nor the rest of us can afford to live. When we try to be more efficient the extent to which our economy has devolved into a wasteful, materialistic, no-money-down gangbang becomes clear.
ladiesbane says:
Three things:
My hometown of choice (Portland, OR) used to have shared bikes for downtown get-around. Lockers dotted the area, and the bikes were checked out and returned like library books. Were any of the bikes NOT stolen? (There is a newer car-share program which seems to work better, but still: most lawnmowers are in the bicycle class for ease of theft.)
Cooperative living, especially sharing appliances, works best when the cooperatives all are motivated to maintain the shared item. Shame, pride, and fear of anticipated guilt all work well, but are negative emotions that most people have purged. They have not been replaced with anything useful, such as good manners, the Golden Rule, or pragmatic doctrine. Buying a share means losing a share. Save your rubles, Comrade.
Last: congratulations on your incipient title! I suspect it's a formality, given what you do now — but a meaningful formality. Unlike some of the schmoes who taught me, I think you deserve it. Good luck.
warmbowski says:
I often wonder how progressive Dems can possibly get elected to run this greedy country.
Say a Dem gets elected president and wants to conserve, wants to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, wants to make factories cleaner. She needs to regulate to do that. The regulation and reductions in output both harm the bottom line. It takes years and dollars to slowly reel people and businesses in and get them on board. To get things greener without taking a really big hit.
Then, after four or eight years, some repub comes along and says "I'll save you money by getting rid of all that stuff, and reimburse some of that money directly to you with a retroactive tax rebate." Now this repub easily gets in office waving that kind of 'voter candy" and can start tearing down regulations at 10 times the speed that they were erected. Drill anywhare, no CAFE standards, cut down any forrest. How can he possibly lose? How can he possibly put us in bigger debt while allowing a free for all like that. Productivity can do nothing but go up, prices on goods can only go down, and everyone feels financial relief. How can it possibly go wrong for him? How can he possibly lose elections with that? How can he possibly put us in debt (cough-war-cough!)?
Now at what point do American voters say to themselves "I think I'll vote for a rational forward-thinking Democrat because I have enough money and cheap things, but I think were really screwing future generations. And I'll actually pay a bit more in taxes this year to help get the 'sustainability' ball rolling again?". I'm sure many voters do say that, but not enough to get anyone decent like that elected.
Again, what gets a majority of voters to pick a Democrat on election day? I like to think it's voters having a conscience, and candidates promising a cheap solar array on every rooftop. But it's probably more like feigning republican and giving in to the promise of a cheap mower in every garage.
Ben says:
Your assessment of the American "economy" as being little more than a consumer-spending-driven mess is spot on.
Allow me to suggest, however, that you have another option in re your lawn: turn it into a front-yard garden. (You may have HOA regulations to deal with, depending on your area, but HOA rules regarding gardens are uncommon.) There are thousands of low- to no-maintenance plants, different types suited for every climate, that you could plant in beds replacing the lawn. Replace enough high-maintenance, demanding, unrewarding lawn with garden beds, and you can mow what little lawn is left with a manual mower. (You know, the rolling blades thing.) Visit your local greenhouse and they'll be happy to help you pick out a range of hardy perennials.
Not only will you have less yard work to do over the long term, but your property will be much more attractive, your property value will increase, and you'll actually be helping the environment.
Matthew says:
Lawns – as they are currently maintained by most aesthetics-conscious homeowners – are actually pretty bad for the environment. I was once stuck at a conference where nothing was going on, so I read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Redesigning-American-Lawn-Environmental-Harmony/dp/0300086946/ref=pd_sim_b_1
A nice thing about urban living is that you don't have to fuck with it.
Adam says:
Ed:
The economy of the US has never, ever been built on efficiency. For that matter, capitalism in most of its varieties requires inefficiency to survive for very long. The aim of all capitalist ventures is to produce at the maximum possible rate to reduce the cost of manufacturing. That means that the tendency of any capitalist economy is toward overproduction. Classic economic theory holds that when demand falls (after everyone has bought their widget and the market is saturated) manufacturing will slow or stop on the affected products. Problem is, when that happens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of workers will be layed-off or fired. If enough workers are displaced at any one time, there won't be enough consumers to buy enough goods to bolster (the already sagging) demand, forcing manufacturers to cut into the workforce a further degree to save their bottom line. Politicians often call such a situation a "market adjustment," a term invented to take the rhetorical sting out of words like "depression" or "panic".
The business community (i.e., our oligarchical aristocracy) recognizes that this pattern of boom/bust is inherent in their methods, and tries its absolute damnedest to find a way to blame someone, anyone besides themselves for their lack of self control. Consequently, they turn out mountains of propaganda against regulation of their industry and for heightened consumer spending. In the mangled logic of the corporate mindset, the answer is not control of manufacturing policy but to throw more fuel on the fire (e.g., stimulus checks, bail-outs, corporate welfare, etc.) Once again, the corporate world's willingness and determination to externalize the true costs of their industry trump the so-called virtues of pure capitalism, and self-regulation is all but forgotten–buried and muted under the hue and cry of the corporate whore: buy, buy, buy!
….And if you run out of money: buy on credit, buy on credit! It's worth noting that consumer credit debt is at an all-time high in the US. I firmly believe that this is no accident. The banks and industry had to invent some way, some method to allow US consumers to buy just as many or more goods in the face of lowered wages (yes, real wages have gone down for many years). The reality of our work-a-day world is that the average worker's former purchasing power has been replaced with a credit line. Certainly, it can be claimed that the average consumer is forced to debt to pay for necessities. What worker has $80,000 (most homes of course cost much more) dollars to buy a home, or $20,000 to buy a minivan? These credit lines are given out to bolster demand and quiet the concerns of the working class who are being robbed of their future.
Ed, you are right in pointing out the ubiquity of debt in our society. Debt is now a constant in the average worker's life, and it (purposefully or not) serves to chain the working class in virtual slavery.
The upper class is always, to some degree, predatory upon the society it rules. How well a society manages to limit that predation is roughly a measure of how free said society is. What we have lost sight of in the US is that it's up to us to wall-off the unlimited appetite of the aristocracy. We have failed to resist pressures from our upper class to soften what few controls we ever had over their practices. It's up to us as citizens to harness the upper classes for the purpose of a more equitable world. It's up to us to change the rules in our favor.
Samantha says:
Sharing a lawnmower? Easier said than done. I've been trying to borrow one all summer and these guys are all like, "Uh. Um. Sure." But that's as far as it ever goes. Ah, the male art of commited non-commital.
Meanwhile, I've got the Serengetti in both front and back yards. Maybe I should offer to rent one from someone for the day?
j says:
Adam: "The aim of all capitalist ventures is to produce at the maximum possible rate to reduce the cost of manufacturing."
Actually that's not completely true: the optimum production rate is that which maximizes profit, which is typically less–often substantially so–than the maximum possible production rate. Hence, factories are often shut down for lengths of time.
But I agree with the rest of your sentiments. Sometimes I wish we had a monarchy so that we wouldn't have this blighted short-term viewpoint on the costs and benefits of our policies.