Recession Hangover

Since the beginning of our current financial meltdown people have been speculating about what types of economic and social changes the recession might spur. Even a country as obstinate as ours can’t suffer an epic fail like this one and come through without some little spark of enlightenment, right? I don’t know about you but I’m kind of hoping for a massive do-over.

OK, so this week GM said they need more cash or they’ll have to file for bankruptcy. Honestly how do CEOs not know that the way their companies operate isn’t tenable? The fact is that they do know, and they just don’t care. No one in charge anywhere was giving the slightest thought to what happens next. So now SUVs are collecting dust on dealership lots all over the country. Maybe our “bigger is better” mentality will be one of the first things to get the boot. Smaller, cheaper, more economical cars make more sense. If the industry puts effort into developing them and we start buying them that might be one change that sticks.

I can’t figure out why the automakers aren’t more embarrassed to have screwed up so badly. Obama should force all the troubled corporations to hire lesbian consultants to come in and teach CEOs to process and talk about their feelings. Think about how much better they’ll all feel. And that will surely make them more productive. Once they learn to communicate, we can teach them other important lesbionic skills like how to live communally, make dairy-free chocolate pudding, decoupage their office furniture and undo bra straps one-handed.  These things make the world a better place.

Another positive recession side effect is the possibility of less suburban sprawl because home prices have tanked. Suburban sprawl isn’t particularly healthy for anyone. People may say they like living in less densely populated areas but it just makes them lazy. When you live in far away suburbs you can’t walk to anything. Filling up every bit of land isn’t healthy for wildlife. Sprawl lowers water quality because we have to pipe water in to far away areas. There’s more pollution per person and sprawling development uses up more land per person than we actually need.

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Of course I’m sympathetic to families struggling to pay mortgages on homes that are worth less then they paid for them; but the bloated real estate market was encouraging all sorts of unnecessary development. All the little subdivisions of housing that have sprung up everywhere aren’t going to fill up. The value of that real estate isn’t what people had been thinking it was, and, now that potential buyers understand they wont be able to quickly sell their homes at a profit, those areas are going to seem less attractive.

All of this means more people will live closer to cities. Cities with thriving urban centers attract people and when people are attracted to a city it stays alive. City planners will have to think about how to keep the culture alive so people will continue to live there. Plus, living in cities is greener. I know it doesn’t seem like it would be; cities make you think of crazy pollution and overcrowding. But because we take mass transit and live in small spaces, New Yorkers have about a fourth of the carbon footprint of everyone else. It’s all the commuting in giant cars that is bad for us. And really, driving two hours each way to work in your giant car and then driving thirty miles to some huge warehouse store on the weekend to buy a bunch more stuff than you need just doesn’t make sense. I’m sorry but there are only so many books on tape you can listen to in your car before you have a psychotic break and start shooting people on the freeway.

All of this sudden dialogue about the economy boom and bust should have started before everyone lost their jobs and houses. Don’t you just want to roll your eyes at, for instance, the fact that a good percentage of Californians were more interested in keeping gays from getting married than they were in the fact that their state was completely busted? How boring of them. But here we are now and since we’re all just unemployed and sitting around in stained bathrobes swigging out of gin bottles anyway we might as well start figuring out how to make things better.