My Closet Theory of World Economics
As a holiday offering for your amusement, I present this personally memorialized version of the story of the over-developed world’s last 30–40 years, writ small:
The City Parents of Augusta, the state capital of Maine, are considering allowing a Las Vegas developer named Patriot Holdings to convert a closed and now empty Big Box Store building into a self-storage unit. Such conversions are a common occurrence, we’re told. How great is that?
First, you shut down the small family stores and businesses in town by putting in that Big Box Store. That allowed everybody to buy more Cheap Everything, most of it made in China. Meanwhile, China shoved millions of its people out of villages and farms so they could work in factories, live in dormitories, and make stuff so cheap Americans could afford to buy it even when they no longer had good factory jobs.
Most of the stuff people bought is stuff they never really wanted, much less needed, of course. So it ends up in “self-storage” a few years later. Everybody pays at every stage, of course — especially the environment, but who cares about that? And the winner is? GDP growth! Each one of those payments at each of those stages counts as economic activity the way Gross Domestic Product (How gross is that?) is figured, including the monthly payments people dole out to the self-storage developers. How perfect is that?
Persistent purchasing by the Great American Consumer is what’s been keeping the global economy afloat of late. How good is that? It’s why we all love Economic Growth so much! Right?
There’s almost nothing about this article from the (truly) beautiful state of Maine that I don’t love, except perhaps the possibility it suggests that the Augusta City Parents won’t allow construction of more garage-style storage units in the parking lot that would be visible from the state capitol. I think it might benefit our political climate if all state and federal legislators spent more time looking at — and contemplating the environmental, economic, and cultural significance of — self-storage units.
It’s All About Closets
Years ago — decades, actually — I had one of those “sudden illuminations” (thanks to Mr. Eliot for that phrase) when I understood the meaning of what we were all experiencing: I immediately dubbed my brilliant (by my personal reckoning) insight The Closet Theory of World Economics. It held that a country’s trade deficit or surplus was proportional to the amount of closet space that country had. Forget purchasing power, and monetary policy, and productivity. It’s all about closets.
The US had (and still has) by far the most closet space, especially once you included in the calculations garages and self-storage units full of junk. I’ve never actually looked for a dataset to prove that, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. As a result, there was no limit to people’s ability it accumulate junk, otherwise known as stuff, and the US therefore had the biggest trade deficit.
Europe was in the middle. It had some closets and other storage space, but not too much. Sure enough, its trade account was reasonably balanced. (We’re looking EU-wide here. None of that silly stuff about the Germans making more stuff, and the Greeks living off 2,000-year-old ruins and borrowed money.)
I said this illumination struck me a long time ago. So long ago that the country with the scary big trade surplus was Japan, not China — and everybody at that time (at least in the West) knew that the Japanese had no closets. They could only buy new stuff if they got rid of some old stuff that would otherwise take up space. And if they had self-storage units, nobody I knew had ever heard about it. The result was obvious under the Closet Theory: Japan ran huge trade surpluses.
I can’t say I’ve read or heard a lot about the size of closets in China. But based on their large trade surplus, I’m guessing — or to be precise, I’m working backwards using the Closet Theory of World Economics, as any good economic theorist would do — that that they have very small closets, if any. It’s obvious.
Still Ruinously Relevant
Other than Donald Trump (and maybe the Chinese), few people worry much about trade balances these days. However, the Closet Theory of World Economics still provides flashes of insight that allow a deep understanding of how the global economy works at its most fundamental, closet-related level. Some people make and sell things (the Chinese). Some people make a few things, buy a few things, and write a lot of rules (the Europeans). And some people buy things and, after minimal use, either put them in self-storage or throw them away and send the trash into someone else’s landfill (Guess who?).
The environmental impacts are dire and getting worse every day (No joke). As if the Climate Crisis weren’t bad enough, there are oceans, rivers, and dumps full of plastic. There are people and insects dying of pesticides. People and their pets dying of cancer. There is no end of it (thanks again to Mr. Eliot), and when the self-storage units and leftover Big Box Stores-converted-into-bigger-self-storage units are all full, that stuff will join the people-killing, and other species-killing, waste in land dumps or the ocean.
Amazon and all the packaging and fossil fuels it has used — and continues to use — to put the Big Box Stores out of business, thereby creating more room for self-storage, don’t really seem like the ideal answer. Even solar panels, a trade war, and bringing plastics production back home to the US and Europe don’t seem like adequate solutions if we keep building and filling all those closets and self-storage units.
Either I’m insane or this system is insane, and being me, I think the problem is the system. Why don’t we just stop buying so much stuff?
Why don’t we only buy what we truly need or, at minimum, something we’re pretty sure we’ll still want a year from now? If you need some methadone-equivalent for your shopping addiction, go to a yard sale, or a ReStore Store, or a pre-owned clothes shop. Or maybe take a walk or bike ride. Anything that doesn’t add more carbon emissions, plastics, pesticides, or other poisons to an Earth that’s starting to look like a self-storage unit for Earth-destroying Everything.
