Opportunity: In Recession, Women Splurge as if Addicted

[nonrate]

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In Recession, Women Splurge as if Addicted | LiveScience

Thoughts?

[bananaman]

I think there's something wrong with the link.

The page won't load, and it didn't load when I tried to view it 10 hours ago either.

[byzantium]

Worked fine for me.

The comments were interesting-one guy noted more women getting pregnant during the recession, which is intriguing. My parents were married in December 1973, in the midst of the oil embargo, and I was conceived the next February. It all seemed quite illogical to me-why would a young couple make such major life decisions in the midst of a crisis that struck at the heart of modern civilization, one which a happy ending was far from clear?

In addition, it seems that after the embargo hit in October 1973, my mom rushed her future husband to the altar-I mean, who gets married in DECEMBER? My mom never gave me straight answers either, all she would say is that "I love (my husband)" and talk about what a cute baby I was. While both were true, what would be the harm in putting a marriage off until the embargo was resolved? I think that there's some deeply buried evolutionary programming going on here. Another commenter talked about gathering food for tough times, and how it might relate to recessionary spending sprees by women.

We don't have a real good grasp on what life was like for our extremely distant ancestors, recently several long held beliefs about prehistoric humanity have gone down, such as the belief that we evolved in Ethiopia, they now think we're from what is now Namibia.

We also have thousands of years of myths talking about vanished civilizations that conventional wisdom says didn't exist, and we have radioactive "melted" stones, descriptions in sagas from India that sound like nuclear missiles, mysterious maps that show things like an ice free Antarctica. The popular concept of the distant past is full of holes.

We don't know why women would be compelled to spend money they don't have and bring babies into the world during a devastating economic collapse. We know very little about the human brain, and how it works, and more importantly why, and what shaped it.

[The Stealthy One]

This is pretty interesting to me, as I'm just finishing up reading the book Your Money or Your Life - it discusses the idea of emotional spending, and correlates that with the fact that so many people are in such deep consumer debt. It seems true that many use shopping as a source of fulfillment. How did we ever get to this point?!

[byzantium]

This is pretty interesting to me, as I'm just finishing up reading the book Your Money or Your Life - it discusses the idea of emotional spending, and correlates that with the fact that so many people are in such deep consumer debt. It seems true that many use shopping as a source of fulfillment. How did we ever get to this point?!

What's incredible is that even with the credit crunch and all the talk about new priorities, too many people, especially women, seem to equate shopping with recreation. They can cut out the trips to Vegas and not blink. But don't take their mall away, nor their credit cards. My local mall has a number of empty spaces, and they have simply been boarded up and effectively abandoned. But people are still going there. At first, the mall was empty of shoppers, last October. Then it gradually filled back up.

Even after 9-11, when people seemed to realize that the shopping life was empty, it took about a month for them to get over their newfound respect for the world outside the mall. W told them to go shopping, and there were great deals, so people went back. It's insane. When do people finally realize that happiness is NOT found at the bottom of a shopping bag?

We've had a 30 year spending spree in the US, and people don't want it to end. We've ruined the country, and perhaps the world, so we could shop. Yet crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, soaring crime, and the disapproval of the Chinese can't stop them. They are so deeply addicted that they have no hope of ever seeing daylight again. Young people start accumulating debt from the day they turn 18, and they are in debt for the rest of their pathetic lives. Where does it end?

I've heard of people killing themselves and their families after accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and when the music stops they can't handle their emasculation, or whatever you call it when you take a woman's womanhood away. They suddenly realize that they owe many times their annual salary, and they have no way to repay it.

I recently saw a "debt clock" that has our national debt, including credit cards, at about 250% of GDP. We're bankrupt. The world is bankrupt, since they rely on us spending. Civilization has bankrupted itself in 40 years. Global debt is three times global assets. We can't pay back the mountains of debt. The bankers may do what bankers have always done, and enslave us to pay it back, and our children for fifty generations. Hello, dark ages.

[bananaman]

It seems true that many use shopping as a source of fulfillment. How did we ever get to this point?!

Marketing.

[The Stealthy One]

What's incredible is that even with the credit crunch and all the talk about new priorities, too many people, especially women, seem to equate shopping with recreation. They can cut out the trips to Vegas and not blink. But don't take their mall away, nor their credit cards. My local mall has a number of empty spaces, and they have simply been boarded up and effectively abandoned. But people are still going there. At first, the mall was empty of shoppers, last October. Then it gradually filled back up.

Even after 9-11, when people seemed to realize that the shopping life was empty, it took about a month for them to get over their newfound respect for the world outside the mall. W told them to go shopping, and there were great deals, so people went back. It's insane. When do people finally realize that happiness is NOT found at the bottom of a shopping bag?

We've had a 30 year spending spree in the US, and people don't want it to end. We've ruined the country, and perhaps the world, so we could shop. Yet crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, soaring crime, and the disapproval of the Chinese can't stop them. They are so deeply addicted that they have no hope of ever seeing daylight again. Young people start accumulating debt from the day they turn 18, and they are in debt for the rest of their pathetic lives. Where does it end?

I've heard of people killing themselves and their families after accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and when the music stops they can't handle their emasculation, or whatever you call it when you take a woman's womanhood away. They suddenly realize that they owe many times their annual salary, and they have no way to repay it.

I recently saw a "debt clock" that has our national debt, including credit cards, at about 250% of GDP. We're bankrupt. The world is bankrupt, since they rely on us spending. Civilization has bankrupted itself in 40 years. Global debt is three times global assets. We can't pay back the mountains of debt. The bankers may do what bankers have always done, and enslave us to pay it back, and our children for fifty generations. Hello, dark ages.

You are so right on. I see dark, dark times ahead. So much so, in fact, that I think most (all?) currencies will be very effectively debased in the near future. I've begun investing far more in precious metals - though their values rise and fall like a commodity, in the end there is a finite supply of these metals. Unfortunately, governments (specifically the U.S. goverment) feel they can continue to print new money and push their financial problems forward just a few more years. We are already too far into a massive downward spiral that I see reaching critical mass sometime within the next 10 years - and probably much sooner. It will not at all be pretty.

[byzantium]

You are so right on. I see dark, dark times ahead. So much so, in fact, that I think most (all?) currencies will be very effectively debased in the near future. I've begun investing far more in precious metals - though their values rise and fall like a commodity, in the end there is a finite supply of these metals. Unfortunately, governments (specifically the U.S. goverment) feel they can continue to print new money and push their financial problems forward just a few more years. We are already too far into a massive downward spiral that I see reaching critical mass sometime within the next 10 years - and probably much sooner. It will not at all be pretty.

Recently the idea of a global "debt jubilee" has been floated, where all debts are written off. The idea comes from the Bible, where the Israelites are commanded to forgive all debts every seven years. Since it's impossible to pay back all the debt, and impossible to print enough money to pay it back, there may be no other choice, unless the bankers simply enslave everybody to pay back the debts. As the Roman Empire was collapsing, the welfare class, who had sold their farms for a "better life" in Rome and other cities, fled the cities to go back to the land, since that's where the food was. But the speculators who had bought up the farms of the plebes decided to make sure that the farmers could never flee again. So they legally bound them to the land. The new farmers were no longer free citizens, but the legal property of the landowners. Thus, feudalism. There are rumors that rich billionaires have been buying up as much arable land as they can. Are they planning for a new feudalism? Might it be wise to buy up some good farmland?