by Laura Conaway

Shawn writes:

I really love your show, and I thank you for helping so much to make sense of all this. There's a common and overriding theme in your reporting, however, that has been really bothering me, and that's the idea that all this is unfair, as if someone did this to us.

The thing is, we did this. We all did this. We were greedy, we lived beyond our means for too long, and now here we are.

 

Sure, some people were more greedy than others. Some people took advantage of other people. Some people who unfairly profited are getting off relatively painlessly, and some innocent bystanders are suffering. Those things are unfair, but overall, we did this to our economy.

My dad was a teacher, and my mom didn't work outside the home. My parents struggled financially, but we lived well within our means and made a good life.

Personally, I've been lucky, but I like having money more than I like owing money, so although I make more than $200k/year as a technology consultant in San Francisco, I've rented a one-bedroom apartment for the last ten years. My fiancee and I will buy a bigger place in 2009 after we get married (assuming we can get a mortgage), and although I'm excited about the prospect of having a dishwasher for the first time in my life, I hate the idea of owing a bank a lot of money.

"More" has been the American mantra for a long time. We expanded across this continent and around the world (often illegally and sometimes violently) to feed our appetites for more.

de Tocqueville wrote of how the typical American "clutches at everything" and "holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications." And again: "As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"

We did this, and we are taking our medicine now.