by Mary Claire Kendall

Created on: May 09, 2009   Last Updated: December 06, 2011

The “Great Recession” that officially hit in December 2007, which still hobbles our economy in 2010, is about as funny as a crutch, especially given the immense job loss – 8.2 million jobs, which experts estimate will take five years to regain, making it the longest recovery since World War II.

Before the economy stalled, we were living the good life – consuming way too much while producing not nearly enough – oblivious to the real estate bubble’s impending collapse.

Our obliviousness to the “boom and bust” cycle is as American as apple pie.

Consider South Florida’s real estate boom in the 1920s.  As Groucho Marx famously joked, “You can get wood. You can get brick. You can get stucco. Boy, can you get stucco.”  Clever marketing by developers such as Carl G. Fisher of Miami Beach, who famously purchased a huge lighted billboard in New York’s Times Square, blaring “It’s June In Miami,” caused prices to skyrocket on speculation, leading to a land and development boom. But, Fisher didn’t count on ‘September in Miami’ when the huge hurricane of 1926 wiped out his tropical paradise, leaving South Florida real estate in the doldrums until the 1970s!

Then, as now, people borrowed more money than their wealth and position justified, to buy into a paradise that, once the bubble burst, was ‘paradise lost.’

Now would be a good time to reflect on the essence of why we got ‘stuck-o’ this time around. 

As larger-than-life President Theodore Roosevelt (1900-1908) rightly worried, America's prosperity contains the very seeds of her destruction, which provides a window into today’s economic reality.  Quite simply, it was our uncontrolled appetites for material possessions beyond our means – especially ever-bigger and ever-more houses filled with ever-more and richer stuff – that caused the massive financial meltdown starting in the summer of 2007.

Walter Huston’s character (“Howard”) in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), a classic film, captures the humor in obsessively pursuing wealth as an end in itself, marvelously well. Down-on-his-luck in Mexico after being swindled, he endures hair-raising adventures to acquire gold in the wilds of central Mexico with his sometimes greedy, untrustworthy partners – Humphrey Bogart (“Dobbs”) and Tim Holt (“Curtin”) – only to see it all blown away by the wind. This surprise ending prompts him to laugh uproariously when he realizes he has what’s most important – life; whereas Dobbs was killed. Tragedy, you see, is the underside of comedy. 

Of course, humor and philosophy will only take you so far.  But, take heart! In the midst of these tough times lie the seeds of America's re-emergence – the inverse of what precipitated our decline.  And, if we play our cards right and start saving and investing in America's innovative ideas, technology and talent – production not consumption – soon, we’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

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