The holiday shopping season kicks off this week with Black Friday, and American shoppers are expected to spend a record amount, particularly in online sales.
Consumer spending keeps the U.S. economy humming, making up 70% of the country’s gross domestic product. But it wasn’t always this way.
“Over the course of the 18th century, by the time of the Revolution, you go from a world where nearly all Americans made their own cloth and something called homespun to them buying it in shops,” said Louis Hyman, an economic historian at Cornell University.
On the show today, Hyman gives us a history lesson on how the American economy became dependent on the consumer, why that change has created serious environmental consequences, and whether there are alternatives to the consumer-driven economy we know today. Plus, what it all has to do with the…
