"IN TIMES LIKE THESE, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these," says Paul Harvey, the legendary radio commentator. A "great transformation [is] taking place around the world...a tectonic power shift...the world is very different," writes Fareed Zakaria in his Post-American World.
They're both right. We have indeed seen economic downturns many times in the past, some severe, some shallow and short. We have gone through periods of rising oil and commodity prices, of a falling dollar, and of rapid technological change. So Paul Harvey is right.
But so is Zakaria. We are finally seeing the impact on the world economy of the emergence of China, India and other once-poor countries. The good news is that we have brought billions of people into the world trading system, enriching them so they can afford to eat regularly, and trade their bicycles for cars. The less good news is that the process of adjusting to this increased demand on the world resources is proving painful, especially here in America.
Previous increases took the price of oil, and most especially of gasoline, to levels that were merely annoying. And anyhow proved to be temporary, as modest adjustments in fuel use and advances in technology combined with new supplies to ease price pressures. The current price spurt, which has taken gasoline prices to over $4 per gallon--half the level in the UK and other parts of the world, but previously unheard of in the United States--is different.
For one thing, it coincides with other
pressures on the consumer, not least of them major increases in food prices. More important, consumers seem to have decided that the new higher gasoline prices are likely to last. So they are changing their behavior.
The day of our ever-larger SUVs is over, at least in good part. These vehicles sit, unloved and unsold, on dealers' lots, and with them any hope that such as Ford and GM will be able to turn a profit in the foreseeable future. Ford, which sold 445,000 Explorers at the height of that vehicle's popularity, will be lucky to sell 100,000 of the profit-generating SUVs this year. On the other hand, there are long waiting lists for the Toyota Prius, which is commanding premium prices, and other hybrids, including--a Detroit bright spot--the Ford Escape. Some experts calculate that at current prices, hybrids, which run on a combination of gasoline and electricity, make up for their higher prices in somewhere between two and three years for the average 15,000-mile-per-year driver.
Meanwhile, during the long period in which the vehicle fleet is turning over, consumer behavior is changing. Miles driven are down about 4 percent, and mass transit use is up 20 percent. Ride-sharing postings on the web are up 88 percent in the Virginia suburbs of the nation's capital, teleconferencing is on the rise, a Colorado IT consultant tells me she has switched to a motorcycle, consumers are trekking to the malls less frequently, rural community colleges are cramming classes into four-day schedules to save their non-rich commuting students hundreds of dollars per school year, and town governments are converting to 4-day workweeks. Shippers are consolidating loads so as to reduce the number of trips, as truckers, faced with a more than doubling of diesel-fuel prices to $5 per gallon, tack on fuel surcharges. More is to come: Hewlett-Packard is quadrupling its video-conferencing facilities to eliminate 20,000 employee plane trips every year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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