Our life experience is our great mapmaker. Etched in our minds — like road maps — is how we behave, treat our neighbors, make sense of our world. We know where we are going because we know where we have been.
For many of us, our mind maps have great economic expectations because we have been raised in a rich, compassionate and abundant country. We inherited a stock of natural wealth and proceeded to build the world’s highest standard of living and generous social systems. Our maps were predictable and dependable and pointed every year to a better life.
But we have been borrowing against that wealth, consuming and spending instead of investing and saving. Over the last 25 years, our public and private debt has gone up $49.1 trillion but our gross domestic product has grown only $10.9 trillion. We are spending our kids’ and grandkids’ money to maintain lifestyles we no longer earn.
We now face a time of reckoning that is not on our mental maps.
It will be years before we are as wealthy as we were at the beginning of this year. As the credit bubble unwinds, we will have to rethink many things: our lifestyles, our consumption patterns, and the very basics of our public policy.
But we have changed the maps in our minds before. Some of our family marched in Selma in 1965. We had been brought up on maps that featured smooth, paved highways for some of us, and separate dirt roads with potholes for others. Yet the maps we followed as we marched featured parallel, hopefully intertwined, roads that would allow each individual to follow his or her dream.
And now, one of those persons whose family seemed destined to follow the “lower” road has earned a route to highest destination an American can strive for: the driveway to the White House.
We grew up with maps of supposedly “equal” roads for men and women. But one was a major thoroughfare that took its travelers as far and as fast as they wished to travel. The other road ran parallel, but it was narrower, more barrier-strewn, and created to support those traveling the super-highway with speed and vigor.
Today, our mental maps show those roads criss-crossing, with travelers of each gender at times catching up, sometimes lagging behind, and then outpacing each other, each according to his or her ambition, ability and personal blueprint for the future.
Those ancillary maps in our mind never took women to high political places. Yet today, we have redrawn the map, removed most barriers and soared. This year, a woman was a serious contender for the presidency, and by January we will see the third female secretary of state in 12 years march through the challenging paths of delicate diplomacy and foreign intrigue.
So what are some of the new maps we will have to create to survive this economic crisis and provide paved (if not perfect) roads for our children and grandchildren? We are going to have to adopt more modest lifestyles and reduce our material expectations. We must put less money into our aging bodies and more money into our aging infrastructure — as many of our highways are crumbling.
We cannot afford the status quo in any of our most politically popular programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which created the mind map that says “The older we get, the more we deserve . . . whether we need it or not.”
Those programs, although successful in uplifting the elderly poor out of poverty in the 1960s, were not sustainable before our current crash and certainly are not now. Workers pay taxes into these systems that transfer an average of $27,300 per capita to those of us over 65. Workers who cannot afford health insurance for their own families pay the health insurance (Medicare) for the elderly, who on average have more assets than those workers.
Our expectations were formed in an America that produced more than it consumed while we now consume more than we produce. We are leaving to our children an America that has more debts ($53 trillion to $70 trillion) than it has assets (an estimated $50 trillion).
A new world of austerity awaits us. Our ecosystem will not allow endless economic growth and we shall have to find sustainable lifestyles that don’t depend on more consumption. There will be medical technologies and treatments that we can’t afford and must start to deny lest we turn our whole economy over to health care. There will be tragedies in other parts of the world that will be beyond our means to alleviate.
America needs a decade of renewal in which we redraw the maps in our minds and renew our wealth-creating assets. We will likely have to lower our standard of living to the point where we save more, consume less, and expect less.
And we may be doing just that this holiday season. No one who has to deny his or her children gifts is happy. But many do seem willing to downscale elaborate celebrations and expensive gift-giving.
Is this the beginning of a new map? We hope so.
Many of our current mind maps are roads to nowhere. And we can find them or create them, as we have found them or created them before.
Our new world needs new maps.
Richard D. Lamm is a former three-term Governor of Colorado. Dottie Lamm was first lady of Colorado and is a former columnist for The Denver Post.
