On what is regarded by many Maltese as being the peak holiday weekend of summer, I have relied on some material passed on to me by colleagues. As such, this week’s contribution will deal with two snippets which both provide some food for thought. The first has to do with what someone wrote nearly 60 years ago. The second has to do with what happened in the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago.

Consumerism in 1955

A colleague of mine passed on to me this quote: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.” This was written by the economist Victor Lebow way back in 1955.

Lebow goes further by stating that a person’s social status is now measured by what that person consumes. Products are consumed, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing pace.

This is no different to what is being said today and the way we are defining our so-called ‘consumer society’. Sixty years ago there was already a strong culture to dispose of what we consider useless. There was also a strong culture of ignoring the intrinsic value of the human being and establishing the value of a person by what that person spends.

The economy which excludes and which Pope Francis refers to, was already with us 60 years ago and we have allowed it to grow. We seem to have transformed the quest for freedom (which is indeed a noble mission) into a quest for liberalism which has displaced the human being from the centre of our economic system.

Parallels with the Roman Empire

Hard economic times are not a phenomenon of just these times we are living in. A crisis similar to the one that has hit the Western part of the world in the last years, had also hit the Roman Empire. Historical records show that Emperor Augustus had returned from Egypt with a substantial amount of treasures of war. In order to boost consumption, he decided to put these treasures into circulation. The next thing that happened was galloping inflation.

Sixty years ago there was already a strong culture to dispose of what we consider useless

His successor, Tiberius, decided to put a stop to the inflationary spiral with policies, which today, we would describe as austerity measures. This resulted in panic and a loss of business confidence. The Romans withdrew their savings from the banks (yes even in those times, banks had something to do with it). The panic spread across the Empire with a number of businesses going bust and negative consumer sentiment. Today, several countries have experienced these austerity measures and know well what the high economic price has been.

Another parallel is the way public finances were managed. Today we complain about the taxes we pay and how public sector expenditure simply devours whatever is collected from taxation.

Equally at the time of the Roman Empire, taxes collected were not enough. The imperial army, estimated to have been made up of around 300,000 soldiers, needed to be fed and paid. Then there were those who were not slaves but could not fend for themselves. These needed to be given bread and kept entertained with festivals.

Moreover there was an infrastructure to be developed such as the building of roads, the building of temples for the gods and the building of amphitheatres as places of entertainment.

At the time, the only way of raising further taxes was through war and the conquest of other lands. Thus the Roman Empire continued to expand to feed what we would refer today as the public sector requirements. Today, the public sector continues to have an invasive role in the economy to pay for its bureaucracy.

One can read about the way the economy was managed at the time of the Roman Empire in a book written in Italian called L’oro dell’impero by Gino Polidori.

What these two snippets really tell us is that since we never seem to learn the lessons of economic history, they eventually come back to haunt us.