Consumer economy

A consumer economy describes an economy driven by consumer spending as a percent of its gross domestic product, as opposed to the other major components of GDP (gross private domestic investment, government spending, and imports netted against exports).

In the U.S., it is usually said by economists, including in Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" that 70% of spending is consumer-based, but this number is disputed by economists like Businessweek columnist Michael Mandel,. Consumer spending in the US rose from about 62% of GDP in 1960, where it stayed until about 1981, and has since risen to 71% in 2013.

The consumer revolution in England is generally understood to have been in the eighteenth century, although the concept of consumerism was perceived to have appeared in the late 1500s and 1600s. Prior to this, the Middle Ages were understood to have been a time of perpetual material poverty, in which the concept of the commodity or the concept of the consumer did not exist. Maryanne Kowaleski argues against this view, arguing that medieval charity, instructional guidebooks, and population growth (paralled by that of currency), created a consumer economy in the pre-Great Famine era Research by people like Britnell and Campbell suggest commercialization first appeared in the medieval period, and researchers like Christopher Woolgar have studied consumption practices in elite households.

In their economy, they had many exotic items (because of the imperial conquests of the British Empire) and it created an environment for a desire-based mode of shopping that was pleasurable, not mundane. Romantic literary critic Andrea K. Henderson argued that this influenced Romantic-era poetry because the poets were often part of an urban society. desiring things that could not be easily attained and were unavailable. This influenced their interpretation of things like the past, and the non-urban natural world, because they had to construct narratives to understand things that were unaccessible to them.

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