I believe in growth and prosperity. As a child, I would frequently visit my Grandpa Max in the small town of Redding, California (see map). Looking back, one of the favorite memories I have of visiting my grandpa was the endless number of stories he yearned to
share. Using his experiences of growing up during the Great Depression in the 1930s, a time when jobs, and the money that went with them, were extremely scarce, Grandpa Max used to tell me about how he and his family could barely make ends meet, and the amount of effort it took simply to put food on the table. When the Great Depression ended, my grandfather entered World War II and was in active duty until its end in 1945. After World War II, the United States saw a sharp rise in the economic wealth that lasted throughout the fifties and well into the sixties. I heard many tales from this time of his life too, but these sagas were very different than his hardship stories: these were excitedly told with a child-like giddiness.For my grandfather, the 1950s and 1960s served as a respite from his previous worries, a time that definitely lived up to clichés like “affluent society” and “American as apple pie.” As Henry David Thoreau once said, “wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” At the end of World War II, that is exactly what my grandfather, and maybe most of his generation, did. He moved from Oregon to California in the early fifties with my grandmother and started his family. Grandpa Max, for the first time in his life, was able to purchase a home, and easily find a job that could support his entire family. I can vividly remember him rambling for hours about the new gadgets that came out during this high time and how, on his income, he was able to purchase them when they were first released into the market. He babbled aimlessly about his new color TV and how
CBS’s “Gunsmoke” was perhaps the best TV show to hit primetime; moreover, he would frequently bring out the first rotary phone (pictured) that he owned from the dusty boxes in the garage and allow me to use it as my “play phone” when I visited. As I played telephone, he marveled at how the invention of instant coffee was his “savior” in the mornings when he would awaken for work at 5:00 AM. With his instant coffee, Grandpa Max would joke that he would get up every morning and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America, and if he was not there, he would go to work!Economic growth and prosperity are at the very crux of a country’s well-being, and more importantly, they are the vehicle for the satisfaction of its citizens. Growth means prosperity, and, conversely, in the minds of most, no growth means stagnation, recession, and a decline in the standard of living. In that way, economics is not the accumulation of abstract statistics, but rather the reflection of the hopes and dreams of sequential generations. I have taken it upon myself to write in my blog about the economic situations that affect growth and prosperity, for example, a trade deficit. One of my favorite quotations is from American physicist Richard Feynman, “There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it is only a hundred billion. It is less than the national trade deficit! We use to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” No matter how unbelievable these
numbers appear, the statement holds a very strong truth. The higher the trade deficit, the less ideal economic growth becomes. I touched on this current issue in my post entitled “Trade Deficit: Record High”.In essence, I owe my keen interest in economics to my grandfather (pictured) and his endless engrossing stories of the “happy days,” fueled by the growing economy and prosperity he experienced. It is from his stories that my strong belief in growth and prosperity sprang. I was able to see how a healthy economy sets the stage for a life that is happy and rewarding. And that definitely captures my attention.
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