The Wretched Ratchet
I was hitching from Geneva to Basel to see an old friend recently, when I ran into the most remarkable woman. The wife of one of Switzerland's ambassadors in Africa, a sculptress, and an ex-hitch-hiker. She was visiting her university-aged children in Geneva ...
She used to hitchhike a lot when she was younger and had picked up hitchhikers long after, until one day living in South America, when she was almost raped by a hitcher she picked up. She got away on foot, abandoning her car and belongings. Lucky in some ways, having escaped, and later recovering the car (less valuables) she was, needless to say, shaken very deeply by the whole experience. The sort of thing that leaves you shaking with shock, restless at night and generally cut to the (emotional) bone. Her trust in hitch-hikers understandably suffered a lot and she didn't pick up hitch-hikers any more. In fact, her husband forbade it.
Some time later, she started picking them up again (I was one of them) but to understand why, it might pay to turn to an article I'd read only days before in the International Herald Tribune. William Safire writes a column on Language and he was talking about the verb ratchet.
A Ratchet (Wretched) Interlude
In 1948 James Duesenberry described the ratchet effect, describing the way we spend money. William Doyle describes the effect as follows:
- It's easier for a household to adapt its expenditures to an increase in income than to a decrease in income. When income increases, consumption spending increases; but when income falls, consumers who have come to view their standard of living as "normal" are very reluctant to decrease their consumption spending.
This theory grabbed my attention. It describes so elegantly what I see as the spiralling growth sickness that afflicts our economies and societies. The neverending talk of economic growth rates, and of rising incomes and standards of living. Our ceasless desire to equate the quality of our lives with the quantity of our consumption.
Beating the Ratchet
Without using the word, Rick Steves described this Ratchet in his well known alternate travel guide Europe Through the Back Door. He argued there that when most people he knew started work after school, they immediately adapted their consumption levels to what they could afford. They bought a new car, better furniture, a house and so on ... He on the other hand travelled the world and they all ask "man, how can you afford all this travel" with a glimmer of envy in their eyes ...
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