The Elusive Vacation

I thought I was the exception in taking only short and infrequent vacations, but a survey by Allianz finds that less than half of Americans have taken a full week away from both home and work in the last year. Geoff Weiss summarizes the study and discussion at Entrepreneur:

More Than Half of Americans Haven't Taken a Vacation in the Past Year, Study Shows

There is a common confusion surrounding vacation in American English, with the same word meaning both a day away from work and a period of travel away from home. Both are important, but the discussion surrounding this new vacation study conflates these separate issues. The study itself seems to share in this flaw by focusing mainly on people who hold the same full-time, salaried job all year long, which of course is the exception rather than the rule. Many workers can’t go away on a vacation because many U.S. jobs allow just 10 vacation days per year, and these few days off can easily be used up with home and auto repairs and health care. Not everyone takes all their allotted days off from work, but those who do may stay home because of the cost of travel.

In my case, I have traveled so much for work in the last few years that travel for pleasure seems, for the moment, like a contradiction. Having a mortgage to pay also makes me reluctant to borrow more money for something so obviously optional as travel. One of the ironies of the American system is that the people who have the most time for a vacation, because they have become unemployed, can rarely get away for more than a couple of days because of both the cost of travel and the rules surrounding unemployment compensation.

Even with all these caveats, it helps to know that the traditional idea of a vacation, a week or more away from home and work, is the privilege of a lucky few rather than a universal experience — at least in the United States. If you haven’t had a “real” vacation in a long time, that is also true of most of the people around you.

Long-Term Study Finds Summer Job Benefits

A longitudinal study of New York summer jobs programs found that the summer jobs led to reduced rates of death and incarceration looking back after about 8 years. The magnitude of the effect was impressive, with a 20 percent lower death rate resulting from summer jobs that typically lasted just six weeks. The story at CNN:

Summer jobs help keep kids alive and out of prison

Despite the limitations of this study, it is cause for concern about the long-term effects of recession on teenagers. In a recession summer jobs are scarce and are more likely to be taken by unemployed adults, creating a cohort of teenagers most of whom won’t have had the experience of a summer job.

This Week in Bank Failures

The next step in the Greek bailout is agreed to, with Germany admitting late tonight that it had run out of excuses for foot-dragging. The loan includes enough money to keep the banking system operating.

Citizens Bank was pocketing customer deposits when there were errors on handwritten deposit tickets or when its scanners read them incorrectly, cheating its customers out of at least $14 million. The bank recorded the pilfered money as rounding error in its books. Now the bank has agreed to return the money to its owners and pay $20 million in penalties. It is the first time regulators have faulted a bank for deposit processing.

Nine banks have agreed to pay $2 billion to settle investor claims of rigging currency exchange rates.

GE is selling its online bank to Goldman Sachs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Deutsche Bank employees were charged with criminal tax fraud in connection with carbon emissions trading in Germany. The seven employees were suspended by the bank after the charges were filed. One former employee was also charged and faces extradition from the United States. The carbon trade in Europe has been subject to a wide range of fraud, and this case may involve traders collecting VAT from buyers, then recording the trades as occurring in a jurisdiction without VAT and pocketing the collected taxes. More than a dozen people have already been convicted in similar schemes.

A Nuclear Restart and a Consumer Spending Lull

Japan has gone back into nuclear power. After two years of cold shutdown for safety improvements, the first nuclear power plant restarted this week. The restart comes with considerable trepidation and has been the topic of heated discussion for months, an unusual occurrence in Japan’s usually more reserved political life. Importing oil cannot be the ultimate answer either, but do we really want to be so dependent on an energy technology that renders whole cities uninhabitable?

It looks like some of the trepidation around the energy supply has translated into consumer behavior. People might think that if they consume less in general, it reduces the need for the risks of nuclear power. Though not everyone will arrive at that connection through logical analysis, the logic is nevertheless correct. There is only a small decline in Japanese consumer spending in recent months, less than 1 percent, but that is enough to make a difference when you measure the direction of a national economy. GDP is expected to show a decline for the latest quarter when that report is released on Monday.

Some of the hesitation will fade after the first few nuclear plants have been humming along for a few months, but I have started to wonder about a longer-term trend away from consumption in favor of feel-good abstractions like peace of mind. This is the theme I have started to explore in the China Crash blog, focusing on China because if the world is turning away from manufactured products, the effect will show up in the world’s biggest manufacturing nation first. There are signs of a slowing pace of manufacturing worldwide, but only China, Russia, and Greece (three countries facing serious financial problems) appear to have actual declines.

The book Fear of Nothing is seven years old now, and one of the points I argue in that book is that we can’t keep consuming more and more products. We already use only roughly ten percent of the material possessions we have at home, and if we keep adding more and our houses fill up with stuff we will run out of space to live our lives. Most of us in North America and Europe have reached the point where the need for space is more urgent than the need for more stuff, and that has to affect the way people shop. Since 2008, we have seen a trend toward smaller houses in the United States, and whole categories of products keep getting smaller (especially televisions and computers). The long-term trend toward more stuff and bigger houses has already been interrupted.

I experience some consumption hesitation myself when I consider that most of my electricity comes from nuclear power stations and coal-burning plants and I pause to turn out the lights. It is an experience common enough that conservative commentators in the United States regularly make a point of cautioning against this kind of thinking, telling listeners, for example, not to limit their driving distance or replace their legacy light bulbs. If consumption hesitation has become so commonplace that it is part of the social conversation, perhaps it will shortly become a measurable worldwide trend.

Ikea Goes LED-Only

“We’ve gone all-in with LED lighting,” Ikea says, making it (in September) the first major U.S. retailer to eliminate legacy lighting technology from its shelves. The move comes as the price for 13-watt white LED bulbs, the brightest you would likely ever use in a house, falls below $11, making it hard to justify the higher costs of legacy bulbs. For comparison, a 19-watt CFL bulb may use $9 in electricity per year, lasts only 7 years, and produces inferior light at that, not exactly living up to Ikea’s reputation for practicality.

A few other retailers will follow Ikea’s lead by next year, but legacy lighting won’t disappear quickly. Hardware stores and supermarkets will be reserving shelf space for incandescent and CFL bulbs for at least another ten years.