Earlier this summer, the 12-story Champlain Towers South beachfront condo collapsed in Surfside, Florida. The final death tally stands at 98 people, making it the fourth-deadliest structural failure in American history. While the engineers paraded into press conferences and experts brought onto news channels are quick to dismiss this collapse as an outlier, it is important to ask what forces are at play here, and to wonder if this is a foreshadowing of what is to come. Perhaps this is what happens when we build for economic—instead of human—purposes.

It is no revolutionary claim to say that we find ourselves in an age of consumerism. While it is not the subject of this piece to dive into the abstract economic discussion of free-market versus consumer capitalism, one can look around and quickly come to the conclusion that economic decisions today are usually predicated on desire, not need. In other words, modern American capitalism is governed not by production, but by consumption. How is this done? By planning obsolescence.

In 1932, a real estate broker named Bernard London wrote a now-famous essay entitled "Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence". In it, he outlines a solution to the Great Depression: government-mandated lifespans of consumer products and hefty taxes levied on “continued use of what is legally ‘dead’ ”. While this sounds draconian (I encourage a reading of the entire essay), much of what London was proposing is now standard practice. What was the “solution” for the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic? At least two stimulus checks, with some folks receiving as many as four. In both cases, the purpose is to incentivize consumption; to have the nation spend its way out of an economic downturn. This is because our economic system has a need for liquidity, the ability to easily convert assets into cash. Planned obsolescence generates these desired economic transactions, which can result in lots of growth. But the problem with this growth is that it comes at the cost of long-term prosperity.