Consuming Geopolitical Outcomes
Beginning an exploration of culture, affordability, and purchasing power.
Imagine a mall where consumers everywhere could put a few dollars toward the weapons platforms of their choice. Would they make smart strategic choices? Would this lead them to weigh the impact of their consumption preferences on competition between great powers? Is this a totally absurd thought experiment?
Well, I’m starting it now. I’ve been waiting long enough. My perfectionism can’t be the enemy of thinking aloud something useful (not yet sure it is).
A 2020 paper entitled “The role of culture and purchasing power parity in shaping mall-shoppers’ profiles”1 by Shaked Gilboa and Vince Mitchell for Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services is as an innocuous a starting place as anywhere.
In their transnational study of declining brick-and-mortar shopping malls, I see a parallel to the decline of the traditional defense industrial base writ large. As malls in many Western nations are bowing to alternative retail formats, such as e-commerce like Amazon and “big box” stores like Target and Best Buy, these bastions of consumerism have not lost their appeal to one key retail demographic: enthusiasts.
Enthusiast consumers, the data tells us, are found, often from the growing global middle class, proactively seeking the mall experience. I assume it comes down to the immersive experience of wandering, monitoring, and pouncing on that deal, that style, that thrill of consumerist self-empowerment that is the exercise of purchasing power.
Thus, malls still thrive in parts of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, according to A.T. Kearny, and the International Council of Shopping Centers [ICSC].
Purchasing power is something that caught my attention as a geopolitical metric in 2012. I was part of a group of Navy civilians and contractors led by Dr. Dale Moore that he called “the strategic cell.” It was a career highlight and a formative experience.
It was all unclassified, and among the briefs we received, I was surprised to learn how much natural economic disadvantage can attach to a nation like ours that lets itself get globally overstretched, that produces volumes of defense capabilities without a long-term strategy, and that fails to balance market dynamism with the protection of its critical defense technologies.
And this brings me to the starting point of this series, a consideration of culture and purchasing power. I’ve curated over 50 articles on Grand Strategy in the U.S. vs. China, on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) as an economic metric, and on the writings of Deputy Secretary of Defense Kat Hicks.
The goal is to think like an American consumer might about the fast-moving tête-à-tête confronting someone like Kat Hicks, who must defend the DoD budget to the same folks on the Hill who are caught up in the culture wars, which is itself rooted in a kind of spectacle that borders on an evil magic spell about the need to exercise one’s purchasing power as a basic human right.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2019.101951