Donald Trump: the New Messiah of Second-Hand Goods?

Will the tariffs change the lives of folks whose existence depends on constantly buying brand new stuff?

The Canadian writer Morley Torgov-in his wonderful memoir of Jewish life in a small Ontario city-referred to his father, a peddler, as the Messiah of Second-Hand Goods. That expression somehow stuck with me over the years. Now, writing in the New York Times (today’s print edition). economist Justin Wolfers may lead us to wonder whether Donald Trump could, on a much larger scale, come to merit that epithet.

Wolfers argues that the Trump tariffs, by making new stuff more expensive, are going to turn upside down his readers’ lifestyles, forcing them to rely more on old stuff and buying far less that’s new. He builds his piece around the inconvenience a family suffers from having to use an older washing machine: “late-night thuds from unbalanced loads, wads of scrunched cloth still dripping wet after a cycle and higher energy and water bills.”

I sort of get that. During the COVID-19 lockdown (when we weren’t at our main pandemic retreat, Montauk) we struggled for months with a dishwasher in terminal decline. Before the coronavirus, I hardly owned a toolbox, and could probably have counted as a Luftmensch par excellence-a nice Yiddish expression for an absent-minded professor. Whatever my efforts at dishwasher triage, the machine finally expired. Fortunately, a licensed technician was able to relieve me of feelings of inadequacy by pronouncing his own inability to revive it.

For much of my life, like the addressees of Wolfers’ column, I was hooked on the notion that my time was too important and valuable not to solve any practical problem by buying brand new any relevant gadget or appliance, the quicker the delivery the better. But I’ve changed. I now see repairing, reusing, reconditioning and buying used stuff as meaningful human activities, not a waste of time for busy modern people. (Wolfers thinks that all his family’s activities are so important that not having two cars would greatly reduce their happiness. The life-cycle carbon footprint of one vehicle is more than enough-maybe a rethink of some of the activities would be in order?)

The circular economy has been a thing for a while. We should be doing this for the environment-though with appliances in particular sometimes, admittedly, it’s a trade-off, if for example the new options are far more energy efficient.

But here I want to focus on the lifestyle point that’s central to Wolfers’ argument. Under the influence of my partner, a real aficionado at this, I have come to enjoy the alternative to always buying new stuff. It started, fairly early in our relationship when we were furnishing our apartment-we both like Art Deco and so we spent many delightful hours searching for tables, lamps, chairs, glassware. It was fun, and a bonding experience. More recently, she has introduced me to the world of vintage and thrifting in fashion. She’s a busy high-powered legal academic with a global footprint but manages to make this a significant and enjoyable part of her life.

Besides the pleasure of personally participating in the circular economy in areas like furniture and fashion, the search for alternatives to compulsively buying new stuff also creates jobs for others in repair and reconditioning. Real people find meaning and not just income in these activities, I was somehow aware of that in the pre-neoliberal era, when I wanted for a while to become an art restorer.

In the cyber era for a long time I didn’t really believe that repairing or reconditioning devices like smart phones and lap tops was even possible, or in any way economically viable. That was another thing that changed during the pandemic-my IPhone was lost and the replacement models available at the time were not to my liking. So I bought a reconditioned phone that was identical to the one I lost, and it’s still working fine 5 years later, despite some cracks and scratches on the glass. Yet I know lots of people who feel the need to get a new model Iphone almost every year. Why on earth?

Abusing intellectual property rights and exploiting information asymmetries about products, global manufacturers deliberately create obstacles to repair: there is a vibrant right to repair that aims to counter this.

I haven’t even started to get into food. You don’t need much land or even a great climate to be able to grow some of your own vegetables, for example. Local growing and retailing food collectives are a great way of opting out of the toxic Big Food/Big Ag mixture of unhealthy food, environmental degradation, and exploitation of poor countries.

So, if Wolfers is right, and we have to adjust our lifestyles in the wake of Trump tariffs, that may well be for the better. As for the President himself, I think he’d look real sharp in some vintage Madmen era suits…