消费社会
By Larry Romanoff, August 06, 2022
通过 Larry Romanoff，2022年8月6日
译者：珍珠
I don’t know if Americans were ever fiscally responsible, if they ever had a time when saving was valued, where you didn’t borrow for consumption, and where low-quality throwaway goods and products were avoided, but if they did experience such a period in their history, it was brief. Twenty years before Elmer Wheeler’s discovery of sizzle, Bernays and his friends had already instilled the equally important concept of spending tomorrow’s money today. The process began with Layaway plans, then moved to ‘Pay as you Go’, ‘No money Down’, ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’, and other easy credit schemes. Television ads displayed beautiful people enjoying their new home and car, kitchen appliances and furniture, TV, clothing and vacations, and not having to pay for them today. The marketers hired Bernays’ psychologists to create a tactical plan to change American values from saving to perpetual consumption, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. US marketers conceived and created a ‘throw-away’ society, where appearance was more important than substance, where quality was sacrificed for fashion. US automakers changed the entire external appearance of their models each year, converting transportation into fashion accessory with advertising campaigns that made people ashamed of driving last year’s car. This is so true that since the 1950s, one of the largest ‘fashion events’ of the year was the unveiling by American auto manufacturers of their new models. There was never any attention paid to engineering or quality; it was all superficial consumerism.
我不知道美国人是否在财政上负责任，他们是否曾经有过储蓄被重视的时期，在那里你没有借贷消费，在哪里避免了低质量的一次性商品和产品，但如果他们确实经历过这样一个历史时期，那是短暂的。在Elmer Wheeler发现sizzle的二十年前，Bernays和他的朋友们已经灌输了同样重要的观念，即今天就花明天的钱。这一过程始于：搁置计划，然后转向“现收现付”、“免首付”、“现在买，以后付”和其他轻松的信贷计划。电视广告显示，美丽的人们享受着他们的新家和新汽车、厨房用具和家具、电视、服装和假期，而今天不必为它们付费。营销人员聘请伯奈斯的心理学家制定了一项战术计划，将美国人的价值观从储蓄转变为永久消费，并取得了超出他们梦想的成功。美国营销人员构想并创造了一个“一次性”社会，在这个社会中，外观比物质更重要，质量是为了时尚而牺牲的。美国汽车制造商每年都会改变其车型的整体外观，通过广告宣传将交通工具转变为时尚配件，让人们为驾驶去年的汽车感到羞耻。这是事实，自20世纪50年代以来，今年最大的“时尚活动”之一就是美国汽车制造商推出了他们的新车型。从来没有任何对工程或质量的关注；这都是表面的消费主义。
Most Americans are too young to realise that their throwaway society is a recent development. It was not so long ago that quality and durability were important characteristics of any purchase, because people weren’t rich enough to buy shoddy products requiring repeated replacement. Consumer goods were meant to last a lifetime – and many did. Many toys were expected to last for generations, and often did. As a child, I played with toys that were handed down from my grandfather. Early in his marriage, my father purchased a set of kitchen pots for my mother, for which he paid nearly two month’s salary. My mother died at 91 years of age, and those pots still looked as new as when they were purchased. It was Bernays and his marketing people, the evangelisers of capitalism, who found a better way to make more money faster. Rather than selling you one good item and losing you as a customer forever (since it would never need replacement), they began lowering the quality, making and selling increasingly cheaper products that would soon fail and require replacement. This way, American manufacturers would have high profits and permanent repeat customers from a wasteful disposable society.
大多数美国人太年轻了，没有意识到他们的一次性社会是最近才发展起来的。不久前，质量和耐用性是任何购买的重要特征，因为人们没有足够的财富购买需要反复更换的劣质产品。消费品本应经久耐用——许多人的确如此。许多玩具被认为可以世代使用，而且经常如此。小时候，我玩祖父传下来的玩具。在结婚初期，我父亲为我母亲买了一套厨具，为此他支付了将近两个月的工资。我母亲在91岁时去世了，那些罐子看起来仍然和买的时候一样新。是伯奈斯和他的营销人员，资本主义的传播者，找到了更快赚更多钱的更好方法。他们开始降低质量，制造和销售越来越便宜的产品，这些产品很快就会失效，需要更换，而不是向你出售一件好的产品，永远失去你的客户身份（因为它永远不需要更换）。这样，美国制造商将从一个浪费的一次性社会获得高额利润和永久回头客。
American manufacturers had developed the processes of large-scale mass production to serve the nation’s war machine, but after the war these massive factories would remain mostly idle. The solution of Lippman and Bernays was to engineer one of the greatest shifts in social values the world has ever seen, by re-defining the concept of “need” in the public mind to coincide with every product American factories could make. They employed their wartime propaganda methods to indoctrinate the American people with a need to purchase everything possible, in their pursuit of “a higher living standard”.
美国制造商已经开发了大规模生产流程，为国家的战争机器服务，但战后这些大型工厂将大部分闲置。利普曼和伯奈斯的解决方案是通过重新定义公众心目中的“需要”概念，使之与美国工厂能够生产的每一种产品相一致，从而实现世界上有史以来最大的社会价值观转变之一。他们利用战时的宣传手段，向美国人民灌输购买一切可能的东西的需要，以追求“更高的生活水平”。
“Bernays began the process of selling not so much products as emotion itself. In psychologically linking the act of consumption to feeling free, happy, empowered, and confident, he tied notions of identity and self to items that could be purchased.” This was the true birth of consumerism, and why it existed (and exists) only in the US. America evolved into a ‘shop-until-you-drop’ throwaway economy, based on easy credit and superficiality. In a few decades, Americans went from ‘thrift’ to ‘spendthrift’.
“伯奈斯开始销售的不是情感本身，而是更多的产品。在心理上将消费行为与自由、快乐、赋权和自信联系起来的过程中，他将身份和自我的概念与可以购买的物品联系起来。”这是消费主义的真正诞生，也是消费主义仅在美国存在的原因。美国发展成了一个“直到你放弃”的一次性经济，其基础是轻松的信贷和肤浅。几十年来，美国人从“节俭”变成了“挥霍”。
Few people have any idea of the extreme, almost fanatical, extent to which Bernays’ consumption virus succeeded in infecting the American population, having long passed the point where it can be deemed pathological. As one measure, that of shopping mall space per capita, Germany has 2.7 sq ft per person, Japan has 3.9 and the UK has 5. For every American shopper there are 24 sq ft of mall. The so-called “American Dream” evolved from this massive psychological abuse, and is why the American search for a higher standard of living manifests itself in mere useless purchase and consumption. The US economy, dependent for 75% of its life on consumer spending, is an entirely artificial construct that could never have existed without the greed, immorality and twisted psychological principles of Bernays and his “elite few”. Americans have now defined this bizarre consumption standard as the default position of all mankind’s economies, which they are now aggressively trying to inflict on China as ‘best practices’ and the will of God.
很少有人知道伯奈斯的消费病毒在多大程度上成功地感染了美国人口，而这种病毒早已超过了可以被视为病态的程度。作为衡量人均购物中心面积的一个指标，德国的人均面积为2.7平方英尺，日本为3.9平方英尺，英国为5平方英尺。每一位美国购物者都有24平方英尺的购物中心。所谓的“美国梦”是从这种大规模的心理虐待演变而来的，这就是为什么美国人追求更高的生活水平表现在毫无意义的购买和消费上。美国经济75%的生命依赖于消费者支出，是一个完全人为的结构，如果没有伯奈斯及其“少数精英”的贪婪、不道德和扭曲的心理原则，它永远不可能存在。美国人现在将这一奇怪的消费标准定义为全人类经济的默认地位，他们现在正积极地试图将其作为“最佳实践”和上帝的旨意强加给中国。
In his book ‘The Affluent Society’, Galbraith so wisely noted that US consumer demand was contrived and not natural. P & G is widely noted today for their unusual marketing model that enjoys a mostly artificial product demand driven by propaganda and supported by massive advertising spending, twice that of any other firm in the world. It is not a secret, and is acknowledged even among P & G executives, that the firm’s sales would within months fall by perhaps 70% if the advertising flood were terminated. As one author noted, “There is a very direct correlation between demand for a product and the marketing expense in synthesizing that demand.” The propagandists representing the elite owners of US industrial production recognised early on that contrived demand and consumption were a royal road to riches for them, and that they held the key to infecting Americans with a consumption virus. They eventually penetrated not only the homes but the school systems, to the extent that today Americans are taught from kindergarten that consumption is king. In this model, industrial production cannot increase without a corresponding increase in consumer demand, which means Americans must be moved to increasingly desire more products and spend increasingly more money to obtain them, which meant not only marketing and advertising but the development of consumer credit. Since Americans would not always have enough money today to purchase today’s new products, they were increasingly encouraged to borrow and spend tomorrow’s money. In a PBS program series, the narrator boasted that “One of the most wondrous inventions of the age was consumer credit. Before 1920, the average worker couldn’t borrow money. By 1929, “buy now, pay later” had become a way of life”. This is virtually the entire picture of the US economy today, consisting of the production and purchase of unnecessary and increasingly lower-quality products, the sales of which are stoked by ever-increasing advertising expense and the fiction of brand value, all financed on credit.
加尔布雷斯在《富裕社会》一书中非常明智地指出，美国消费者的需求是人为的，不是自然的。如今，宝洁以其不同寻常的营销模式而闻名，这种营销模式主要是人为的产品需求，由宣传驱动，并得到大规模广告支出的支持，是世界上任何其他公司的两倍。如果广告泛滥被终止，该公司的销售额可能在几个月内下降70%，这已不是秘密，甚至在宝洁高管中也是如此。正如一位作者所指出的，“产品需求与综合该需求的营销费用之间存在非常直接的相关性。”代表美国工业生产精英所有者的宣传人员很早就认识到，人为需求和消费是他们致富的必经之路，他们掌握着让美国人感染消费病毒的关键。它们最终不仅渗透到了家庭，也渗透到了学校系统，以至于今天美国人从幼儿园开始就被教育消费为王。在这种模式下，没有相应的消费需求增长，工业生产就无法增长，这意味着美国人必须越来越渴望更多的产品，并花费越来越多的钱来获得这些产品，这不仅意味着营销和广告，还意味着消费信贷的发展。由于美国人今天并不总是有足够的钱来购买今天的新产品，他们越来越被鼓励借钱消费明天的钱。在PBS的一系列节目中，叙述者吹嘘“这个时代最奇妙的发明之一是消费信贷。1920年之前，普通工人无法借钱。到1929年，“现在买，以后付”已成为一种生活方式。这实际上是当今美国经济的全貌，包括生产和购买不必要且质量越来越低的产品，其销售受到不断增加的广告费用和虚构的品牌价值的推动，所有这些都是通过信贷融资的。
Galbraith noted correctly that American society evaluates people by the products they possess. Because for generations the corporate propagandists created and propagated the myth of striving for “a higher living standard” – which they defined as owing more things – as the epitome of the American Dream, it is natural that Americans now judge themselves and others according to their rates of useless consumption. It is probably true that the principal social goal of Americans is owning more things, the direct result of generations of intense programming. It is often said that Americans have a standard of living while Europeans have a quality of life, an accurate observation beyond the appreciation of most Americans. Galbraith again noted that American values are wrong, that “We set the wrong goal, the national dream, which created the evaluation system that is now conspicuous consumption and possession”. He wrote further that the urge to consume – which is virtually the bedrock of the US economic system – was deliberately created by fostering a false value system that emphasised production and consumption as the governors of prestige.
加尔布雷斯正确地指出，美国社会根据人们拥有的产品来评价他们。因为几代人以来，企业宣传者创造并传播了追求“更高生活水平”的神话——他们将其定义为拥有更多的东西——作为美国梦的缩影，所以美国人现在根据自己和他人的无用消费率来判断自己和他人是很自然的。美国人的主要社会目标可能是拥有更多的东西，这是几代人紧张编程的直接结果。人们常说，美国人有生活水平，而欧洲人有生活质量，这是大多数美国人无法理解的准确观察。加尔布雷斯再次指出，美国的价值观是错误的，“我们设定了错误的目标，即国家梦想，这创造了一个现在是炫耀性消费和占有的评估体系”。他进一步写道，消费冲动——这实际上是美国经济体系的基石——是通过培养一种虚假的价值体系故意制造出来的，强调生产和消费是声望的主宰。
As far back as the 1920s, economist Paul Nystrom claimed that changes in lifestyle had induced American society to a “philosophy of futility”, of consumption for its own sake as a kind of social fashion. Norwegian economist Thorstein Veblen first coined the term “conspicuous consumption”, which was defined as a narcissistic behavioral addiction, a kind of psychological deformity induced in a population by promoting the purchase of usually expensive goods that are not necessary to one’s life, simply to show that one is able to afford them. Veblen’s original proposition was that conspicuous consumption was a psychological end in itself, providing the honor of superior social status while provoking envy in others. This kind of consumption is most notably seen in the behavior of the newly-rich, demonstrating their immaturity and lack of good taste by showing off, though we can sometimes observe it in the lower social classes who perceive themselves as relatively poor and give themselves a psychological lift by the unnecessary purchase of an expensive item. We see this often in the black ghettos in the US, where the poorest teenagers will spend unaffordable sums to buy a pair of sport shoes that happens to be in vogue.
早在20世纪20年代，经济学家保罗·尼斯特罗姆（Paul Nystrom）就声称，生活方式的改变已导致美国社会陷入“徒劳哲学”，将消费本身视为一种社会时尚。挪威经济学家Thorstein Veblen首先创造了“炫耀性消费”一词，该词被定义为一种自恋行为上瘾，是一种通过促进购买通常是昂贵的商品而导致的心理畸形，这些商品对一个人的生活来说是不必要的，只是为了表明一个人有能力负担得起。凡勃伦最初的主张是，炫耀性消费本身就是一种心理目的，提供优越社会地位的荣誉，同时引起他人的嫉妒。这种消费在新贵的行为中表现得最为明显，通过炫耀来证明他们的不成熟和缺乏良好品味，尽管我们有时可以在较低的社会阶层中观察到这种情况，他们认为自己相对贫穷，并通过不必要地购买昂贵的物品来提升自己的心理。我们经常在美国黑人聚居区看到这种情况，在那里，最贫穷的青少年会花不起的钱去买一双时尚的运动鞋。
This is not the same as purchasing something that we really do want for its own sake, and which would add pleasure and enjoyment to our lives. If we really love something and would be happy for owning it, there is no harm in indulging ourselves. Life is for living. But if you buy something for the sake of status or prestige, in other words, not because you love it for itself but to impress others, you are not living your life – you are living theirs. The British economist John Stuart Mill stated this quite well when he wrote, “I by no means wish to see discouraged any indulgence which is sought from a genuine inclination for, and enjoyment of, the thing itself; but a great portion of the expenses of the higher and middle classes in most countries is not incurred for the sake of the pleasure afforded by the things on which the money is spent, but from regard to (public) opinion.”
这与购买我们真正想要的东西是不一样的，这会给我们的生活增添乐趣和享受。如果我们真的喜欢某样东西，并愿意拥有它，那么纵容自己并没有坏处。生活是为了生活。但是，如果你买东西是为了地位或声望，换句话说，不是因为你爱它本身，而是为了给别人留下深刻印象，那么你不是在过你的生活——你是在过他们的生活。英国经济学家约翰·斯图亚特·密尔（John Stuart Mill）在写这篇文章时很好地说明了这一点，“我决不希望看到任何放纵行为受到阻碍，这种放纵行为是出于对事物本身的真正爱好和享受；但大多数国家的中上层阶级的大部分开支不是为了金钱所花的事物所带来的快乐，而是出于对金钱的尊重（公众）舆论。”
Of course, American society and quality of life were the natural victims of this propaganda. When we are overwhelmed with advertisements to buy new cars, we have much less sympathy for higher taxes that would pay for schools, hospitals or a high-speed rail system. And since US corporations and their elite owners and financiers exert a virtual ownership function on the US government, American government policies were recalibrated to support the capitalists instead of the best interests of the citizens and the nation. It is not for nothing that the US has no government-operated health care system, spends more on prisons than on education and that virtually its entire physical infrastructure is crumbling today. All of this stems from the same propaganda directed to serve the top 1% and satisfy their personal greed.
当然，美国社会和生活质量是这种宣传的自然受害者。当我们被购买新车的广告淹没时，我们对学校、医院或高铁系统的高税收就没有多少同情心了。由于美国公司及其精英所有者和金融家对美国政府发挥了虚拟所有权功能，美国政府的政策被重新调整，以支持资本家，而不是公民和国家的最佳利益。美国没有政府运营的医疗保健系统，在监狱上的花费比教育上的多，而且几乎整个有形基础设施今天都在崩溃，这并非毫无道理。所有这一切都源于同样的宣传，目的是为1%的富人服务，满足他们的个人贪婪。
A significant characteristic of US media that exists in no other country is the subtle but persistent reinforcement of consumerism. When George Bush finally appeared on TV after 9-11, his only advice to Americans was to “go shopping”. Ben Bagdikian, Danny Schechter, Noam Chomsky and others have all detailed the extensive infiltration of consumerism into all aspects of media communication, where informational programs, documentaries and other important measures are eliminated because the media want “to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the ‘buying mood’”. Media owners want to keep Americans sequestered in their private little local worlds, cut off from too much knowledge about the world, preferring viewers to be “tranquilized, pacified, entertained”. According to Shechter, the dominant media mantra to viewers and readers is “shut up and shop”. Embedded in this approach is also a constant selling of the benevolence of capitalism and benefits of free enterprise. Bagdikian detailed how subtle forms of this cultural reinforcement appear almost everywhere, displaying corporate imagery flattering to capitalism, promoting the concept that “all businessmen are good, or if not, are always condemned by other businessmen”, that the ‘American way of life’ is beyond criticism.
美国媒体的一个显著特征是消费主义的微妙但持续的强化，这在其他任何国家都不存在。当乔治·布什最终在9-11事件后出现在电视上时，他对美国人唯一的建议就是“去购物”。Ben Bagdikian、Danny Schechter、Noam Chomsky和其他人都详细介绍了消费主义在媒体传播各个方面的广泛渗透，纪录片和其他重要措施被取消，因为媒体希望“避免播放严重复杂的节目和干扰“购买情绪”的令人不安的争议”。媒体所有者希望将美国人隔离在他们私人的小地方，与太多关于世界的知识隔绝，更希望观众“平静、安宁、娱乐”。据Shechter说，对观众和读者来说，主流媒体口头禅是“闭嘴购物”。在这种方法中，还包含着对资本主义的仁慈和自由企业利益的不断推销。巴格迪肯详细描述了这种文化强化的微妙形式几乎无处不在，展示了迎合资本主义的企业形象，宣扬“所有商人都是好的，如果不是的话，总是受到其他商人的谴责”的概念，“美国的生活方式”无可挑剔。
P&G’s expenditures on TV advertising are so huge the company uses its power to dictate program content to the networks. For decades, P&G have demanded of TV networks: “There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking in all sentimental or spiritual motivation.” Sound familiar? I could provide a list of significant events that might easily categorise P&G as “cold, ruthless to the point of criminality, and lacking in all sentimental or spiritual motivation”. Not only that, P&G have a vested interest in maintaining the utopian mythology that so controls American consumers. From their policy statement again: “If there is any attack on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the same show”. The result of all this influence from owners and advertisers is that all US media content, not only news but all network programming, and all movies, are subject to a subtle but pervasive censorship, all of which works together to reinforce not only the consumer society but the entire range of American social and historical mythology. The entire media and communications landscape in the US is infected with propaganda of one kind or another.
宝洁在电视广告上的支出如此之大，以至于该公司利用其权力向电视台口授节目内容。几十年来，宝洁要求电视网络：“不会有任何直接或间接冒犯任何商业组织的材料。我们的任何节目中都不会有任何材料以任何方式推动商业冷酷无情、缺乏情感或精神动机的概念。”听起来熟悉吗？我可以提供一份重要事件清单，很容易将宝洁归类为“冷酷无情到犯罪的地步，缺乏所有情感或精神动机”。不仅如此，宝洁在维持如此控制美国消费者的乌托邦神话方面拥有既得利益。他们的政策声明再次写道：“如果对美国海关有任何攻击，必须在同一节目中予以彻底驳斥。”。所有这些来自所有者和广告商的影响的结果是，所有美国媒体内容，不仅是新闻，还有所有网络节目和所有电影，都受到微妙但普遍的审查，所有这些共同作用不仅强化了消费社会，而且强化了整个美国社会和历史神话。美国的整个媒体和传播领域都受到这样或那样的宣传的影响。
Let’s put aside marketing fraud for a moment and review the most important consideration of US consumer spending. To re-state, the American economy depends for 75% of its life on consumer spending, a ratio far higher, nearly twice as high, as that of most other nations, a condition that is pathological by any economic or psychological measures. This condition did not derive from natural development but was instead the result of decades, generations in fact, of an insidious program of marketing propaganda consciously promulgated to turn Americans into witless consumers for the sake of enriching the industrial 1% of the nation. An economy based on a level of consumer spending of this magnitude is so unbalanced that in the long run it cannot survive. And indeed, its temporary survival comes at enormous cost to the nation. One such cost is that the US is now a country with an infrastructure, including dams, highways, bridges, airports, railways and more, that has seen no maintenance or upgrading for more than 60 years and that is increasingly experiencing collapse. The money that should be extracted in taxes and spent on crucial national needs is instead spent on shoddy goods at Wal-Mart. In fact, the funds requisite for critical national needs are being siphoned off as corporate profits for the benefit of a chosen few. Yet we have the Americans today furiously urging China to follow their path and drastically encourage consumer spending. Of course, part of this evangelising is an equally furious urging for China to cease all infrastructure spending and other national development to release funds for consumers to spend. The reasons are two-fold.
让我们暂时把营销欺诈放在一边，回顾一下美国消费者支出的最重要考虑因素。重新表述一下，美国经济75%的寿命都依赖于消费者支出，这一比例远远高于其他大多数国家，几乎是其他大多数国家的两倍，任何经济或心理指标都会导致这种状况。这种状况并非源于自然发展，而是几十年来，事实上是几代人，一项阴险的营销宣传计划的结果，该计划是有意识地颁布的，旨在将美国人变成愚蠢的消费者，以丰富美国1%的工业生产。一个基于如此规模的消费水平的经济是如此不平衡，以至于从长远来看它无法生存。事实上，它的暂时生存给国家带来了巨大的代价。其中一个成本是美国现在拥有基础设施，包括水坝、公路、桥梁、机场、铁路等，60多年来没有进行维护或升级，并且正日益经历崩溃。本应从税收中提取并用于国家关键需求的资金，却被用于沃尔玛的劣质商品。事实上，满足国家关键需求所需的资金正被作为企业利润抽走，以造福少数人。然而，我们今天有美国人强烈敦促中国走他们的路，大力鼓励消费者消费。当然，这一宣传的一部分是同样愤怒地敦促中国停止所有基础设施支出和其他国家发展，以释放资金供消费者消费。原因有两方面。
One is that following the US advice would mean China’s development would be frozen in place, all improvements would cease, China’s hopes for the future would die on the vine, all this being part of the plan. The second reason is that the Americans hope to profit the most from a potential doubling of consumer spending in China. It is astonishing to me the clearly-flawed economic theory postulated by the Americans has been able to gain any traction in China. Briefly, the postulation is that consumption, consumer spending, will replace investment in development and therefore permit China’s economy to continue to grow unimpeded, a theory so obviously false one would need to believe in fairies to give it credence. Consumption – consumer spending – is not the driver or creator of national growth and development, but is the result of growth. As the economy grows, wages and incomes rise, and people have more money to spend. To freeze investment and encourage the population to spend all their money will not make the economy “grow”, regardless of the temporary (and false) effect on GDP statistics. It will simply transfer private savings and incomes to the owners of those firms selling consumer goods, impoverishing the nation while enriching primarily the American MNCs. The entire proposition is rubbish, pushed onto China for the perceived benefit of American firms with the added attraction of derailing China’s economic development and thus removing China as an economic threat to the US. And that is the entire story. China’s economy is neither unsustainable nor unbalanced, and to follow the advice of the Americans to “shift China’s growth model to one driven by household consumption rather than by investment and exports”, will serve only to destroy China. And that is the plan.
其一是，遵循美国的建议将意味着中国的发展将被冻结，所有的改善将停止，中国对未来的希望将化为泡影，所有这些都是计划的一部分。第二个原因是，美国人希望从中国潜在的消费者支出翻番中获利最多。令我惊讶的是，美国人提出的明显有缺陷的经济理论能够在中国获得任何吸引力。简言之，假设是消费，即消费支出，将取代发展投资，从而使中国经济继续不受阻碍地增长。这一理论显然是错误的，人们需要相信仙女才能相信它。消费——消费者支出——不是国家增长和发展的驱动力或创造者，而是增长的结果。随着经济增长，工资和收入增加，人们有更多的钱可花。冻结投资并鼓励人们花掉所有的钱并不会使经济“增长”，不管对GDP统计数据的暂时（和虚假）影响如何。它只会将私人储蓄和收入转移给那些销售消费品的公司的所有者，使国家陷入贫困，同时主要使美国跨国公司致富。整个提议都是垃圾，为了美国公司的利益而推到中国身上，更具吸引力的是破坏中国的经济发展，从而消除中国对美国的经济威胁。这就是整个故事。中国的经济既不是不可持续的，也不是不平衡的，按照美国人的建议“将中国的增长模式转变为由家庭消费而不是投资和出口驱动的模式”，只会毁灭中国。这就是计划。
NOTE to readers: This essay is a companion piece to a chapter in one of my E-books titled Bernays and Propaganda, which deals with a wide range of related topics. This is the link:
读者注意：这篇文章是我的一本电子书《伯奈斯与宣传》中一章的配套文章，涉及广泛的相关主题。这是链接：
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/BERNAYS-AND-PROPAGANDA.pdf
The related part is: Chapter Four — The Transition to Education and Commerce, which provides more detail and background, and some live examples. Scroll down to the heading “Turning to Commerce”. The Chapter is not long but is necessary for the extended view it provides.
相关部分是：第四章-向教育和商业的过渡，提供了更多细节和背景，以及一些实例。向下滚动至标题“转向商业”。这一章并不长，但对于它提供的扩展视图来说是必要的。
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
罗曼诺夫先生的作品已被翻译成32种语言，他的文章发表在30多个国家的150多个外语新闻和政治网站上，以及100多个英语平台上。拉里·罗曼诺夫是一位退休的管理顾问和商人。他曾在国际咨询公司担任高级管理职位，并拥有国际进出口业务。他曾是上海复旦大学的客座教授，向高级EMBA课程介绍国际事务案例研究。罗曼诺夫先生住在上海，目前正在写一系列十本书，通常与中国和西方有关。他是辛西娅·麦金尼新集的贡献作者之一“当中国打喷嚏时”（第2章-对付恶魔).
His full archive can be seen at:
他的完整文章库可在以下网址查看：
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
可通过以下方式联系他：
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2022