The Evolution of Consumer Society in the USA 1990-2002

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the US consumer society in the period 1990-2002. The paper focuses mainly on consumption and household debt. The main hypothesis whose validity is tested in the thesis is the claim that the increase in the availability of consumer credit and the development of consumption options led to the rapid development of a consumer society during the 1990s in the United States. In the theoretical chapters, this thesis provides a basic definitional framework of the consumer society. It looks at the political and economic situation, the technological revolution, and then the consumer society of the 1990s itself. The analysis of consumption confirms the development of the consumer society in the period under review and the increasing share of services in total household consumption. A closer examination of consumer credit and the financial balance verifies the increase in household indebtedness, particularly for revolving credit where credit cards are involved. The financial balance and the household savings rate provide information that demonstrates rising average household incomes and declining savings rates. In the last section, I decompose the growth rate of real GDP and the central role of consumption is also confirmed. Technological innovation certainly helped in the context of a consumer society, especially with the consumer optimism of the second half of the 1990s that eventually resulted in the bursting of the dot-com bubble and thus a large outflow of consumer finance. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of consumer trends and the monitoring of the volume of household debt. I consider the adaptation to new technologies such as the Internet and prepaid SIM cards in the 1990s to be useful research for today. I consider artificial intelligence to be a similar innovation today.