Is shopping the new patriotism?

Consumer activity has been the main crutch keeping the U.S. economy -- and by extension, the world economy -- hobbling forward over the past year. As manufacturers have shut down factories and laid off thousands of workers, as stock market prices have plummeted, consumers have, much to the mystification of many observers, kept on buying.

Even before the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon, the fall in the Dow and Nasdaq and the spike in unemployment had economists worried that the consumer confidence locomotive was about to run out of steam. But now that the United States has been shaken to the core by the devastation wreaked upon New York's financial district, economists' gloom has deepened.

But there may be some room for optimism. The United States is nothing if not resourceful. So many pundits and politicians have been quick to announce that the attack on the World Trade Center is comparable in scale and devastation only to the attack on Pearl Harbor. If so, could the country pull together in the wake of this horror just as it did in 1941?

"Americans have proved that they can be resilient," says Shiller. "That's the Pearl Harbor story. The market dropped for the first two days after the attack and then kept growing."

"In an emergency of this kind, in all respects people pull together and there will be a can-do spirit," says Golub. "They want to keep on going, they want to keep on working. Basically, everybody is going to work. Basically, everything will carry on as normal."

"There's going to be some initial panic," says Golub, "like when the stock market fell 25 percent in 1997, and Alan Greenspan said a few words and it bounced back. This is obviously more severe than that. But it's not like the whole infrastructure of the U.S. economy has been destroyed. I think we have a pretty resilient economy. That's my guess, and yeah, when people realize that it's a one-time thing and not the end of the world, I think it's going to bounce back, if the central banks are prepared to act."

The question is, how exactly will people bounce back? There is no clearly defined enemy, as in World War II, that can compel citizens to volunteer for the armed forces. There is no pressing need to save every shred of rubber or paper to contribute to the war effort. How can Americans express their patriotic fervor? How will they pull together?

Maybe, by remembering what makes this country's economy great -- shopping. The suggestion may sound facile -- but it also carries with it some possibilities for pyschological satisfaction. Resolute Americans can stand tall by refusing to despair, by holding on to their stocks and heading to the mall -- by continuing to shop, even in the face of unthinkable terror.

"It's not a completely crazy idea," says Terry Odean, a Berkeley economist. "But it might be a hard sell. 'It's your patriotic duty to shop till you drop' doesn't sound ideal. It's easy to understand why people lined up to give blood. People are enthusiastic about pitching in for the common good, but it's hard to convince them to go to K-mart."

"On the work side," continued Odean, "There's that sense that people don't want to give in to this. We don't want to be intimidated so we'll show that we're not scared by working hard. But it's harder to give in to the argument about shopping. Work has a connotation of doing something for society, but it's harder to make people believe that it's their duty to go to the mall."

"Wall Street will have an easier time," says Odean. "People will have a sense that selling isn't right. If there's a correlation between patriotism and investing -- and I think there is, though it's slight -- I think people might say, I'm not going to sell my stock because it's a vote against the country. It's likely that people will not sell out of a sense of duty."

So should President Bush recommend a national shopping spree? Could he pull it off?

"It's going to be very hard to spin people into shopping," says Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at MIT. "The Fed has been working hard to fight paranoia, but going even further will be tough."

"There is one thing, though, that fits with the theory [of Americans turning a crisis into a boom]," adds Mullainathan. "There are several studies showing that during war times, efficiency goes up. There are different reasons, but one of the things that these studies show is that a lot of economic activity works according to goodwill. You don't have to do a good job, but if you feel connected to work, then you work harder, your efficiency goes up. So if this country enters a mentality of war, a united front, then it's possible that their efforts will turn the economy around."

There are some other factors that could boost the economy -- a surge in defense spending, reconstruction of New York's financial district, continued moves by the Fed to lower interest rates. But it's a tough call to predict where things will go, if the general public doesn't continue pulling out some plastic.

"There is some chance [for an economic revival]," says Cohen. "There's likely to be a sudden burst in government spending, and maybe emergency interest rates will decline to kind of push things along. But that's where the big uncertainty is. And that's a genuine uncertainty. Nobody knows."

• View blog reactions