Irony, thy name shall be Wall Street:

If you are the CEO of a publicly held company, like say the Tribune Company, there is nothing that will make your stock rise faster on Wall Street than to lay people off. Wall Street loves down-sizing. So what gives when the Feds announce that unemployment has risen to 5 percent last month, the news of which sent stocks tumbling? Peter S. Goodman and Michael M. Grynbaum report on the situation in yesterday's updated business section of The New York Times.

Answer: We are a consumer society. People who are out of work buy less. Worse yet, when the rate of unemployment begins to grow dramatically, other consumers, even those with good jobs, begin to act conservatively in their buying habits, fearful that they might be next.

In the beginning, we were an agricultural society, then an industrialized nation, then an information society. Now we just consume stuff. (At this point, cue the George Carlin monologue.)