And they're off!

The start of the holiday shopping season, which has become as big a deal for the media as it is for retailers, brings all sorts of statistics, forecasts (guesses by another name), and hype. The National Retail Federation publishes expectations for Black Friday sales. Pollsters tell us how much the average consumer plans to spend during the holiday season. Shoppertrak keeps us updated on "foot traffic." (Now there's a metric you can take to the bank!)

Never mind that Black Friday sales are a poor predictor of overall holiday sales. Or that earlier store openings—this year some retailers never closed—shift the timing of purchases, not the totality. It is all much ado about nothing.

Then come the post mortems. Retail spending over the Thanksgiving weekend fell 11 percent from last year, the second consecutive annual decline, according to the NRF. Shoppers spent an average $380.95, down 6.4 percent from the same period last year.

Finally, the ex-post rationalizations: "Despite improvements in labour and housing markets, retailers and economists say U.S. consumers continue to be inhibited by economic uncertainty, rising living costs, confusion over healthcare and political gridlock in Washington," the Financial Times reports in its summation of last weekend's sales.

Of course, we knew about all those impediments beforehand. But I digress.

The reason retailers and economists obsess over America's favorite pastime is that consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of gross domestic product. As the consumer goes, so goes the nation.

Or does it? Someone once said that the wealth of nations comes not from what we spend but from what we sow (actually, I wrote that several years ago). Like the farmer, a nation has to plant seeds in the spring to reap a good harvest in the fall, which is how Chauncey Gardiner, the fictional hero of Jerzy Kozinski's Being There, might have put it. For the rest of us, it's called investing in the future.

Just imagine if mom and dad, grams and gramps, doubled up on their holiday spending on toys and other tchotchkes for the kids. Spending would go up, GDP would go up, and toymakers would have to increase production to replenish their inventory. They might even hire a few new workers. The increased demand for toys would trickle down to suppliers, including manufacturers of plastics and other materials.

Then what? Tomorrow's growth is a function of what we invest today. It is investment in plants and equipment that expands productive capacity, increases efficiency, lowers prices, leads to higher real wages and enables the economy to expand at a faster rate in the future. There is no free lunch, but productivity growth is about as close as it gets.

So unless you think Barbie holds the key to a higher standard of living, conspicuous consumption—as it was known when Americans were being encouraged to save—should not be the goal of a prosperous society.

Consumer spending does send an important signal to producers as to how to best allocate scarce resources. Not that entrepreneurs are listening. Alexander Graham Bell didn't need consumer demand to encourage him to invent a piece of equipment that would transmit speech electrically. Nor did Steve Jobs wait for iPhone demand before creating Apple's incredibly popular smart phone. Entrepreneurs invent things because they anticipate a market for, and profit from, their product. If they change the world in the pro cess, so be it. They don't need encouragement or validation—seed capital will suffice—before they create something the public didn't know it wanted or needed. The "uncertainty" that existing businesses whine about is the entrepreneur's stock-in-trade.

All the energy expended on quantifying holiday sales would be better spent on qualifying new ways to lift U.S. economic growth from its fair-to-middling trajectory. Real GDP has expanded at an average rate of 2.3 percent since the recession ended in June 2009, the weakest of any post-World War II expansion. Of even greater concern is the possibility that potential growth has slowed, a function of subdued increases in the labor force and productivity. Without faster growth, the burden on future generations to support an aging population is going to be enormous.

Isn't it time we harnessed all the creative energy focused on holiday foot traffic and put it on a more productive path?

Caroline Baum is a contributor to e21. You can follow her on Twitter here.