We all know the catechism. America is cradled within the longest uninterrupted - uninterruptible! - economic boom in history. Stock prices mint fortunes at the speed of a mouse click. Billionaires live next door. Yak herders carry Palm Pilots. And so on, et cetera, ad nauseam.
Just how far, I wonder, can our pundits drift from an accurate picture of reality without melting from shame? It's not that growth in the aggregate economy is not real, not startling. But as social analysis, to say only that is to build a stool missing two legs. Pay attention long enough to mainstream media and you can catch an occasional glimpse of the stool's first absent strut: the exponentially growing levels of economic inequality since the early '70s. But you can look forever and not find a single mention of the second. It is America's new problem that has no name: our unhappiness epidemic.
Social scientists have been confirming it again and again in recent studies. Two sociologists examining the accuracy of the Generation X stereotype stumbled upon the fact that not only are people in their twenties more listless, cynical, and morose than kids in past decades - so are people of all ages. One economist demonstrated a steady decrease in the amount of Americans who report themselves to be "very happy" since the end of World War II, inversely proportional to the nation's ever increasing gross national product. Others show how that trend has accelerated since inequality began growing in the '70s.
As with most social phenomena that don't fit into the story the media megacorporations and their ilk tell us, it helps to go to academia for your corrective. And these days, the best place to start is the work of Harvard economist Juliet Schor. The broader public first became aware of Schor through her 1992 bestseller, The Overworked American, which argued - with a force great enough, according to some, to inspire the Family Leave Act of 1993 - that the average American now works a full month longer per year than the American of 1969. Her 1998 book, The Overspent American, was something like a prequel. It sought to explain how the nation allowed itself to get to this pass in the first place: It's all those bills we have to pay.
The heart of that argument is distilled, and argued over by 12 other prominent scholars of consumerism, in the excellent new paperback Do Americans Shop Too Much? (part of a series put out by the MIT-based policy-and-culture bimonthly the Boston Review, a gem among little magazines). In Schor's view, what is new about our economy is not so much the riches it delivers as the aspirations it enforces. For as long as there have been Joneses, Americans have looked to their neighbors for reference on what a house should look like and what it should be stuffed with. Now, however, our references come not so much from the Joneses as from the likes of those wacky kids on Friends with the 4200-square-foot Manhattan apartment. She calls this the New Consumerism.
Think of the New Consumerism as a system of taxation - an extra measure of money we're compelled to spend just to stay on an even keel. Because even the most saintly among us derive a proportion of our well-being from our relative position in the status pecking order, when the stock-optioned class ups the consumption ante, most of us cannot but feel pressured, in our own pathetic little ways, to keep up. It is also like a tax in a more literal sense. If you want your child to have an above-average education, you need to buy a house in an above-average neighborhood - which now means moving into a place that looks like only above-above-above-average neighborhoods did a decade ago. And if you want to have an above-average-sized car to stay safe on the road, you need to buy a tank (excuse me, I mean SUV).
Think of treadmills. Think of Sisyphus rolling that big rock up the hill. Think of being trapped in that garbage-compactor room in Star Wars. The American savings rate has gone from 8 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in 1990 to less than zero percent now. Typical unpaid credit card balances are $7000 per household (though people always estimate theirs as much lower); to help matters, credit companies send out some 2.5 billion solicitations a year. Bankruptcies are up from 200,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million now. No wonder people are unhappy
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Carl