The Poverty of Affluence. Paul Wachtel

feeling pinched at levels enormously above those of the “affluent society” period. The increase in possession of major consumer items is even more dramatic than in the comparison to 1970 cited earlier. The proportion of homes with air conditioners, for example, rose 484% (from 9.5% at the beginning of 1958 to 55.5% at the end of 1979). For some other representative items the figures were: freezers, 134%; clothes dryers, 356%; and dishwashers, a whopping 743%. If one looks at the absolute numbers of homes possessing these items, the figures are even more extraordinary: air conditioners, 838%; freezers, 278%; clothes dryers, 628%; and dishwashers 1268% (from 2.5 million homes to 34.2 million).¹⁰ Even correcting for the increase in population over that period, the increase is unambiguous.

      Why, then, do so many Americans seem to feel less pleased with their economic situation than did their counterparts in 1958? Part of the answer, to be sure, is a fear that present levels cannot be maintained. Many feel that we are on the edge of a precipice, facing imminent decline unless something is done to turn things around. But that does not really provide an adequate explanation; upon sober reflection, few would conclude that there is any reasonable likelihood of our “decline” really taking us back to the levels of 1958—that is, to the level when we were characterized as “the affluent society.”^*

      Inflation too contributes to the illusory sense of decline. Our real buying power has gone up, but not nearly as fast as our income in dollars. A salary of, say, $30,000 doesn’t buy what one grew up thinking $30,000 would buy, yet psychologically at such an income one expects to live at “a thirty-thousand-dollar level.” One forgets that the job one holds paid only $15,000 when one’s image of what $30,000 would be was being shaped, and that one’s buying power is greater than was the buying power of one’s equivalent back then. Instead, mesmerized by the numbers, we are struck by how little “thirty thousand” is.

      The economist Lester Thurow makes a similar point in a somewhat different way. Referring to the period from 1972 to 1978, when the sense of economic decline began to be widely felt, he notes that

      [w]hile real incomes were rising 16 percent, money incomes were rising 74 percent. Suppose a money man were to deliver $74 to your doorstep in the morning. You put on your bathrobe to go down to pick up the money along with the morning paper but find that when you get to your doorstep only $16 is there. Are you happy or mad? You are $16 better off than you were, but you have seen the $74 and can imagine what life would be like with it. You may even be able to convince yourself that your real standard of living has gone down.”¹¹

      He adds that in some psychological sense people really may be worse off, a theme I will elaborate, though in a very different way.

      Our decreasing sense of economic well-being is also due in part to changes in our living conditions that change the meaning of certain goods. For example, in 1958 to have two cars in a family was more likely to be a luxury than it is today. Now for many families two cars are close to a necessity and bring little sense of amplitude of living. More women work; more families live in suburbs, and particularly in the more sprawling suburbs of the South and West; the quality of mass transit has declined as we have placed our resources more and more at the disposal of the private automobile; suburban shopping centers have largely taken the place of urban commercial centers; and factories too have tended to move away from cities and into areas accessible only by car. All these factors now make two cars necessary for many in order to accomplish the tasks of shopping and getting to and from work with any degree of convenience. The reader will doubtless be able to think of similar arguments as to why many of the other things we now have in greater numbers do not mean to us what they once used to.

      To some, this might seem to contradict the thrust of my argument, to offer an “objective” basis for the widespread feeling of not being able to make ends meet, of barely being able to address basic needs despite salaries whose numbers once would have seemed impressive. According to this line of thinking, we really do need more and our salvation does lie in expanding the economy and increasing productivity. I would contend, however, that the fact that we seem “really” to need more today is but one more reason why our emphasis on economic growth doesn’t work for us; the way the growth economy has been constructed, it creates more needs than it satisfies and leaves us feeling more deprived than when we had “less.”

      The Growth Mentality

      The creation of needs in a society organized for economic growth is not just a function of material conditions such as suburban sprawl and deteriorating mass transit. These are important, to be sure, but from another perspective they can be seen as the physical manifestations of a psychological state—an almost inevitable consequence of a set of values, assumptions, and habits of mind that characterize citizens of a growth-oriented society. Neither the material conditions nor the psychological state really are more basic; they continually co-determine each other, and both must be understood and addressed if we are to master our present state of crisis. I shall concentrate more on the psychological aspects, as befits my own professional background, but it is important to keep in mind that the psychology I shall rely on here is one that does not falsely and sharply dichotomize between the inner world of experience and the outer world of social and economic reality.

      In another influential book that reflects the sense of affluence experienced in the late 1950s, David Potter’s People of Plenty, American national character is depicted as shaped particularly by economic abundance. That book discusses a conclusion of Margaret Mead’s to the effect that Americans judge their worth not by where they are but by how far they have come from where they started.¹² This propensity may perhaps characterize Americans in particular because of the specific historical circumstances in which American society evolved, but it is also largely accurate for all people living in societies organized around economic growth.

      It is ironic that the very kind of thinking which produces all our riches also renders them unable to satisfy us. Our restless desire for more and more has been a major dynamic for economic growth, but it has made the achievement of that growth largely a hollow victory. Our sense of contentment and satisfaction is not a simple result of any absolute level of what we acquire or achieve. It depends upon our frame of reference, on how what we attain compares to what we expected. If we get farther than we expected we tend to feel good. If we expected to go farther than we have then even a rather high level of success can be experienced as disappointing. In America, we keep upping the ante. Our expectations keep accommodating to what we have attained. “Enough” is always just over the horizon, and like the horizon it recedes as we approach it.

      We do not tend to think in terms of a particular set of conditions and amenities that we regard as sufficient and appropriate for a good life. Our calculations tend to be relative. It is not what we have that determines whether we think we are doing well; it is whether we have more—more than our parents, more than we had ten years ago, perhaps more than our neighbors. This latter source of relativity, keeping up with (or ahead of) the Joneses, is the most frequently commented upon. But it is probably less important, and less destructive, than our comparisons with our own previous levels and with the new expectations they generate. Wanting more remains a constant, regardless of what we have.

      Our entire economic system is based on human desire’s being inexhaustible, on there being a potential market for almost anything we can produce. Without always recognizing what we are doing or how we do it, we have established a pattern in which we continually create discontent, and we attribute the restless yearning to the spontaneous expression of human nature. This is not just something perpetrated by people in the advertising industry, though they are hardly innocent in it. And it is not the simple result of a deliberate conspiracy by the corporations, though they do indeed attempt to manipulate us to their advantage. Rather, it reflects a mentality we all share, something we all participate in. We are all afraid of stopping the merry-go-round, whether we view things from the perspective of businessman, worker, union leader, bureaucrat, parent, or consumer. I do think that advertising stirs desires that might otherwise not be there, and often to our detriment. But it does not write its message on a blank slate. We are all primed to receive its messages, and our priming, our state of mind, plays a critical role.

      Growth, progress, the idea of “more” is so much a part of our consciousness that it takes very little to persuade us that