The Poverty of Affluence. Paul Wachtel

beings, and our desires are not a product of some purely internal set of preferences that are simply “revealed” in our consumer choices. We all have real and genuine (indeed, sometimes fierce) inclinations; we are not straws in the wind. But with the exception of absolute biological necessities, our desires and inclinations are not immutable; they evolve through our encounters both with the social and economic realities we confront and with the thousands of messages we receive each day—not just from ads that are consciously designed to affect those desires but from informal exchanges with friends, neighbors, and colleagues in interactions that we do not necessarily realize are shaping how we think of the good life. When we do not appreciate the power of all these social messages—when we take our present aims as just “natural” and given—then it can appear that it is simply our desire for an enjoyable and satisfying life that is putting us on a collision course with ecological disaster, that the planet is at war with human nature itself.

      This book points us toward a rather different—both more hopeful and more differentiated—way of thinking about our social and ecological challenges. It is not uncommon for those who share my concern about the dangers of climate change and environmental degradation to argue that the only way we can avert a deadly day of reckoning is by “tightening our belts” and giving up many of the comforts we have gotten used to, as well as the expectation of still further comforts and pleasures as the economy grows. In contrast, my argument here is that success in making the changes that can diminish our impact on the environment and increase social and economic equality does not depend on our accustoming ourselves to a less ample and satisfying way of life but on our understanding better what actually does make our lives feel ample and satisfying.

      As I attempt to show throughout this book, and as much research done since the book was first written further shows, the ways we have thought about and pursued economic growth, while causing great harm to both the environment and the social fabric, have not in fact brought much increment in contentment or satisfaction as compensation. As I elaborate in my discussion of the “cotton candy” effect in Chapter Three, there is paradox and contradiction in our pursuit of the consumer way of life—many of the things we buy seem at the time we buy them, and even for some period of time afterward, to be making our lives better, and yet, if we add up all these seeming increments in well being and look at how our lives feel before and after we have gotten a bunch of the things we dreamed of having (whether it be a bigger house, a better car, the latest iPhone, or whatever the aspiration is that fits your budget and your social circle), the increases in happiness or satisfaction melt like cotton candy, leaving no trace of anything that has nourished or enhanced our sense of our lives. One important reason for this is that in the pursuit of these material gains, we often must work long hours, be on-call for emails or texts from the office, and in other ways disrupt what much research has shown to be the real sources of an enduring sense of well-being—relationships with family and friends, participation in and a sense of belonging in a community, leisure to enjoy hobbies and passions, engagement in spiritual or other commitments that give life a sense of meaning and purpose.

      The accumulating evidence that many of the aims around which we have organized our lives do not really lead us toward satisfaction in the ways we have assumed they do might seem to be depressing news. But what it also means is that addressing the challenges we face is not the zero sum game we sometimes think it is. Understanding more clearly what actually enriches our lives can point us toward a way of life that is at once more satisfying and less damaging to our planet’s ecology and climate.

      The imperatives of life in the consumer society impede both our understanding of the discontents we vaguely sense and our ability to visualize alternatives. Indeed, as it is one of the central aims of this book to elucidate, the ways our society has channeled our desires lead us to try to quell those discontents by doing more of the very things that have created them in the first place. Without fully articulating this to ourselves, we very largely aim to buy our way out of the discontent, to garner higher incomes, bigger houses, nicer cars and better gadgets, all the while feeling these are simply “natural” desires because all our friends and neighbors are doing the same thing. And what we then fail to notice is that all the sacrifices we make in family time and leisure in pursuit of the “more” to which we aspire, all the ways that we accept the pressure, the competitiveness, the 24/7 availability to boss or clients, and the continuing score-keeping that such a way of life entails, are very largely the cause of the discontents we are trying to quell, and that still more of the same is just that—still more of the same.

      When the challenge of addressing climate change is framed in terms of “belt-tightening,” it can have the counterproductive consequence of making denial more likely, or of promoting its equally maladaptive cousins, minimizing and temporizing. It is hardly surprising, after all, that calls for what sounds like a decline in the pleasures life has to offer would be a message most people would find unwelcome. Nor should we be surprised that, as a consequence, even many people who strongly believe that climate change is a genuine threat nonetheless end up in an essentially dissociated state of mind, in which they verbally acknowledge the reality of the danger while largely continuing in the ways to which they have been accustomed. The reasonable sounding language of moderation, tradeoffs, or cost-benefit analysis may then serve as the vehicle for warding off too acute an experience of the contradiction.

      To be sure, the efforts we have thus far made, both as individuals and as a society, should not be dismissed or undervalued. But continuing to think of what is required as giving up our pleasures and comforts—and failing to see how the treadmill way of life of the growth economy actually undermines our sense of satisfaction and well-being—has placed limits on how effectively we can respond to the challenge we face. Buying hybrid cars or compact fluorescent bulbs or promoting international treaties or cap and trade schemes that limit carbon emissions, even if those limits are far too permissive, are certainly better than doing nothing. But our efforts have been constrained by an assumption (sometimes explicit, sometimes unstated) that they should not be of a magnitude that they interfere in any way with the overriding goal of economic growth. That is, efforts to address climate change—converting to wind or solar energy, for example—have basically been undertaken only to the extent that they are perceived as not interfering in any significant way with economic growth. Hence, without full articulation or awareness, these efforts are essentially placed in a position of secondary priority and may end up as too little too late.

      Further, in these calculations, growth is again almost always thought about in terms of the total aggregate output of the economy. Little attention is paid to whether the fruits of that growth end up reaching the majority of the population (see my discussion of inequality below) or whether they provide much benefit to those most in need. On top of this—and most germane to the central point of this book—this way of thinking is based on flawed assumptions about the relation between economic growth and the actual experience of well-being of real human beings. It pays much more attention, that is, to how much is produced than to what is produced, to whom it mostly goes, and whether it actually makes us better off.

      What Has Changed Since This Book Was First Written? What Has Remained the Same?

      This book first came out in 1983, and I began working on it in the late 1970s. Obviously, much has changed in the world and in American life since that time. Some of the changes have been highly salutary, and some have been problematic, further exacerbating trends that I already viewed with considerable concern when I began my writing and research. On the positive side of the ledger, there have been significant advances in civil rights and social acceptance for a range of groups in our society, although clearly there remains much still to be done. In the world at large, hundreds of millions of people have been brought out of poverty, one huge positive effect of economic growth that must not be ignored if one is to fairly evaluate the complex mix of benefits and costs of a growth oriented economy and way of life. Additionally, some of the changes in our way of life that I advocated in the first edition of the book—including some that seemed at the time like pie in the sky to some readers—have begun to go mainstream. Bike lanes have proliferated in our cities and suburbs