The Poverty of Affluence. Paul Wachtel

as prevalent in the United States as it is in places like Holland or Scandinavia, this healthy and environmentally friendly mode of transportation is gaining increasing adherents in America as well. Electric cars are increasingly appearing on our roads, and likely will be still more prevalent in coming years as the infrastructure for them is further developed. Ride sharing schemes and other instantiations of an economy built around sharing and not just owning have gone from exotic hypothetical consequences of increasing computer power to mainstream targets of entrepreneurial activity.

      Indeed, the very meaning of cars in our lives has begun to change very significantly, I discuss in Chapter 3 the role of cars as dream machines in the American psyche and elsewhere discuss the lure of annual model changes and the role they played in creating a need for a new car even when one’s old one was functioning perfectly well. Obviously the marketing of cars and the attempts of advertisers to weave fantasies around them have not gone away. But younger readers might be surprised by the degree to which cars once looked so strikingly different each year than they did the year before or by how much of the American psyche was taken up in wondering what the next year’s models would look like.

      At the same time, nothwithstanding these and other salutary, many of the social and environmental problems that originally motivated me to write this book have persisted or even worsened. Even here, it is important to acknowledge that some of the environmental concerns I discussed in the book have been addressed responsively and effectively. We can point with satisfaction, for example, to toxic waste sites that have been cleaned up or to meaningful reductions in acid rain and in certain forms of air pollution. Indeed, in my own corner of the world, I can, with some amazement, note that the once notoriously polluted Hudson River is a place where people now swim and kayak. But new instances of environmental despoliation continue to become evident, from massive oil spills, to pollution of drinking water from coal mining and processing, to the increasingly massive threat of radical changes in our planet’s very climate. And the dark side of the emergence from extreme poverty of hundreds of millions in China, India, and elsewhere is that breathing itself is a health risk in cities like Beijing and New Delhi. I asked in the first edition of this book what would happen if the billions of people in China, India, and other then poor parts of the world began to drive cars and in other ways live like Americans and Western Europeans; for better or worse, it seems we are about to find out.

      We Are Both More Affluent and Less Affluent Than We Were When This Book Was Written

      In further considering what has changed and what has remained the same since this book first came out, I am struck that it is meaningful to say that America was both more affluent and less affluent then than we are now. The ways in which both of these seemingly contradictory claims can be true at once is at the heart of the book’s message.

      We were more affluent then in the sense that a higher proportion of the populace saw themselves as living a comfortably and securely middle class life style or viewed such a way of life as within reach. This was a view prevalent not only among college graduates but for many blue collar families as well. The “American Dream,” was under duress, but it still very largely defined the aspirations and expectations of most Americans. In contrast, in discussing the terminology used by candidates for the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reports: “The once ubiquitous term ‘middle class’ has gone conspicuously missing from the 2016 campaign trail, as candidates and their strategists grasp for new terms for an unsettled economic era. The phrase, long synonymous with the American dream, now evokes anxiety, an uncertain future and a lifestyle that is increasingly out of reach.”¹ Thus, in a significant way, something has gone awry since the time this book first appeared.

      This does not mean that there were no clouds on the horizon then or no economic anxieties or discontents. Far from it. After more than a generation of steadily rising real wages, which created an expectation for those who grew up or came to adulthood in this era that continuing increase in economic well being from year to year was virtually a law of nature, the income of the average wage earner began to plateau. On top of this, an OPEC oil embargo led to long lines at the gas pumps and contributed to troubling levels of inflation that were not yielding to the usual remedies. Moreover, economic challenges from Japan were creating somewhat similar kinds of concerns that the rising economic might of China is creating today. So we should not look back at the time this book first came out with rose-colored glasses. Many of the same anxieties we are experiencing today were already emerging.

      But there were important ways in which, for all the anxiety, most people in America viewed the future with more hope and confidence than is common today. Although the flatlining of average real wages that we have now lived with for forty years had already begun, it was largely viewed as a temporary, if distressing, setback that could not hold back the inexorable tide of history. To most people it was still inconceivable that their children’s generation would not do as well as theirs—indeed, that their children’s generation would not do better. What we now (often balefully) call globalization had already begun, but it was not as pivotal a fact of economic life as it is today. The outsourcing of American jobs to India, China, and other low wage countries abroad has accelerated enormously in the last thirty years, and it has changed the very structure of expectations for many in America. Ours is the first generation in living memory in which many people expect their children to be less well off than they are.

      So when I say that we were more affluent at the time this book was being written, I am referring to our feeling more affluent then, having more confidence that although the economy inevitably goes through ups and downs, over the long haul good jobs would continue to be available and most people’s lives would keep getting better and better. That confidence, and the feeling of well-being it generates, is an important part of any reasonable conception of affluence. When I simultaneously say that we were less affluent at the time this book was written than we are now, I am referring to a different facet of what it means to be affluent—how much “stuff” people actually have. Indeed, a central focus of this book is the difference between the two, the ways in which, in a growth-centered society, we can have more and not really notice that we have more—or feel any better for it.

      How are we better off materially now than we were at the time this book was first written? Consider, to begin with, the homes in which we live. In the year this book was published, the median square footage of American homes was 1565 square feet; by 2010 it was just under 2170, an increase in home size of close to forty percent.² In addition, not only are our homes larger, but if we look inside those homes at what products the people living in them own, we find a wide range of products that did not even exist when this book was written—large flat screen TVs, DVRs, personal computers, iPods, iPads, smartphones, etc., and often more than one of each.^*

      So in many respects, the average American today has considerably more than his or her counterpart at the time this book was written. Yet the sense of plenitude that one might expect from such material advances is largely lacking. A sense of anxiety and decline instead seems closer to the norm. Thus, it seems, one thing that has not changed is the state of affairs I described when I first wrote this book—a “sense of deprivation amidst a stock of possessions that once would have seemed like plenty.”

      This discontent and anxiety at the same time that people have greater stocks of material goods than ever before is not simply a perverse refusal to acknowledge what we have or some morally culpable sense of entitlement. It reflects in part the very dynamics of a growth-centered economy and way of life. As I discuss in some detail later in this book, growth-oriented societies run on discontent; it is their most basic fuel. But the distress reflects as well real changes in the structure of American life. Many families have more “stuff,” for example, but are legitimately worried if they will be able to afford sending their kids to college. Private college tuition has gone up precipitously while the average family’s income has not even remotely kept pace, and our system of affordable high quality state universities and colleges is being increasingly both starved out and priced out in a political climate inhospitable to the public funding necessary to maintain their excellence and affordability.

      Adding still further to the discontent, many families have only been able to afford those larger homes that I referred to earlier by living further and further from