Village Voice Book Supplement
BUYING UNHAPPINESS
REVIEW BY RICK PERLSTEIN
Do Americans Shop Too Much?
By Juliet B. Schor et al.
Beacon, 102 pp., $12 paper
The Consumer Society Reader
Edited by Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt
New Press, 502 pp., $22.95
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.
Critics, of course, have had interesting things to say about the growth of
commodification and its effect on human life in an unbroken tradition
dating back to the 19th century, and some of the best examples are
available in another new book from Schor, coedited with Douglas Holt, The
Consumer Society Reader. The benchmarks make the book worth buying: Marx on
commodity fetishism; Veblen on "conspicuous consumption"; Galbraith on how
corporations manufacture desires that they claim to be satisfying;
Baudrillard on how consumer desires resemble the logic of dreams; Betty
Friedan's matchless chapter from The Feminine Mystique on the fabrication
of a new, hyper-consuming housewife ideal in the '50s.
But few of the other pieces in the book, mostly written in the '80s and
'90s, deserve the august company. Consumerism, George Orwell once said, is
the air we breathe. Demystifying it takes uncommon intellectual creativity;
in the attempt, most writers end up recycling empty gestures. They decode
the semiotics of advertisements, but in the end there's nothing to decode
(nobody really knows what makes people buy what they buy, which is
precisely why there are so many advertisements); or they throw up their
hands and, postmodernists aping admen, act as if the market were like any
other repository of symbols from which to construct
identities-inexhaustible, neutral, unimpeachable. These articles feel a
little bit like flashy consumer commodities themselves: boutique packaging,
not much inside, so you go back for more-and are never fully satisfied.
In the end, this book from Schor only points up the importance of all her
other books. Her work escapes the circumference of consumerism's slippery
circle. It is hardheaded; it is grounded; it is realistic; it is tough and
sturdy. In her spectacle of more people making more than ever, and the same
people being more broke than ever, we have the measure of our age.
----
Rick Perlstein is the author of the forthcoming book Before the Storm:
Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.
Louis Proyect
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