The Poverty of Affluence. Paul Wachtel
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living have also made it difficult for us to feel much satisfaction in the world we have wrought. As I put it in Chapter Two, “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.”
Many of the roots of our understanding of the mystifying frustrations of this way of life, as of our understanding of its ecological consequences, can be traced back to the fascinating and fertile decades of the 1960s and 1970s. At various points in the book, I discuss this period of intense cultural ferment and social experimentation. For some readers, these discussions will bring back complex and emotionally resonant memories. For readers who did not live through that time, they will serve as a useful immersion in an era that has shaped much of the world we know today and as an opportunity to consider where its ideas and cultural innovations have continuing relevance and where they must be reworked or regarded as detours or dead ends. It was a time that was anything but dull, and so in partially encountering the present through its lens, the reader is likely to experience an enlivening polyphony.
In reissuing the book at this time, I faced the choice of whether to make changes in the text at certain points to accommodate to developments between the time the book was originally written and now. The most obvious potential targets for change reflect the way that over time inflation changes the meaning of different dollar amounts. In Chapter Five, for example, in examining the distinction between the price of an item and its value, I discuss the experience of reading my New York Times at a local coffee shop and the greater pleasure I get from reading the paper than from the bitter cup of coffee, despite the latter costing more. In that example, I mention the price of the Times as thirty cents and of the coffee as forty-five. Inflation has rendered those numbers strange to read today, but I think the point should still be very clear.
Similarly, on page fifteen, my discussion of how inflation can change the subjective experience of a given income has itself become subject to the impact of inflation since the time the book was written. In the example, I state that,
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.
To readers in 1983, the number 30,000 would have designated a reasonably comfortable middle-class income. Today the number has a very different meaning. Yet again, I think that in the context of the argument, the point should remain clear.
At a different location in the income distribution, the reader may similarly be surprised at my reference in Chapter 12 to a million dollars as a very high level of pay for the chief executive of a major corporation. Today, most CEOs receive major multiples of that. Yet again, the point holds even with different numbers as the markers. I quote in the same chapter Paul Samuelson’s comment from the same era that, “If we made an income pyramid out of a child’s blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.”
Thinking just of the specific examples I have just described, they would have been relatively easy to update by changing the numbers. But inflation did not affect every kind of price or income to the same degree, so deciding on what numbers to substitute for what throughout the book was not such a simple and straightforward matter. Moreover, numbers were not the only referents that one might consider updating for a contemporary readership. References to cultural and political figures of the time, some of whom remain of enduring interest and others of whom have receded into semi-obscurity, represented an even more difficult challenge. Indeed, even the phenomenon of inflation itself turns out to be historically specific. Despite the powerful ways that, over the years, inflation has changed the meaning of the numbers designating salaries and prices—thus creating a source of confusion for a contemporary reader of the sort that I was just addressing—it is also the case that for many readers it may be the discussion of inflation itself that is disorienting.
I began writing this book at a time when runaway inflation was a very serious concern and a prime focus of economic anxiety. In contrasting the period of experienced prosperity and confidence in the future that had reigned for several decades to the upsurge of economic anxiety that was prevalent in the late 1970s and 1980s, I referred regularly in the book to such experiences as “the increased preoccupation with economic concerns that inflation has spawned.” I could be confident, at the time the book was written, that readers would know exactly what I was referring to. Today, economic anxiety and preoccupation is no less than it was then; perhaps it is even greater. But that anxiety is not linked to runaway inflation, which has not been experienced in the United States for several decades, but to a variety of other experiences that leave people concerned that they will not live as well as their parents did.
Here again, I am confronted with the question of whether to change some details to make clearer the continuing relevance of the issues being addressed. That is a tempting course in some ways, but it raised for me a concern that what might emerge would be a patchwork of some items or passages changed significantly, some changed in small details, and others left as is, a hybrid that was neither the original book nor a new one. In the end I opted to trust the reader’s ability to respond to the book as it was written, rather than trying to doctor it for a new audience. The dynamics of the economy and the experience of living in the consumer society remain very much the same, and I decided that respecting the integrity of the book as it was written and enabling readers to encounter it on its own terms was the best course. This new introduction is meant to serve as the bridge between the time the book was written and now. And I hope, in what I have just written, to inoculate the reader against any confusion that might arise from specific cultural referents reflecting the time when the book was first written or particular illustrative numbers that are different from those one would use today. The points remain very much the same.
Much of this book is about the vicious circles in which living in a growth-focused consumer society ensnares us and the insights and actions necessary if we are to extricate ourselves from their dynamic pull. I have spent most of my career explicating the ways that human problems organize themselves in this vicious circle fashion, both in the clinical realm, where I have applied this understanding to the development of personality and the challenges of effective psychotherapy,21 and in the larger social realm, where I have tried to elucidate how race relations in America, and by extension international and interethnic tensions around the world, show a similar vicious circle structure.22 In my focus in the present book, I aim to show how intersecting dynamics in our economy and our lives as individuals impact the larger ecological balance that supports both. In what follows, I spell out how reciprocally reinforcing features of our economy and our culture shape our perceptions of the good life and how life in the consumer economy generates desires that almost inevitably outrun what is attained. Especially central to the analysis is examination of the ways that attempting to quell our discontents via the means encouraged by the consumer society instead regenerate those discontents, leading us on a path that takes us further from the real sources of security and satisfaction and, at the same time, impacting the climate and the environment in alarming ways.
In my work as a psychologist, I have learned that any effort at change in human behavior must be rooted in finding the small seeds of new possibility that can almost always be found sprouting in the midst of the dominant pattern that occupies our attention. The tangle of individual, social, and economic forces I explicate in this book is powerful and pervasive, and in its insistent self-perpetuating momentum it is daunting. But my aim in writing the book is not to write an epitaph for our civilization. It is to point us toward an understanding that can be the foundation for new possibilities and new directions. Some possible kernels of those new possibilities may be emerging in the attitudes and habits of the generation we have come to call Millennials, those who came to adulthood in the present century.