The Poverty of Affluence
The Poverty of Affluence
A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life
Paul L. Wachtel
New York, NY
Copyright © 1989, 2016 Paul Wachtel.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:
Ig Publishing
Box 2547
New York, NY 10163
ISBN: 978-1-63246-022-6 (ebook)
For Ellen, Kenny, and Karen
Contents
Chapter Two The Illusions of Growth: Economic Abundance and Personal Dissatisfaction
Chapter Three The Unperceived Realities of the Consumer Life
Chapter Five The Cultural Context of the Growth Ideology
PART II BEYOND THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
Chapter Six Economic Growth and Personal Growth
Chapter Seven New Alternatives
Chapter Eight Strategies and Pitfalls
Chapter Nine The Dilemmas of Psychologocial Man
Chapter Ten Misunderstanding Narcissism
Chapter Twelve The Myth of the Market
PROLOGUE
The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same: The Poverty of Affluence in 2016
One might think that as an author I would be delighted when virtually everyone with whom I have discussed this new edition has said that the book is even more relevant now than it was when it first came out. Instead, I find that continuing relevance deeply troubling. I had hoped that by now we would have made real progress in addressing the problems that are the book’s central focus. Instead, the worrisome trends that concerned me have persisted and even accelerated. My main consolation is that they remain solvable, if only we can better understand the real sources of satisfaction and well-being in our lives and the ways that certain features of the consumer society we have constructed actually end up undermining those sources of well-being. It is toward that better understanding that this book is directed.
In taking a close look at where our way of life brings satisfaction and where it yields disappointment, I aim to clear some space for new thinking about what I regard as the two defining challenges of our time—accelerating inequality and potentially disastrous assaults on our planet’s environment and climate. Effectively addressing both these challenges has been impeded by a set of widely held assumptions about what constitutes the good life, the well-functioning economy, and “success.” In pursuing in single-minded fashion the aim of maximizing economic growth, we have paid insufficient attention to the question of growth in what.
Not all additions to GDP yield equal increments in human welfare, and some indeed create threats to that welfare. In the calculus of many economists, more is almost always better, and just what gets produced and to whom it goes are matters best left to the market to decide; as long as output is increasing, and especially if jobs are being generated, the economy is deemed to be healthy. But in making wise choices both about our individual lives and about the policies and directions we should promote as a society, these questions of “what” and “to whom” are crucial.
So too is the related question of what kinds of jobs the economy yields. There is abundant evidence that unemployment is one of the most powerful sources of human misery, and enabling people to have a productive role in the life of the society must be a central aim of any humane and effective economy. But the assumptions that have guided our approach to creating jobs have skewed our efforts in this regard in ways that have left many people working at jobs that feel meaningless, pressured, or both, an experience evident not only at the bottom of the income distribution but often, in this era of 24/7 expectations, at the top as well. In pursuing the good life in the way we do, many people’s lives end up not so good at all.
I am a psychologist and a practicing psychotherapist, so my thinking is strongly anchored in attention to how people actually feel about themselves and their lives and to the ways in which we can misrepresent those feelings to ourselves and becloud the consequences of our actions and choices. In this I depart significantly from the assumptions of standard economic theory, which depicts us as supremely rational decision makers with perfect knowledge of our true needs and desires. But I am not the kind of psychologist who explains everything as just the result of how your mother treated you growing up. I believe it is important that we look just as closely at the social institutions and economic realities that frame (and often constrain) our choices and at how in our daily give and take with others, we mutually shape each other’s perception of what is desirable, normal, or natural. As I discuss in the chapters that follow, even the experience of satisfaction or pleasure is often far from simply given in the experience, but rather is powerfully shaped by the stories we tell each other, a matter not lost on advertisers or marketers.
What we want, what we expect, what we “need” is profoundly shaped by what others around us do and say, as others are reciprocally influenced by what we do and say. We don’t live our lives in a vacuum, and our desires do not just well up from within like bubbles in champagne when the cork is popped. We do not just tell the market what we want; our desires are very largely shaped by what the market offers. Corporations employ large staffs of marketers for a reason—to instruct us in what we should want, to influence what we want.
These influences on what we buy or aspire to do not mean that