The Overspent American : upscaling, downshifting and the new consumer
Juliet B. Schor Harper Perennial 1998

Before we go any further, let’s just mention that average weekly incomes in the UK are currently about $800. Does that sound like wanton consumerism to you? Yes, incomes have doubled in real terms in the UK over the last generation. Lots of people are significantly better-off. But the cold data of growth and distribution in Britain remind us that many families do really quite well - but not spectacularly well. This is broadly true of much of Western Europe. Whatever ugliness excessive consumerism might bring, it cannot seem half as ugly as the poverty that, within living memory, was the gruesome companion of millions of lives.

Another delay. Let’s offer an axiom of all social and cultural research. The phenomenon of personal happiness - and all its upwards and downwards movement over time - will be very hard, even for the brilliant in our midst, to measure.

This leads us to The Overspent American, which we did not like at all. It is not a new book but Juliet Schor, especially for her work on time-use patterns, is a US academic much favoured in UK research houses and we recognise her as an important agent for a particular kind of intellectual US-EU trade. Moreover, books are being produced on this side of the pond which, knowingly or otherwise, mimic her forms of analysis and amplify her conclusions.

According to the Harvard-based Schor, American consumers have let their spending surge massively out of control. Competitive individualism has brought a niagara of durables crashing down on the nation’s fragile soul. The average US family is being culturally programmed to buy things it does not need, brands it cannot afford, labels it should mock for their emptiness rather than admire for their swank…. Hers is a moral posture. She can prove that in this swamp of excess festers disaffection, confusion and unhappiness. Hers is a liberation theology. “I became convinced”, she declares - and you can almost hear the preacher roaring and soaring - “that America, as a country, had to free itself from work-and-spend”. I believe!

And as with all preachers, there has to be a message of gloom - before there can be a promise of light.

“…by the midnineties, America was decidedly anxious. Many households felt pessimistic, deprived or stuck, apparently more concerned with what they could not afford than with what they already had…. What was going on? The economic trend was diverging income distribution. The sociological trend was the upward shift in consumer aspirations and the vertical stretching out of reference groups. They collided to produce a period of consumer anxiety, frustration and dissatisfaction”.

The saddest part of his book is the list of luminaries - inc. the estimable Barbara Ehrenreich, J.K. Galbraith (yes, him) and Susan Faludi - who have given it enthusiastic notices. Yet even from their point of view, surely, in the cold light of dawn (before we mention the cold light of data), this analysis has all the social radicalism of the brandy chat at a stockbroker’s dinner party in Hampstead.

Of course, it is unwise to consume beyond your means. It is imprudent too perhaps to measure your own success exclusively in material terms. And yes GDP is not society’s God. But, for goodness sake, where does all this hyperbolic contempt for consumerism come from? And are the facts on display really facts at all? Listen to the rhetorical elisions and hark to the absence of evidence in the concluding flourish to The Overspent American :

“Throughout Europe, people are wondering whether the globalisation of consumer markets isn’t proceeding too rapidly, with too little thought. They are worried that they will not be able to maintain their quality of life in a world where making as much money as possible has become the reigning religion…”.

This is a grotesque caricature of people’s concerns and emotions. And an unrecognisable one to the millions of European families who struggle and adjust on a daily basis to add modestly to their standard of living. This is just the worst kind of Wal-Mart moralism. Sounds high-minded; is really petty. Billy Graham meets the East Coast liberal! Yeeughh!

Juliet Schor has looked around America and does not like what she sees. She says that “things have been getting worse for more than twenty years” (sic). She complains that the US savings ratio has fallen to an unprecedented low - never reflecting on the possibility that saving, in a preposterously successful economy where positive consumer / citizen expectations are high, has begun to change meaning and purpose. Throughout Schor strains to prove that too much consumption is damaging the fundamentals of US economy and since this is pretty damn difficult for her to do, she retreats into a really quite nauseating moral peevishness.

Many would agree that the US should spend more on public goods and, once again, we are happy to endorse the idea that it is good sense to regulate personal consumption even when our capacity to consume might be increasing from year to year. But this cheapjack moralism, this Ivy League snobbery, this we-have-facts-to-prove-it disdain for the allegedly pointless vulgarity of so much purchasing by ordinary people - oh no, not our cup of meat, at all.

“When the telephone was introduced”, Juliet Schor tells us, “life without one posed no problems”. (Eh?). “But as phones became widely disseminated throughout the population, practical difficulties arose”. (What?). “Alternative forms of interpersonal communication declined”. (Evidence?)….. “New products promise freedom, but often feel enslaving”. This is just how seriously analytical The Overspent American gets sometimes. Where there should be an appeal to the reader’s brain, there is just a slush of factoidal nostalgia. Progress has to be exposed as an illusion. Consumers are really no more than slaves to the rhythm of NPD. We are all going to hell into customised handcarts.

Back to where we started : the problem of happiness. Schor offers the following as a statement of fact :-

“A fivefold increase in Japan’s average income made its citizens no better-off in terms of happiness. The postwar threefold increase in American incomes had the same result”.

This is an extraordinary claim. (And it is repeated in many books we know in the US and the EU). But how do analysts measure such things? Is there an adequate market research model that can clinch this for us? Or vast trans-generational neurological studies perhaps? Well, er, no. In the appendix (ie the small print) of her book, Schor for her part muses on “the relation between consumption and well-being” and whispers : “This is a complex issue”. No sense of this complexity though attends the absolutist statement about life in Japan and the US since 1945 quoted a few lines above. The truth is that the research community can provide no evidence of a perfect enarthrosis between rising consumption and happiness and / or rising consumption and unhappiness. Within the dizzying swirl of their lives, only individuals can report on how happy they are. And so, to measure objective levels of happiness in any given society at any given time is to try to catch the wind. But this does not stop many commentators affirming, wanting to prove that we are unhappier now than we used to be.

One other little comment did stick out from Schor’s appendix. “Being poor has a very negative impact on happiness”. Well, there you have it! Marvellous what these intellectuals can do, isn’t it?