our parents had. To be “standing still” seems to many in our society a sign not of stability but of stagnation and failure.
This way of thinking has led to our current impasse. If even to stand still we must move ahead, then an ever larger supply of energy and of natural resources must be made available. For many years we managed to satisfy the prodigious appetite of our economic system, but the enterprise has begun to collapse under its own weight. We are finding it increasingly difficult and expensive to meet what have become our needs. Moreover, we have learned that there are severe side effects to our productivity. Health-threatening pollution of air, water, and food has grown along with the economy; “Love Canal,” “Three Mile Island,” and “PCBs” have become unwanted additions to our vocabulary. As a consequence, an “atmosphere of limits” has descended upon us, and fear of the future and a sense of austerity have become widespread.
But our present problems stem not so much from physical and economic limits—real as those are—as from our miscalculations as to what really works to provide us with security and satisfaction. Our economic system and our relation with nature have gone haywire because we have lost track of what we really need. Increasing numbers of middle-class Americans are feeling pressed and deprived not because of their economic situation per se—we remain an extraordinarily affluent society—but because we have placed an impossible burden on the economic dimension of our lives. So long as we persist in defining well-being predominantly in economic terms and in relying on economic considerations to provide us with our primary frame of reference for personal and social policy decisions, we will remain unsatisfied. A central task of this book will be to show how our excessive concern with economic goals has disrupted the psychological foundations of well-being, which in a wealthy society like ours are often even more critical.
It is common today to claim that we are already too preoccupied with psychological matters, that we are a culture of narcissism, a “me” generation. I will argue that we are not psychological enough, that the psychological impact of our decisions about how to commit our resources and energies and how to organize our lives has been insufficiently addressed. The critics of psychology have raised important issues. Many of their arguments are useful and compelling. But in examining these critiques, I will try to show how they have been based on a rather narrow and limited conception of psychology—narrow both in terms of the kinds of psychological theories that are considered and with regard to what the possible role of psychology in our culture might be.
This is not to say that psychological considerations ought to become our exclusive concern. A narrow psychologism would hardly be an improvement over our present way of thinking about things. But it is important to recognize that paying greater attention to the psychological dimension can facilitate the attainment of other important values as well. A shift in emphasis from an economic to a psychological definition of wellbeing, for example, makes far more feasible the attainment of a harmonious ecological balance. To the degree that we measure our lives in terms of social ties, openness to experience, and personal growth instead of in terms of production and accumulation, we are likely to be able to avoid a collision course with our environment without experiencing a sense of deprivation.
The shift in values and guiding assumptions I am suggesting does not imply reneging on our commitment to social justice or to the poor and disadvantaged. Initially, I will be addressing myself to considerations that bear most clearly on the experience of the middle class. I will try to show that much of the dissatisfaction currently being expressed by middle-class Americans stems not really from material deprivations but from deprivations more psychological in nature, and I will argue that most of us are considerably more affluent than in our present mood (and with our present assumptions) we are able to recognize. But real poverty will not go away by magically redefining it as affluence. There are many millions in America who really are poor, and there are still more enormous numbers throughout the world for whom the considerations with which this book begins seem sadly irrelevant. Before I am finished, however, I hope to show how the changes in thinking I am hoping to foster can play a role in relieving the plight of those who go to bed hungry or who lack jobs, decent housing, or the luxury of being able to reflect on whether or not their deprivations are real.
Even with regard to the middle class, it is not very useful to argue that their complaints are based on needs that are not “real.” The way we have set things up, people really do experience a need for the things they buy (or wish they could buy).
Any argument that does not take this very real experience as a starting point is unlikely to find many followers. But the experience of economic needs in our culture is an artifact of how we have set things up—with little regard for the psychological consequences of our single-minded striving for material productivity. For all of the books on self-actualization and personal growth, all of the therapy sessions, all of the claims that we are a “psychological society,” we are really a society that is psychologically quite unsophisticated. We need a new set of values and guiding assumptions to live by—assumptions that will let us enjoy our affluence and will enable us to translate the achievements of our technology into a life that is experientially richer and more secure.
My concern in this book is not primarily with the technical matters that concern economists. Rather, it is to raise some questions about the human reality that lies behind their imposing charts and figures. I want to have us look afresh at what money, goods, and jobs mean to us as individuals trying to make some order—and get some pleasure—out of our lives.
In criticizing the misuse of economic thinking and its excessive dominance in the ordering of our lives, it is not my intention to criticize the profession of economics or the individuals who practice it. Indeed, it is often the economists who are most aware of the limits of applicability of an economic approach and who complain that economists are asked to provide—and then criticized for not providing—guidance of a sort that economics was never intended to provide (for example, indicators of general welfare instead of indices of material productivity).
The aspects of our lives for which economic analysis is useful are limited but extremely important. It makes no small difference whether our resources are deployed in ways that permit us to achieve our goals or are frittered away in needless and frustrating inefficiencies. But however sophisticated its analyses, however cleverly it tries to include (and impute a dollar value to) such “externalities” as clean air, leisure, and life span, economics remains the science of “bread alone.” When it ceases to be employed as a tool in the service of larger ends, and becomes instead the guiding framework of our lives, economic thinking becomes destructive. This has, to a disturbing degree, become the case in contemporary America.
Our discussions of critical ethical and social issues and our decisions about the priorities by which we will live tend today to be couched in terms of what we can “afford.” The “bottom line” has become our favorite metaphor for what really matters. Now, no one would deny that a clear understanding of the economic impact of any course of action is essential in order to make an informed and intelligent decision; a recognition that our resources are finite and that deploying them in one direction limits what is available for other things is a mark of wisdom. But often our use of economic justification for policies masks deeper and less readily acknowledged values, fears, and prejudices. We pretend to ourselves that we are simply dealing with matters of accounting and budgeting and we thereby can avoid—for the moment—facing the more difficult choices that are really at issue.
But these deeper questions will not go away. By attempting to solve them by proxy, by pretending that they are limited to the arithmetic of dollars and cents, we fail to gain the clarity necessary for effective and satisfying resolutions. We can defer the sometimes painful process of examining whether our grounding assumptions are still valid, we can delay confronting our real beliefs about what is right and wrong—and whether we live up to those beliefs—but the price for this temporary comfort is a compounding of our difficulties as we try to make sensible choices while squinting at reality. In far too many instances we have limited our vision to economic considerations alone, and in so doing we
