thrust of my argument, to offer an “objective” basis for the widespread feeling of not being able to make ends meet, of barely being able to address basic needs despite salaries whose numbers once would have seemed impressive. According to this line of thinking, we really do need more and our salvation does lie in expanding the economy and increasing productivity. I would contend, however, that the fact that we seem “really” to need more today is but one more reason why our emphasis on economic growth doesn’t work for us; the way the growth economy has been constructed, it creates more needs than it satisfies and leaves us feeling more deprived than when we had “less.”
The Growth Mentality
The creation of needs in a society organized for economic growth is not just a function of material conditions such as suburban sprawl and deteriorating mass transit. These are important, to be sure, but from another perspective they can be seen as the physical manifestations of a psychological state—an almost inevitable consequence of a set of values, assumptions, and habits of mind that characterize citizens of a growth-oriented society. Neither the material conditions nor the psychological state really are more basic; they continually co-determine each other, and both must be understood and addressed if we are to master our present state of crisis. I shall concentrate more on the psychological aspects, as befits my own professional background, but it is important to keep in mind that the psychology I shall rely on here is one that does not falsely and sharply dichotomize between the inner world of experience and the outer world of social and economic reality.
In another influential book that reflects the sense of affluence experienced in the late 1950s, David Potter’s People of Plenty, American national character is depicted as shaped particularly by economic abundance. That book discusses a conclusion of Margaret Mead’s to the effect that Americans judge their worth not by where they are but by how far they have come from where they started.12 This propensity may perhaps characterize Americans in particular because of the specific historical circumstances in which American society evolved, but it is also largely accurate for all people living in societies organized around economic growth.
It is ironic that the very kind of thinking which produces all our riches also renders them unable to satisfy us. Our restless desire for more and more has been a major dynamic for economic growth, but it has made the achievement of that growth largely a hollow victory. Our sense of contentment and satisfaction is not a simple result of any absolute level of what we acquire or achieve. It depends upon our frame of reference, on how what we attain compares to what we expected. If we get farther than we expected we tend to feel good. If we expected to go farther than we have then even a rather high level of success can be experienced as disappointing. 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.
We do not tend to think in terms of a particular set of conditions and amenities that we regard as sufficient and appropriate for a good life. Our calculations tend to be relative. It is not what we have that determines whether we think we are doing well; it is whether we have more—more than our parents, more than we had ten years ago, perhaps more than our neighbors. This latter source of relativity, keeping up with (or ahead of) the Joneses, is the most frequently commented upon. But it is probably less important, and less destructive, than our comparisons with our own previous levels and with the new expectations they generate. Wanting more remains a constant, regardless of what we have.
Our entire economic system is based on human desire’s being inexhaustible, on there being a potential market for almost anything we can produce. Without always recognizing what we are doing or how we do it, we have established a pattern in which we continually create discontent, and we attribute the restless yearning to the spontaneous expression of human nature. This is not just something perpetrated by people in the advertising industry, though they are hardly innocent in it. And it is not the simple result of a deliberate conspiracy by the corporations, though they do indeed attempt to manipulate us to their advantage. Rather, it reflects a mentality we all share, something we all participate in. We are all afraid of stopping the merry-go-round, whether we view things from the perspective of businessman, worker, union leader, bureaucrat, parent, or consumer. I do think that advertising stirs desires that might otherwise not be there, and often to our detriment. But it does not write its message on a blank slate. We are all primed to receive its messages, and our priming, our state of mind, plays a critical role.
Growth, progress, the idea of “more” is so much a part of our consciousness that it takes very little to persuade us that any particular item is something we want or need. Ads influence what particular things we will desire (and in their very ubiquitousness they contribute to the growth state of mind as well), but it is our state of mind, linked as both cause and effect to so many interlocking features of our way of life, that it is particularly crucial to understand.
Let us consider a revealing article that recently appeared in the Columbia alumni magazine.13 The writer describes a dinner party attended by a number of recent graduates in which the conversation (as it always seems to these days) “turned to the state of the economy and our personal finances.” It was not the sort of group one would expect to feel hard-pressed: “Graduates of the nation’s top business and law schools and alumni of Ivy League universities, many of us are earning starting salaries our parents regard with amazement or envy,” the author tells us. Yet the outlook of this elite group was “unrelievedly bleak.”
The problem, it seems clear from the article, is that they are victims of the growth mentality. They are already, she acknowledges, enjoying a standard of living in their twenties and thirties that their parents did not attain until their forties or fifties. But they are dissatisfied because “our present material worth is irrelevant if we can’t expect our future gains to surpass it.” That is as eloquently stated a formula for personal and environmental disaster as one is likely to find. And unfortunately, the author is probably right when she says that is the cornerstone of what her generation was taught by teachers and parents.
Not all who are complaining about their economic circumstances are as privileged as these dissatisfied Ivy League graduates. Their situations highlight with unusual clarity how little the sense of economic distress and disappointment currently sweeping America has to do with real deprivation and how much with assumptions and expectations. In other cases the ambiguity is greater, and it is easier to lend credence to the illusion that the problem is primarily an economic one.
Many other members of their generation, for example—not as elite as those just described but part of that great majority of Americans who define themselves as middle class—are experiencing difficulty in buying a house. Inflation, it seems, is making impossible the “great American dream” of a house in the suburbs for every couple.
The problem, to be sure, is not just a matter of expectations. A number of factors, all coming together at once, have combined to hit the housing market with special severity. Certainly inflation and interest rates must be considered, as well as other traditional economic categories and particular economic policies that have prevented adequate construction and maintenance of housing. We must recognize as well that housing costs in the past did not honestly reflect the environmental impact of the expansion of our population in numbers and into new territories. Costs of providing for proper sewage, for access to water, and other such necessities have contributed substantially to the increased cost of housing; present home buyers are paying the environmental debts of their predecessors.14 Pressure on the housing market is also enormously increased by the huge influx of new home-seekers as the “baby boom” generation enters adulthood and by the simultaneous tendency toward smaller households. More young people are living alone, as are more of the elderly, thus increasing still further the number of units needed to satisfy the demand. In the long run, the decline in the American birthrate, if it is maintained, may go farther toward solving the housing crisis than any economic policies.
But for those caught in it in the present, it is essential
