Let us return for a moment to the words of our privileged Ivy League graduate, for here her experience is, even on its face, not very different from that of many of her generation. “When my parents were married,” she says, “they did what their parents had done: watched expenses, did without conveniences, and saved for the down payment on a house.” That indeed was the typical pattern until quite recently. People didn’t expect to move into their own suburban dream house right away. And they didn’t feel that things were going all to hell if they couldn’t.
A recent article in The New York Times Magazine confirms that the change in expectations is not confined to the Ivy League.15 Reporting on conversations with couples seeking housing and with real estate agents from Queens to Des Moines, the article describes how couples “find it difficult to save because their tastes and style of living were formed during their relatively affluent adolescences” and how they, like their Ivy League brethren, are unwilling to start out in the kind of neighborhood their parents did. By an odd and ultimately self-lacerating logic, this makes them feel poorer than their parents.
The Logic and Illogic of Growth
So immersed are we in the assumptions of growth, so inured to what we actually have and preoccupied only with whether it is more than we had before, that our ability to make certain basic logical distinctions has declined; for many of us not having more has become equivalent to having less. This is part of what accounts for the paradox noted earlier—that at an enormously higher material level than in the late 1950s, we no longer feel like an “affluent society” or a “people of plenty.” We have much more, but our rate of increase has declined.
The sociologist Paul Blumberg, in an influential analysis of the social consequences of our present economic situation, notes that
for Americans, as well as for theorists of the American class structure, what has always been crucial is not merely the absolute level of living, but the progress from year to year, decade to decade, generation to generation…. [I]t is this expectation of continuous improvement that recent developments now threaten.16
There is much that is useful in Blumberg’s analysis, yet like many who have tried to come to terms with what is happening he also contributes in certain ways to the very problem he is analyzing. His depiction of an “age of decline” when discussing a lack of increase in income is consonant with his references—hardly unique to him—to the “stagnation” of living standards or to workers whose living standards “barely are holding their own.”17 Were one not so mired in the language and perceptions of a growth ideology, one might as accurately portray living standards as “stabilized” or as “maintained at a level higher than those of the affluent 1950s and 1960s.” The confusion so many of us seem to experience between our level of affluence and whether it is increasing still further is captured beautifully in his term “the falling rate of affluence,” which again refers not to a decrease in living standards but to a decline in the rate at which they continue to increase still further.
Blumberg’s fall into the habits of growth-think is only partly unwitting. In much of his book he seems quite aware of what he is doing, and it can be justified as an accurate phenomenological account of how workers experience the vicissitudes of the economy. Moreover, he is correct that these are real expectations whose social consequences can be ugly if they are not met. Other analysts seem to slide into describing a lack of increase as a decrease even when unambiguously speaking in their own voice; and when they are economists—and indeed economists more sensitive than most to what is happening to us—that is especially significant. Thus John O. Wilson, whose book After Affluence is subtitled Economics to Meet Human Needs, refers to an “end to affluence” by which he means, as indicated in the next sentence, “no increase in our consumption of nonessential goods and services” (italics added). Similarly, he says American workers’ productivity had taken a “nosedive,” yet later in the same paragraph it becomes clear that what he means by this and by a “drop in productivity” is that there was only a one-percent growth in productivity, whereas in other years growth rates were higher.18
I do not mean to suggest that Wilson did not understand the distinction, but rather to point out how pervasive and revealing are the almost tic-like language habits that creep into our speech undetected and constitute a kind of growthspeak or growth-think. If economists cannot keep these distinctions clear, even when carefully presenting arguments for publication, it is hardly surprising that the rest of us are unclear about these matters in our daily lives.
Affluence and Adaptation Level
One useful tool for understanding our confusions and the apparent lack of fit between our level of affluence and our experience of well-being is a psychological theory originally developed for studying processes of perception. The theory, called adaptation-level theory, was developed by Harry Helson.19 It has found increasingly wider fields of application and is now used to address a broad range of problems in social psychology and the psychology of personality as well as in its original domains of application. Central to adaptation-level theory in all its applications is the recognition that our perception of events depends not just on their “objective” nature but on the expectations and assumptions that we bring to bear. In particular, our experience with previous events of a similar nature influences our perception. We tend to experience events in relation to what we are used to. Our perceptions are inherently comparative.
Thus, in a typical adaptation-level experiment, if a person is given a weight to pick up and asked to judge how heavy it is, he will judge it as heavier if he has previously picked up weights lighter than it. Similarly, in studies of the effectiveness of various rewards, it is found that the same reward may lead to greater or lesser effort depending on the reward that the person expects and on what he has been used to receiving in similar situations. Previous experiences and expectations produce an internal standard or norm, which psychologists call the adaptation level. New experiences are rewarding or disappointing not in terms of any absolute standard but in relation to this internal norm.
In judging how well off we are economically, similar processes seem to be involved. We assimilate new input to our “adaptation level.” For many Americans, having one or several color television sets, two or more cars, a home in which there are more rooms than people—few Americans realize what an extraordinary luxury that is to most people in the world, even in the industrialized world—these and other features of their lives are experienced as the “neutral point.” They do not excite us or arouse much feeling. Only a departure from that level is really noticed. Some pleasure may be afforded by our background level of material comfort, but unless we look elsewhere than the accumulation of goods for the main sources of pleasure and excitement in our lives, we are bound to be on a treadmill—one which, we are increasingly recognizing, can damage our health and shorten our lives.
The way off this treadmill, I will argue, lies in focusing more of our aspirations on experiences less subject to the adaptation-level effect. Attention to human relationships and cultivation of the senses and of aesthetic experience can point us toward domains where “more and less” thinking—while not completely absent—is not so dominant and where variety and novelty prevent the dulling of experience to a much greater extent. These dimensions of human aspiration have, of course, always been an important part of American experience, and there is evidence that they are in fact on the rise.20 Nonetheless, when the director of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York was asked recently why he permitted the museum to become involved in a large-scale commercial development scheme he answered, with considerable accuracy I believe, “The fact is that shopping is the chief cultural activity in the United States.”21
Social Limits to Growth
In addition to the psychological factors that limit the satisfaction which economic growth can bring, the late British economist Fred Hirsch discussed a number of more objective considerations as well.22 Hirsch pointed out
