for him (and it is still preponderantly men who occupy that role) to lead the company in a direction in which it thrived. He would actually feel some need for the stock options that could boost his overall earnings (though it is important to note, that, consistent with this proposed arrangement, those options could only be available to the CEO if they were available to all the employees in the firm, and the amount of the options available to the CEO would be a fixed ratio of the amount issued to the median employee). This would still be capitalism and private enterprise. But it would be capitalism in which the incentive structure made it in the interest of the CEO for everyone else who works in the firm to do well.
Conclusion: The Poverty of Affluence in 2016
In this book I raise serious questions about a way of life so thoroughly organized around the intertwined ideas of growth, accelerating material consumption, and “creating” jobs. I began with concerns about the ecological consequences of this way of life, but as a psychologist, whose daily work offers me a kind of access to people’s intimate subjective experience that is not available to economists, sociologists, climate scientists, or others who have focused on similar concerns, I gradually became aware of what could be seen as still a further cost of this way of life—but a cost that could also offer a crucial handle on how we could extricate ourselves from the trap in which we are caught: The growth-oriented consumer society doesn’t really bring us the satisfactions or contentment we are led to think it does. Thus, we do not really need to give up the good life to protect the earth; indeed, we need to find it.
This does not mean that growth bears no relation to our deepest psychological needs or to the way our brains are wired. We would not have developed a growth oriented society if it did not. But the very ways in which growth seems wired into us are also the foundations of why growth doesn’t work to bring us the better life we turn to it for. I take up some of these issues in my discussion of adaptation level in Chapter Two and in various discussions in Chapters Six, Nine, and Ten. Throughout the book I highlight the irony that the very ways of thinking that enabled us to generate prodigious growth in our material standard of living have also made it difficult for us to feel much satisfaction in the world we have wrought. As I put it in Chapter Two, “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.”
Many of the roots of our understanding of the mystifying frustrations of this way of life, as of our understanding of its ecological consequences, can be traced back to the fascinating and fertile decades of the 1960s and 1970s. At various points in the book, I discuss this period of intense cultural ferment and social experimentation. For some readers, these discussions will bring back complex and emotionally resonant memories. For readers who did not live through that time, they will serve as a useful immersion in an era that has shaped much of the world we know today and as an opportunity to consider where its ideas and cultural innovations have continuing relevance and where they must be reworked or regarded as detours or dead ends. It was a time that was anything but dull, and so in partially encountering the present through its lens, the reader is likely to experience an enlivening polyphony.
In reissuing the book at this time, I faced the choice of whether to make changes in the text at certain points to accommodate to developments between the time the book was originally written and now. The most obvious potential targets for change reflect the way that over time inflation changes the meaning of different dollar amounts. In Chapter Five, for example, in examining the distinction between the price of an item and its value, I discuss the experience of reading my New York Times at a local coffee shop and the greater pleasure I get from reading the paper than from the bitter cup of coffee, despite the latter costing more. In that example, I mention the price of the Times as thirty cents and of the coffee as forty-five. Inflation has rendered those numbers strange to read today, but I think the point should still be very clear.
Similarly, on page fifteen, my discussion of how inflation can change the subjective experience of a given income has itself become subject to the impact of inflation since the time the book was written. In the example, I state that,
A salary of, say, $30,000 doesn’t buy what one grew up thinking $30,000 would buy, yet psychologically at such an income one expects to live at “a thirty-thousand-dollar level.” One forgets that the job one holds paid only $15,000 when one’s image of what $30,000 would be was being shaped, and that one’s buying power is greater than was the buying power of one’s equivalent back then. Instead, mesmerized by the numbers, we are struck by how little “thirty thousand” is.
To readers in 1983, the number 30,000 would have designated a reasonably comfortable middle-class income. Today the number has a very different meaning. Yet again, I think that in the context of the argument, the point should remain clear.
At a different location in the income distribution, the reader may similarly be surprised at my reference in Chapter 12 to a million dollars as a very high level of pay for the chief executive of a major corporation. Today, most CEOs receive major multiples of that. Yet again, the point holds even with different numbers as the markers. I quote in the same chapter Paul Samuelson’s comment from the same era that, “If we made an income pyramid out of a child’s blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.”
Thinking just of the specific examples I have just described, they would have been relatively easy to update by changing the numbers. But inflation did not affect every kind of price or income to the same degree, so deciding on what numbers to substitute for what throughout the book was not such a simple and straightforward matter. Moreover, numbers were not the only referents that one might consider updating for a contemporary readership. References to cultural and political figures of the time, some of whom remain of enduring interest and others of whom have receded into semi-obscurity, represented an even more difficult challenge. Indeed, even the phenomenon of inflation itself turns out to be historically specific. Despite the powerful ways that, over the years, inflation has changed the meaning of the numbers designating salaries and prices—thus creating a source of confusion for a contemporary reader of the sort that I was just addressing—it is also the case that for many readers it may be the discussion of inflation itself that is disorienting.
I began writing this book at a time when runaway inflation was a very serious concern and a prime focus of economic anxiety. In contrasting the period of experienced prosperity and confidence in the future that had reigned for several decades to the upsurge of economic anxiety that was prevalent in the late 1970s and 1980s, I referred regularly in the book to such experiences as “the increased preoccupation with economic concerns that inflation has spawned.” I could be confident, at the time the book was written, that readers would know exactly what I was referring to. Today, economic anxiety and preoccupation is no less than it was then; perhaps it is even greater. But that anxiety is not linked to runaway inflation, which has not been experienced in the United States for several decades, but to a variety of other experiences that leave people concerned that they will not live as well as their parents did.
Here again, I am confronted with the question of whether to change some details to make clearer the continuing relevance of the issues being addressed. That is a tempting course in some ways, but it raised for me a concern that what might emerge would be a patchwork of some items or passages changed significantly, some changed in small details, and others left as is, a hybrid that was neither the original book nor a new one. In the end I opted to trust the reader’s ability to respond to the book as it
