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Book
Review
The Poverty of Affluence:
A
Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life
by Paul L.
Wachtel
Writing in straightforward and accessible language, Paul Wachtel
captures in The Poverty of Affluence the essential underlying
sources of our discontent in America. Our growth-oriented economy, cult of
individualism, and endless quest for "more"--whether in jobs,
relationships, or any other sphere of life--has not brought us
contentment, and this book explores the complex web of forces that got us
here as well as promising alternatives to our current ways of thinking and
structuring society.
Wachtel's book is not overly academic or inaccessible. In fact, his
goal in writing it was to make it as accessible as
possible:
"Most of all I want to make my arguments accessible
to the general reader. I believe the topic to be too urgent for scholarly
discourse alone. I have no quick and easy remedy for the disillusionment
and confusion that have gripped so much of our citizenry, but I think I
can offer the first step toward such a remedy--a diagnosis of some of the
basic assumptions that have led us astray."
Wachtel theorizes that "psychological factors weigh at least as
heavily as the actual output of the economy in determining how people feel
about their standard of living", and goes on to explain how these factors
relate to the dilemmas we are facing in the modern world.
Here are some choice quotes:
Competition and our
choices
"The key to forging a future that we can look upon with
hopeful anticipation is not in making us more 'competitive'. It is in
making us more perceptive, more able to realize what we have, what we
need, and the longer term consequences of the short-term choices we are
making."
The consumer life
"The concrete realities
of our society as it is today make it difficult for all but the most
extraordinary individual to extricate himself from the temptations of the
consumer life on his own."
Social and political
context
"Understanding how our present choices are
self-defeating is a crucial step in the process of change, but so too is
understanding how the social and political context makes such
self-defeating choices seem almost inevitable."
Economic
well-being?
"So long as we persist in defining well-being
predominantly in economic terms, we will remain
unsatisfied."
Social class factors
"Initially, I
address considerations that bear most clearly on the experience of the
middle class. I argue that most of us are considerably more affluent than
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 for whom the considerations in this
book seem sadly irrelevant. 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."
Creating discontent?
"Our entire economic
system is based on human desire's being inexhaustible. Without always
recognizing what we are doing, we have established a pattern in which we
continually create discontent. 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."
Growth, material goods, and
well-being
"The reason why economic growth no longer brings a
sense of greater well-being, why the pleasures our new possessions bring
melt into thin air, is that at the level of affluence of the American
middle class what really matters is not one's possessions but one's
psychological economy, one's richness of human relations and freedom from
the conflicts and constrictions that prevent us from enjoying what we
have. In a Harlem tenement, or a village in India, one might well expect
improvements in the material basis of life to be strongly associated with
improvements in feelings of well-being. But the middle class in the US,
Western Europe, and other industrialized nations constitutes what one
might call an "asymptote culture", a culture in which the contribution of
material goods to life satisfaction has reached a point of diminishing
returns."
A growth economy
"Most economists do not
fully appreciate the degree to which our pursuit of continuing economic
growth is self-defeating."
Do you love your
work?
"I have seen too many driven people claiming they love
their work to accept such claims at face value very readily. There are
some rare individuals who enjoy their work so thoroughly and genuinely
that it represents a wise choice consistent with their true best interests
and deepest satisfactions. But for a far larger number, loving their work
is at best making a virtue of a necessity."
Defining
ourselves by our achievements
"By defining their lives and their
self-worth in terms of what they achieve in the sphere of work, many
people shorten their lives, decrease pleasure in living, and enrich all
those--from brewers to therapists to pharmaceutical firms--who make their
living dealing with tension and instability. Yet to work less hard, to
relax more and reflect on what one really finds rewarding, is not very
easy to do. It may seem to many an appealing goal but a naively utopian
one. For we live in a highly competitive and individualistic society, and
the pressures on us to strive, to achieve, to 'get ahead' are enormous.
There is a price to be paid--having continuously to face the question 'am
I doing enough?' and, for many, never quite having the sense of
one's work being done and its being time to relax."
Changing
both the 'inner' and the 'outer'
"A change in consciousness can
change society, but when pursued without an understanding of the
reciprocal influences of consciousness and social structure on each
other, [this idea] can be puerile and even
dangerous."
Activity and distribution
"It is
difficult for us to respond appropriately to the situation we face because
our system requires people to keep busy in some economic activity in order
to have a rationale for distributing to them those things which are
valuable. Thus, even if what is being produced by a given worker is not
needed--indeed even if its production is harmful--we need to keep him
working in order to have an excuse for providing him with a share of that
portion of the economic product that really is valuable."
A
new problem we face
"Our problem today is...how to live in a
society where less work is needed than what can be produced by the labor
force. This is a new problem in human history, and we have yet to face it,
have yet even to acknowledge its existence."
Let's get off the treadmill of 'more'
"Our problem is
not that we are insufficiently productive. It is close to the opposite. We
have organized our lives around maximizing production at any cost. And the
cost has mounted steadily. What we need now is not "more". What we need is
a way off the treadmill. We need to learn to enjoy and savor instead of
'moving up', to learn how to establish roots, how to conserve instead of
wasting, and, most difficult of all, how to give a new place to work
and jobs in our lives, one that does not compel us to put people to work
first and consider the damage they are doing
second."
Valuing leisure
"Many of our best social critics are
as rooted in the assumptions of scarcity as are those who run our
corporations and government bureaucracies. The creative and rewarding
use of leisure should be at least as central a concern as the need for
meaningful work."
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction
Part I: False Profits
Chapter Two: The Illusions of
Growth: Economic Abundance and Personal Dissatisfaction
Chapter
Three: The Unperceived Realities of the Consumer Life
Chapter Four:
Vicious Circles
Chapter Five: The Cultural Context of the Growth
Ideology
Part II: Beyond the Consumer Society
Chapter Six:
Economic Growth and Personal Growth
Chapter Seven: New
Alternatives
Chapter Eight: Strategies and Pitfalls
Part
III: Against the Tide
Chapter Nine: The Dilemmas of Psychological
Man
Chapter Ten: Misunderstanding Narcissism
Chapter Eleven:
Jobs and Work
Chapter Twelve: The Myth of the Market
Insightful, rich in wisdom, and full of social consciousness, this
book is on top of the CLAWS recommendation list, and with good reason.
We've given it an enthusiastic five
rating.
Sadly, this book is out of print. (Unfortunately, the really
radical and subversive books often are). Look for a copy of it at your
local library or search used bookstores--it's well worth it.
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