Waking Up From the American Dream

David Brooks has an interesting column in which he essentially gives a platform for David Platt.

Platt is a preacher who thinks that it is time for us to give up the American dream of living better. This reconsideration of the American dream is not unique to the religious world. People like Michael Polan, who argue for eating locally grown foods, are also suggesting that health and happiness might lie down a path of moderated consumption.

I am sympathetic to these notions. I've argued more than once that one of the characteristics of the new economy will be a shift from an emphasis on quantity of goods to quality of life. But I think that Platt probably gets something wrong.

Progress rarely means going back. The way out is forward.

In the early 1900s, consumer credit and the birth of mass consumption that made mass production profitable was challenged by the religous groups. They pointed to Paul's injunction to "owe no man" as evidence of God's disapproval of credit. For them, credit was a social evil and the thought that people might be free to buy goods simply because these made them happy was itself a little sinful.

But credit is an essential part of the modern economy and so is consumption. I do think that we'll consume fewer "things" in the future. Already we've shifted to spending an increasing amount of money on virtual products rather than real ones.

Excerpt from a Future History Book, or "whatever happened to shopping?"

The popularity of shopping depended on the ancient urge for the modern, that old wish for something new.

No one had considered the possibility that this urge for the new might actually be turned on shopping itself, or that fashion might go out of fashion.

Yet people gradually decided that they had too much stuff and clutter and turned away from the malls. Consumption never again drove the economy like it had throughout the 20th century.

For generations, economic goods had implied economic goods to have. Early in the 21st century, communities realized that people were ready to focus more on economic goods to do. The stuff of life was replaced by experience, and having became less important than doing. As communities adjusted, it was not just philosophers who saw this as positive. Even economists eventually realized that this was progress.

In Which Your Blogging Host Boldly Suggests Inaugural Speech Inserts

Here are some things that I'd like to hear in tomorrow's inaugural speech. In the interest of restraint, I've listed only a couple of things that I'd like to hear Obama say. Imagine this in his voice.

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It is of little use to have a great house in a dangerous and ugly neighborhood. I think that the Bush administration intuited correctly that we cannot live in isolation from the rest of the world, indifferent to the suffering of AIDS patients in Africa or the outrage of religious fundamentalists in the Middle East.

But what seemed to be missing in that great effort to address the rest of the world’s problems is the creation of a dialogue with the rest of the world about how best to do that. We can’t just assume that the path to progress is in our wake. I think that we can be a model of what is possible without being the blueprint of what must be. We cannot – and should not – assume that the rest of the world wants to be like us. Progress has always been about increased autonomy – the ability to more fully aspire to the life of one's own choosing. Progress is not really about imitation or following dictates. If we do want to encourage progress, this means that we’ll include other countries – indeed, other groups – in the conversation about what it means to create a better world.

The choice is not between withdrawal from the rest of the world or dictating. We are citizens of the world – not its dictator. In my administration we’ll choose to participate, not dictate.

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And I want to talk about a different kind of economic progress.

For too long we’ve confused quantity of goods with quality of life. Whether we look at the current financial crisis that has stemmed from a excess of debt or the threat of climate change, it seems increasingly obvious that the path towards happiness that goes through more and more and more is simply not sustainable. Making the shift from quantity of goods to quality of life as a measure of economic progress might be the most difficult, yet important, task before us.

It was only about 100 years ago that we began to systematically measure things like GDP and incomes and savings and consumption at the national level, measures that helped to shape policy and track its efficacy. We formalilzed our focus on quantity of goods. Through this we have learned a great deal and made real progress.

Now we have to do something similar with quality of life. We need to craft a new set of measures that go more directly towards the happiness of the citizenry. Adding new measures to what we track may sound trivial but it is the first step towards real change.

As part of this move from quantity to quality, we need to move beyond the narrow definition of economic goods as simply referring to goods to have. Our lives become meaningful not from what we take but from what we give: work matters. Whether this be in the form of public service and volunteer work or jobs that give pride in work, a really developed economy is able to create good jobs and not just good products. It gives us more goods to have AND more goods to do.

Towards this end, we’re going to measure more than consumption to know how we’re doing. Among other things, our policies are going to target job creation. And not just jobs for people engaged in computer programming or biological research. Jobs for factory workers and construction specialists, blue collar and white collar workers as well as a new and growing group of green collar workers who'll help to define new industries that address climate change and dependence on oil.

Good Goods and Better Goods

"When I saw the old bum pushing his grocery cart down the street, at first I felt sorry for him. But then when I saw what was in his cart I thought, Well, no wonder you're a bum, look at the dumb things you bought."
- Jack Handy, Deep Thoughts

Philosophers talk about three kinds of goods: goods to have, goods to do, and goods to be. Goods to have represent simpler desires and are easier to attain than goods to do or be.

In the last 200 years, the developed countries have become adept at stimulating and meeting demand for goods to have. The result? Our garages are stuffed with stuff and people who think about such things warn us that we're stripping the planet of natural resources at an unsustainable rate. The data suggest that more isn't doing it for us anymore - quantities of happiness have not kept pace with the quantities of goods in recent decades.

This suggests that our economy still isn't particularly mature. We're still stuck at an earlier stage of development.

It might have been difficult to explain to someone in the 16th century just how many amazing social inventions would be required to get to the place at which so many had more stuff than they could keep track of: factories, retail stores, credit, and all the myriad and extraordinary inventions that support those larger constructs.

I wonder what a person 200 years into the future would tell us about how we developed an economy that went more directly after goods to be - allowing us to attain states of being that improved quality of life without relying on an increase in our quantity of goods. How many social inventions and oddly foreign practices would it take to create a community where goods to be were as easy to attain as our goods to have are today?

If economics goods to be represent the highest stage of economic development, this meandering path of economic development might yet turn out to be a full circle.

“Progress was understood to be a shining and unswerving vector, but it turned out to be a complex twisted curve, which has once more brought us back to the very same eternal questions which had loomed in earlier times, except that then facing these questions was easier for a less distracted, less disconnected mankind.”
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Given its a Friday and a soul ought to have something more than philosophy, here's a Radiohead music video (thanks Toby) that is beautiful and somehow seems quite fitting with a post about being. Now, don't just have a good time - be the good time. Enjoy the weekend.

The Future of Prosperity - When More is Less

A fascinating post at http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/ leads with this:

"Jeff Jarvis is blogging from the Davos world leaders conference, finding (amongst other things) that 53% of Western Europeans think that the next generation will be less prosperous than this one. That's compared to 37% in the US, and just 14% in China."

Why the optimism gap? It could be that the West has an intuitive sense that the model we've been using for more than a century may be appropriate for a place like China but is increasingly less so in the West. China's per capita income is about 5% what it is in Western Europe or the US and Canada, making their perspective very different.

A single scoop of ice cream is nice - two can be fine ... but at some point (3? 6?) the enjoyment turns to nausea. More is nice for those who have little but after a while more becomes less desirable. Many Chinese are only now beginning to enjoy the benefits of prosperity - getting bikes, cars, stereos, and fashionable clothes for the first time. But once they have that, what is the next stage of prosperity? What happens when more is no longer better?

For decades we have confused quantity of goods with quality of life. Given that the prosperity of the last couple of centuries was the equivalent of our first scoop or two of ice cream, this confusion has not been particularly important. But now that we're facing our third or fourth scoop, it is important to make the distinction.

Our economies are still largely geared towards more, towards quantity of goods. Walk through a Costco or a landfill to see how voluminous our appetite for "goods" is. Yet these goods to have are not the only kind of goods. In fact, philosophers distinguish between goods to have and goods to do - considering the goods to do a higher good than those we have. Quality of life is related to goods to have - it is hard to imagine aspiring to a quality of life that didn't include at least some modicum of shelter, clothing, and food - much less those delightful bits of technology like laptops, mp3 players, or cell phones. Yet the marginal utility - the additional joy we get - from more goods (to have) does gradually drop. Eventually, goods (to have) simply do less to increase our quality of life.

Those in the West may well see that we're geared for getting more even as getting more has less and less impact on our quality of life. This may be the reason for the optimism gap between the West and China. Until the West has shifted its economies to more directly go after improvements in quality of life, this sense of pessimism in the West may only get worse.