Affluenza

Chapter 3 introduces some of the concrete effects of affluenza on our health. According to the authors, the rise in consumption in the Age of Affluenza corresponds to both higher rates of economic productivity and increases in working hours. The result is what they call “time famine,” a scarcity of free time beyond the time we devote to our jobs (35-36). As the economist Juliet Schor has shown, the average American worked 160 hours—or four full workweeks—more in 1991 than he or she did in 1969 (38).

Besides the quantitative growth in working hours, de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor also note that the qualitative intensity of work has also increased. For example, many workers report not using their mandated vacation days so as to seem like more committed and productive employees. In other words, as a society, we are working longer and harder than ever before in order to produce and buy more and more stuff. More work and less vacation and leisure time, the authors claim, has resulted in increased stress levels with adverse medical effects similar to smoking. Stress, as Dr. Sarah Speck says, is “the new tobacco” (39).

The authors contrast the American situation with that of Europe, where rises in economic productivity since 1970 have correlated to fewer working hours per week and longer vacation periods (41). Affluenza is therefore producing more wealth and innovation for us than at any other point in human history, yet the consequent trend in the United States has been less free time, lower wages, shrinking household savings, and poor health.

This chapter examines the effects of affluenza on children and the family. According to the book The Lonely American, by Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, longer working hours and the need for two-income households have limited the exposure that parents get to each other and to their children. Parents become managers of their children’s busy schedules, which are increasingly oriented around a bevy of indoor, structured activities designed to help them succeed as future workers in the competitive global marketplace. The number one family activity is of course watching television, a strictly passive experience for exhausted individuals who are then exposed to dozens of advertisements, which are the very fuel of affluenza. The Age of Affluenza has seen lower marriage rates and an increase in single-person households, a sign of the decline of the traditional nuclear family (44).

In terms of children, the authors present disturbing evidence regarding the growing prominence of marketing to kids. Children today are exposed to more advertising than ever before both inside and outside school, a product of a rising awareness by marketing firms of children as consumers. The authors even mention an advertising trade fair in 1996 in which corporate representatives encouraged fostering rebellion and disobedience in children against their parents since parents typically act as barriers to spending; “[a]nti-social behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing,” says one speaker (47). The authors mention increasing health and psychological issues in children (obesity, depression, suicide) as side effects of the culture of affluenza and its emphasis on earning and spending, instant self-gratification, and less free time for children to play and explore. Once again, comparisons with European countries like the Netherlands suggest that affluenza is wreaking serious havoc on families and children in America.          

This chapter extends the argument of Affluenza to the sphere of the community. It opens with an anecdote by one of the authors, David Wann, about his youth during the 1950s in Crown Point, Indiana (52). Every day, David would walk with his grandfather into the town square; every person that they passed knew his grandfather’s name, and David in turn still remembers the names of every one of those people.

The authors offer this story not as an indulgent slice of pure nostalgia. Rather, the distance of our present-day towns and neighborhoods from this image exemplifies the degeneration of local communities that has accompanied the spread of affluenza. The main target of the chapter is major retail chains like Wal-Mart, Office Max, Home Depot, Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, and McDonald’s. When these big-box stores move into a community, smaller local businesses with deep ties to the area are quickly obliterated. A result is the loss of what Ray Oldenburg calls “third places”; that is, public spaces between home and work (53). Moreover, in contrast to local businesses, the profits generated by multinational chains are typically transferred out of the community and invested elsewhere. The destruction of public space by large corporations is reflected in the growth of gated communities in which distrustful residents build walls and barriers in order to separate themselves from their neighbors (57-58).

The lone bright spot in the chapter is provided by the story of Al Norman, a Massachusetts man who successfully blocked the opening of a Wal-Mart in his small town and now travels around the country instructing others about local activism (56-57). His example is meant to demonstrate the power of resistance that the authors believe is the only effective response to the expansion of chain retailers that feed on the foundations of genuine community. We do not consume the products of major corporations, they conclude; on the contrary, the corporations are consuming us (59).

Chapter 6 looks at what the Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater called the “spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, a tumor of the soul” (62). Once again, the authors begin their discussion with a striking story: the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a public work relief program for young men that operated from 1933 to 1942. Though overworked and underpaid, the participants in this program, responsible for building impressive and enduring public infrastructure in the US, reported immense satisfaction and fulfillment with their work decades after the fact. They were, so to speak, “building America,” and proud of it (61).

Such meaningful work is startlingly rare in the Age of Affluenza, in which many of us labor at tedious, anonymous jobs in order to simply survive, or, if we are lucky, buy some of the things that we think that we want. The authors list the anti-materialistic philosophies of numerous figures, from Jesus Christ to the Dalai Lama (and even several conservative economists) in support of the claim that money and the accumulation of possessions fails to bring us true happiness. This is borne out by the tenfold increase in diagnoses of clinical depression since 1945 (64). If there is one thing that the political Left and Right can agree on, the authors argue, it is that affluenza has created a society of dejected, de-individualized workers who see no point in their work and cannot find lasting fulfillment from the seemingly limitless possibilities for consumption offered to them.