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Monday, January 12, 2004
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But Let’s Not Go Overboard
A little addendum/clarification to my last post: In a recent book, Growth Fetish, the Australian social critic Clive Hamilton argues that since what some observers are now calling “affluenza” creates large numbers of people subject to “manipulation by marketers, obsessive materialism, endemic alienation, and loneliness,” governments must impose morally improving deprivations upon their populations. In order for too-successful countries like Australia and the United States to get their citizens off “the hedonic treadmill” (a nice phrase coined by Richard Easterlin), Hamilton recommends that governments 1. increase taxation to reduce demand for consumer goods; 2. impose/increase progressive, luxury, speculative, ecological, and inheritance taxes; 3. mandate limitations on working hours; 4. ban most advertising; 5. reduce television broadcast hours; 6. reduce the supply of goods; 7. phase out fossil fuels. This is madness. Although I agree with Tony Kushner’s recent health reform proposal (the American government should provide free psychiatric care to anyone who drives a Hummer), I support wholeheartedly the right of all Americans to buy jackshit and tons of it, watch sixty hours of television a week, work themselves to death, burn fossil fuels, and pleasure themselves with Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues. While I agree with Christopher Lasch that "a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation," I think we need to figure out subtler ways of capping growth than Hamilton seems to have in mind. |