The Examined Life

...Many contemporary writers argue that Americans have been so corrupted by wealth, status-seeking, and the demands of a competitive economy that they have become incapable of resisting the dominant trends creating a conformist mass society...

...It seeks to demonstrate that "waste" is endemic in the American economy...

...The reasons for this opinion are not the writing, for Larrabee is the better writer...

...Herbert Hoover wrote an essay on the sins of "waste" in 1921...

...Larrabee seeks to document some of the improvements...

...The level of analysis in Larrabee's work is much higher than that of Packard's The Waste Makers, yet I predict that the latter book, which seems to attack American capitalism, will be much more successful in terms of sales than The Self-Conscious Society, which seemingly praises the accomplishments of the society...

...Packard with his criticisms makes us feel smug and satisfied...

...Poverty, hard physical labor, and scarcity are sources of virtuous living...

...The principles of scarcity, of the virtues of smalltown America, are, of course, those of conservative Republicanism...

...Rather I suspect Packard succeeds because he permits his readers to have their cake and eat it too, to indulge in all the activities which he morally condemns, secure in the belief that the good society lies in the American past, in the times of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, not in the present...

...In discussing the nature of American society before 1929, many, including some of the then leading American Communists, seriously debated whether or not abundance had created a qualitatively new social system, different in key aspects from all preceding ones...

...Where the critics of the Thirties were concerned with ending poverty and unemployment and with opportunities for social mobility, the critics of the Fifties and Sixties are interested in shifting the resources of America from tail fins and cosmetics to good schools, symphony orchestras, handsome architecture, and the like...

...Eric Larrabee suggests that as a nation we are masochistic, that we love to be criticized, and he quotes George Bernard Shaw that "all that is necessary" to gain the approval of Americans "is to hold them up to the ridicule of the rest of the universe...

...Packard argues, first, that most of the hard goods we buy are deliberately built to break down in a short time, and, second, that "the hidden persuaders" of the advertising agencies are able to make us buy what we do not need, to accept the dictates of style-setters whose only objective is to reduce the utility of goods by changing fashions as rapidly as possible...

...Given the severity of Packard's criticisms of the values and practices of contemporary American society, some readers of his books may find it curious that he does not suggest any radical political or economic solutions, that he is satisfied with urging a return to the presumed verities of an idealized Nineteenth-Century rural, small-town, and frontier America...

...The latter see America as a rich, wasteful land which has let wealth corrupt it...

...It is a time for radical thinking about what Twenty-first Century America should look like, not for nostalgia about how good it is to be able to live in a Vermont farmhouse without central heating, running water, or electric lighting...

...to what extent were built-in waste, planned obsolescence, and extensive advertising campaigns designed to create new desires, necessary to maintain the equilibrium of the market...

...Reviewed by Seymour Martin Lipset Three and four decades ago the popular social and economic analyses concerned the problems of an "age of plenty" (Josiah Stampp), an "economy of abundance" (Stuart Chase), and "the tragedy of waste" (R...

...But, as Eric Larrabee explains in The Self-Conscious Society, an analysis of how and why Americans as a people are so self-conscious and self-critical, it is "possible for people to profess the principles of Scarcity while observing those of Abundance...

...not surprisingly, a period of prolonged prosperity and full employment brings discussions similar to those of the 1920's...

...He believes that it has considerably improved both individual existence and culture, that it has enlarged "the range of human possibility" as against the old days which were in some large part "crabbed, and mean, and bitter, and hopeless," that "until our dirty and disreputable industrial civilization came along even the modest range of cultural experience that the arts represent was foreclosed to all but a tiny minority...

...As a solution for such institutionalized forms of waste Packard recommends certain individual solutions— that we change our basic personal values, regain "pride in prudence," and acknowledge "that there is only a modest connection between possessions and life's satisfaction, except as possessions are able to corrupt...

...Vance Packard has reached a mass audience with three books which analyze the wastes inherent in the efforts to succeed in the economic and status system of a prosperous society...

...Individualism as we know it, as a possibility for the many, did not exist until modern times...

...our own purpose, that of our people...

...The best known analyses of America published since 1950 take the problem of scarcity and of poverty as settled, essentially...

...Among the topics discussed were whether it was possible to determine at which point a society passed from the age of scarcity to that of "plenty," and what the social and economic consequences of such a change were...

...like a good sermon, he can make you feel better, more moral, personally above the crass world which you can enjoy, but for which you are not responsible...

...Larrabee, unlike Packard, prefers abundance to scarcity...

...What remains problematic for the economy of abundance is its culture, how it spends its abundance...

...And given the assumption that scarcity had been abolished, one of the major problems for discussion was how such an economy would maintain itself...

...David Potter has described Americans as a "people of plenty," while John Galbraith has portrayed the economic and social problems of an "affluent society...

...Our forefathers who lived in an age of scarcity, and our contemporaries who live outside of the competitive affluent society, such as those who live on "the bleak Aran Islands of Ireland" or the "natives" of the small towns and farms of Vermont, are much happier than the upper-middle class of metropolitan America who buy Packard's books...

...In short, Packard tells us that things were better before a complex, competitive civilization forced us into conformist, status-seeking, wasteful activities...

...rather, abundance "calls into question the most fundamental principles...

...But the problem for Larrabee is how to keep the revolution going, how to extend it both within and outside our borders, how to increase genuine creative culture, and so forth...

...Americans seem to love to hear how corrupt, wasteful, status-seeking, and conformist they are...

...Intellectual fashions, like changes in dress design, follow a recurrent pattern...

...H. Tawney and Stuart Chase...

...The reception of The Waste Makers seems to prove that Shaw and Lar-rabee are right, since it is already enjoying a success in reviews and sales...

...Packard is the sociologist for Sunday reading...

...For Larrabee, the solution to the problems created by abundance are not a return to the principles of scarcity, to the virtues prescribed by Herbert Hoover...

...Larrabee with his praise calls us to act, to find a way to "transcend" the smugness and self-satisfaction of the present...

...There is much evidence that Packard is factually wrong, that the activities which he dislikes characterized much of Nineteenth Century America as well, but this is another issue which I do not have space to develop here...

...Larrabee, on the other hand, tells us that we have advanced a far distance, that we have built a better life than people have ever enjoyed, that our abundance for the first time makes economic security, individualism, cultural creativity, and intellectual insight possible for the many, not just for the few...

...This conclusion seems to be contradicted by the very popularity of the critics and their works...