CST Economics: The Cost of Consumption

I am not even an amateur economist, nor do I quibble with the fact that higher per capita GDPs are a good thing. I do, however, feel obliged to point out that much of the evidence of America's supremacy over Europe in terms of wealth creation (see Steve's post below) has come at a substantial moral cost to Americans themselves. Besides reflecting the degree to which technological conveniences have become standard to the American way of life (even among the poor), the rates of ownership of televisions, cars, air conditioning, etc., along with the square footage of our homes, all provide a sense of the degree to which the consumer culture has found its ultimate expression in modern American life. Given the vastly lower percentage of poor and middle-class Americans who have health insurance, save for college, or save for retirement, I'm not sure that the nearly universal ownership of televisions is a good thing. And I'm doubtful that the rise in square footage of the average home is a positive indicator of a family's overall health, given the corresponding need of both parents to work outside the home in order to make mortgage payments. (I'd be interested in seeing the US-EU comparison of per capita personal debt levels.) If both parents need to be working, I think that the European tendency to ensure paid parental leave after a child's birth is more vital to the health of the family than the square footage of the American home to which the nanny is welcomed every day.

I'm not challenging Steve's characterization of the study's relevance, and I do not suggest we embrace the obviously flawed model of the European social welfare state. But I do think we need to resist any temptation to judge the health of a society (even economic health) solely by measures that feed into culturally destructive habits. In this regard, I was reminded of David Hart's article, Freedom and Decency, in the current First Things (the article is not available on-line). He wrote concerning our society's insistence that censorship is utterly incompatible with freedom. I think his words also apply to the market economy:

A society is just precisely to the degree that it makes true freedom possible; to do this it must leave certain areas of moral existence to govern themselves, but it must also in many cases seek to defeat the most vicious aspects of fallen nature, and to aid as far as possible in the elevation in each soul of right reason over mere appetite and impulse -- which necessarily involves denying certain persons the things they want most. . . . When appetite seizes the reins of the soul or the city, it drives the chariot toward ruin; so it is the very art of sound governance to seek to perfect the intricate and delicate choreography of moral and legal custom that will best promote the sway of reverent reason in city and soul alike.

. . . . The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethos, if it could be taken to its logical end, would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen.

Rob