Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century
204
Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century
204Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Whether watching baseball or undergoing heart surgery, Americans have bought a variety of goods and services to achieve happiness. Here is a provocative look at what they have chosen to purchase. Stanley Lebergott maintains that the average consumer has behaved more reasonably than many distinguished critics of "materialism" have suggested. He sees consumers seeking to make an uncertain and often cruel world into a pleasanter and more convenient place--and, for the most part, succeeding. With refreshing common sense, he reminds us of what many "luxuries" have meant, especially for women: increased income since 1900 has been used largely to lighten the backbreaking labor once required by household chores.
Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691607580 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #161 |
| Pages: | 204 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Pursuing Happiness
American Consumers in the Twentieth Century
By Stanley Lebergott
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04322-7
CHAPTER 1
Consumers and Their Critics
All societies pursue experience, not mere survival:
Men are children of the Universe with foolish enterprises and irrational hopes. A tree sticks to its business of mere survival; and so does an oyster, with minor divergencies. [But] ... the life-aim of survival is modified into the human aim of survival for diversified worth-while experience.
Economic activity aims not for output, but for experience via consumption. So Smith and Mill declared, and Ruskin. So Fisher, Keynes, Nordhaus, and Tobin agreed. Consumers buy bazaars full of goods, but only to create the diversified experience they ultimately seek.
Of course, goods yield a wavering stream of satisfaction. Some movies prove to be boring; books, dull; automobiles, lemons. And yesterday's delightful purchase may be dumped in today's trash can. Consumers nonetheless keep searching. The reality principle may block enjoyment of some purchases, but the pleasure principle makes consumers persist, cheerfully or desperately. Their motto through it all remains that euphoric sentence from Antony and Cleopatra: "I hope well of tomorrow."
Consumers may be constantly "in pursuit of happiness," to use Locke's immortal phrase. But doubters find their choices regrettable, even repellent. Thus, a famous professor of zoology complained of the proliferation of "still more automobiles, color TV sets, speed boats, new gadgets, new models." Male zoologists apparently were suitable car buyers. But not women. Or teenagers. Or families on welfare. (Since these latter groups did not own automobiles previously, it was largely they who accounted for "still more" automobiles.) But what made them less worthy buyers than zoologists who specialize in fruit flies? What principle of zoology demonstrated color televisions to be objectionable, but not black and white ones?
How cogent are objections such as those by Veblen, Galbraith, Mishan, Scitovsky, Robinson, Nordhaus, and Tobin? They do extend a long tradition. In the 1900s Henry George declared a millionaire's life "abnormal" because he had a telephone in his bedroom. In the 1760s, English law still required that "no man shall be served more than two courses at dinner or supper." (France drew the legal line at three courses.) A seventeenth-century writer on political economy complained that lesser men "dress like a gentleman ... [thereby] corrupting our ancient discipline." Another social critic attacked the bourgeois who sported "a more brilliant equipage than a duke or peer," and whose wives wore "more superb clothes and more diamonds than a countess." Ancient Rome limited the number of guests at a family dinner, and how much could be spent for boiled vegetables. Sparta forbade cooks to use any spice but salt or vinegar. Russia promised death to smokers, and Turkey, to coffee drinkers.
Students of American materialism have added their obiter dicta. Many decry money spent for services (though not goods). A leading Marxist economist scathingly described the unproductive, ever "growing, contingent of service workers" (which, of course, included himself—and every other teacher, physician, social worker, musician, artist, writer, and government or hospital employee). A clinical psychologist cast no less scorn on other products. His verdict? The nation requires fewer cars—and more bicycles; fewer polyester suits—though not polyester dresses.
More recently, a noted professor of English volunteered his list of "many things deplorable" in the United States. He, too, began with "the size of the service sector," thereby including the private university at which he taught, and the theatres, art galleries, and restaurants to which his colleagues resorted. Not to mention their ministers, psychoanalysts, and ski instructors.
These professors shared a widespread distaste for service employees—teachers, bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers, physicians. But none bothered to specify any standard—zoological, psychological, economic, moral, aesthetic, philosophic, or political—by which to demonstrate that services were inferior to products.
Other scholars have contrasted uncomely expenditures with comely ones. Veblen began with his saturnine attack on American spending for domestic servants. But the flood of academic criticism really dates from the 1950s, with Galbraith's classic observations on sheet steel. In his mordant phrasing, the American consumer bought "big, ungainly, unfunctional" automobiles, sadly disfigured by "functionless bulges."
Of these pejoratives, "ungainly" has little economic content. "Big" offers little more. Does aesthetics really demonstrate that the Bugatti is repellent because it is big? (Or the Rolls Royce? The Lincoln?) And even if philosophy can distinguish "gainly" eight-cylinder cars from ungainly ones, economics offers no theory on the subject, or measurement. At best, economists repeat casual aesthetic preferences.
Galbraith's quasiprofessional objection appeared in his third adjective: bulges are "unfunctional." Indeed, sheet steel would be economized if only functional bulges were allowed. But how does economics define a functional bulge? One shaped like the airplane nacelle that flies deep thinkers from speaking engagements in the United States to ski resorts in Switzerland?
What is functional for human consumers? Surely every (legal) consumer expenditure is. For every one is made in the simpleminded pursuit of happiness. Does Western engineering declare that some expenditures are unfunctional? Or Western morality? Even if they did, Western economics cannot. True, some economists may see spending as functional if for rock concerts, but not Indian miniatures-or vice versa. Others approve baseball tickets, but not books—or vice versa. Still others accept beach buggies without bulbous fenders, and reject Chryslers with. And some economists are offended by "mauve and cerise" automobiles (though perhaps not by simple cerise).
But what do such preferences have to do with "function"? What society is committed to mere physical survival? Even those with the grimmest prospects have devoted resources to art. So the cave paintings of Lascaux mutely testify, as well as the decorations on the ostrich shells in which Hottentots held their tiny stocks of water. In the medieval world, the bards of poverty-stricken Wales and the harpers of Ireland were no less "functional." In the twentieth century, a dour society bent on swift industrialization nonetheless financed Khatchaturian, Shostakovich, and socialist realism. And Mao's China supported the composers of the Yellow River Concerto. What society has sought mere survival, mere "engineering" functionalism?
Does Galbraith's distinction between functional and nonfunctional really lead to a useful conclusion? One remembers how Goneril proposed to reduce Lear's recklessly large retinue of knights. What need had he of one hundred? Of fifty? Nay, even of one? Lear's reply defined the scope of consumer expenditure in free societies: "Oh, reason not the need." That cry from the heart is more persuasive than the moral or aesthetic criteria that some thinkers excogitate. For consumption has always reflected "the sum of things hoped for"—not the "evidence of things seen."
To vague concerns about offensive luxuries, Nordhaus and Tobin have added an analytic concern, about "regrettable" necessities. Thesey they say, "are not directly sources of utility themselves but regrettably necessary activities that may yield utility." Economists from the Midwest to Greece and Japan have followed their lead. Consumer outlays such as the cost of commuting to work, they hold to be only "instrumental." They therefore banish from GNP all spending for
regrettably necessary inputs to activities that may yield utility. [By] classifying defense costs—or police protection or public health expenditures—as regrettable and instrumental we certainly do not deny the possibility that given the unfavorable circumstances that prompt these expenditures consumers will ultimately be better off with them than without them. This may or may not be the case. The only judgment we make is that these expenditures yield no direct satisfaction."
Their argument turns on the simple assertion that such goods "yield no direct satisfaction." But is indirectness so daunting? Must it automatically force exclusion? And if so, what sector of consumer expenditure escapes? Food? Surely no one buys lard for the direct satisfaction it yields, or flour, or oregano. Clothing? Who revels in the acquisition of yard goods, buttons, or zippers? Transportation? Are trips to the grocery store, the doctor, the drug store, less "indirect" than trips to work (which Nordhaus and Tobin do exclude)?
Few categories provide direct joy, or thrills. Not driver education or coal oil, insurance costs or dish drains. All are driven by expectation. Expenditures typically provide consumers with a mere ticket of admission to future experience. Were "direct satisfaction" indeed the criterion, then GNP would omit almost everything consumers now buy.
But suppose that "indirectness" were nonetheless damning. What would follow for measuring consumer expenditure? Quite the opposite of the Nordhaus-Tobin conclusion. For we can make one sure judgment about "regrettably necessary" expenditures: they are necessary. And the more necessary they are the more inevitably consumers will seek to make them. Should we then exclude from consumer expenditure the very items consumers desire most urgently?
The argument against "indirectness" fails because it starts from a faulty premise. Consumers do not "regret" necessary expenditures. If anything, they regret the state of the real world. They regret that friction exists. (If it did not, commuting costs would drop to zero.) They regret that disease exists. (If it did not, they would spend less for medicine.) They regret the neighbor's dog. (If it ran away, they would spend less on lawn repair, on cleaning.)
"Regret" is a word of seismic potency. It can be applied to a thousand facets of the real world. But how does it apply to expenditure? Consumers actually want to pay for commuting to work; their alternative is to walk. They wish to buy medicine; their alternative is to become sicker, or to die. They strongly desire to spend for antipollution devices—given the alternatives. Such expenditures help them to cope with menacing aspects of the real world, and the exasperating ones. Consumers would find one thing worse than "having to" make such expenditures: being unable to make them. Consumer behavior, and welfare, can be understood no better by excluding "regrettable necessities" than by excluding "regrettable luxuries."
Meanwhile other economists chide consumers for spending too little (on certain goods). Thus it has been discovered that we Americans
are known for our interest in nutrition and our lack of interest in the pleasures of food.... To quote ... a scientific text on food selection and preparation: "In this country of lavish, almost shameful abundance, the great majority of Americans go through life without experiencing a single technically evaluated, good, representative dinner."
(Is gluttony, a cardinal sin for centuries, now a minor virtue?)
The United States does indeed lack an official corps of tasters and chewers, to decide which dinners are "good, representative." But what of that vast, untidy party of amateurs who exhort and instruct in newspaper food columns? And what of the bestsellers in U.S. bookstores for decades—cookbooks? This record hardly demonstrates any "lack of interest in the pleasures of food."
How does a nation that lacks a Brillat-Savarin Academy of Cuisine decide which meals to serve? By ignoring its aesthetic responsibilities? Apparently. Scitovsky begins an eloquent chapter quoting "a distinguished Mexican poet-diplomat": "Pleasure is a concept [a sensation] absent from traditional Yankee cooking ... it is a cuisine with no mysteries: simple, spiceless, nutritious food." It is hard, Scitovsky adds, "to document such an eloquent statement statistically." But he nonetheless volunteers a gaggle of ratios to "confirm ... that we Americans are less interested in the pleasures of food than are Western Europeans."
One is the high percentage of expenditures on red meat that Americans use for sausage or ground meat. Lower percentages for Europeans, however, call attention to their low incomes, and docile housewives, not to delicate sensibilities. European women may dutifully grind their hamburger at home. Americans do not. But how do such percentages demonstrate American "willingness to consume unimproved, in the shape of hamburgers, all the inferior cuts of meat, which others dress up with sauces and garnishes to offset or hide their inferiority"? (Unless, among other improbabilities, a dubious brown sauce proves an "interest in the pleasures of food" but catsup reveals disinterest.)
Still another percentage purportedly demonstrates additional American inadequacies. Belgians and Swedes, we are told, buy more rutabagas, turnips, and potatoes than Americans do. More precisely, of all spending on vegetables, the percentage that goes for canned and dried vegetables is lower in Western Europe than in the United States. Yet that ratio surely reflects primarily greater willingness of European than American housewives to spend hours shopping for, cleaning, cutting up, and preparing fresh vegetables. How does that demonstrate greater European zest for the "pleasure component" of food?
The panoply of percentages is, however, irrelevant. They would describe Americans as "less interested in the pleasures of food than Europeans" if Americans consumed twice as much food as Europeans, and spent all day doing so. For Scitovsky's ratios only show that Americans 1) had higher incomes and 2) consumed relatively greater amounts of foods considered inferior by some aestheticians.
Americans have also been rebuked for not attending to "the physical environment of one's home and its furnishings [though] its importance for man's well being is well attested." Statistical tables are offered as proof. (Oddly enough, they reveal that Americans spend three times as much on flowers and plants as Britons do, and as much as Western Europeans. But these numbers are not mentioned.) American inadequacy is further derided by a ratio: the United States spends a smaller percentage of its national income on flowers than seven other nations. But what does that really mean? Americans could be embowered in nosegays, surround themselves with potted palms, and strew their highways with roses, yet still spend "a smaller percentage" on flowers than poorer nations. Greater income would easily permit their doing so. Such revelations convey little to those who judge behavior by criteria other than ratio analysis.
Theologians and philosophers have long disapproved of much consumer behavior. But they disagreed as to which items were suspect. More recent social critics, economists included, have extended those lists. They object to catsup (but not brown gravy); to particolored cars (but not sober yellow); to stylish polar parkas (but not ones that only protect against freezing); to more automobile models (but not more book titles).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pursuing Happiness by Stanley Lebergott. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Tables and FigurePreface
Pt. I Economic Well-Being
1 Consumers and Their Critics
2 Happiness and Economic Welfare
3 Consumer Choice: Advertising
4 Consumer Choice: Externalities, Varieties
5 Consumption Inequality
6 Immortality and the Budget Constraint
7 Per Capita Consumption and the Angel of the Lord
8 Women's Work: Home to Market
9 Work, Overwork, and Consumer Spending
10 More Goods: The Twentieth Century
Pt. II Major Trends, 1900-1990
Postscript
Appendix A: Personal Consumption Table
Appendix B: Estimating Details
Works Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Lebergott's entrancing ... Pursuing Happiness ... makes the point that much of the twentieth-century spending binge of Americans, sneered at by the intelligentsia from Veblen to Galbraith, was to substitute for housewives' time."—Don McCloskey, University of Iowa