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THREE

The Unperceived Realities of the Consumer Life

IN THE WORDS OF NOBEL economics laureate Herbert Simon, the basic model of economics posits that each person has “a complete and consistent system of preferences that allows him always to choose among the alternatives open to him; he is always completely aware of what his alternatives are; there are no limits on the complexity of the computations he can perform in order to determine which alternatives are best.”¹ Most economists agree that such a description of human behavior is not realistic but regard it as a close enough approximation to be useful. Doubtless for certain purposes it is. But I will stress here another perspective that yields quite a different picture. I have already indicated some of the ways in which our thinking about the economic side of our lives is less realistic and less rational than we like to believe. In this chapter I shall consider some further ways in which we blur our experience or practice self-delusion about our lives as consumers.

Our economy absolutely requires that we nurture illusions if it is to persist in its present ways. Our image of what things mean to us and the homilies we share and repeat to each other have become increasingly at odds with the realities of our daily lives. We magnify the satisfactions our material pursuits bring, while the sacrifices are either blotted out or reinterpreted in ways that make what we’re doing seem to make sense.

To the psychotherapist, such a dedication by people to precisely the way of life that causes their distress is a familiar phenomenon. Irony and self-deception are abundant in the behavior patterns he studies. The psychotherapist’s perspective is less superficially reassuring than the Panglossian circle of mainstream economics, which defines our real preferences as revealed—conveniently—by precisely what we buy. But there is something to be gained if one persists in the effort to examine experience a bit more closely than one’s grocery list permits—perhaps not only self-knowledge but even the possibility of a kind of liberation considerably more satisfying than simply being “free to choose” what is on the shelves.

The Automobile as Dream Machine

Let us begin our examination of the self-deceptions of the consumer life by looking at the role of automobiles in our lives. Few products have had as powerful a role in shaping the way we live, for both good and ill, and few so strongly define and limit what options appear available to us. Moreover, few products have aroused such a complex of emotions in us or become so utterly indispensable to our way of life. The French semiologist Roland Barthes has even provocatively suggested that “cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals … the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”²

In Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood we find one character saying “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” Joyce Carol Oates says about the frame of mind of one of her characters, “As long as he had his own car he was an American and could not die.” And lest one think such statements appear only in fiction, one finds in a New York Times article on the effects of energy shortages on people’s lives the following statement by a social worker who had switched from solo driving to a car pool: “That first week of the car pool, when I knew my car was not out in the parking lot, I felt like I had lost an arm or something.”³

In America cars have been the lifeblood of the society of growth; it is not without reason that roads and highways are referred to as arteries.^* Even those who live in cities, where automobiles may seem less of a necessity, depend for their very lives on the flow of automotive traffic. The seductive pull of the automobile-aided by huge government investments in a comprehensive highway system—has led to the atrophy of rail transportation, and since few of us grow our own food, we count on trucks and roads for the necessities of life.

Automobiles have reshaped our landscape, both geographically and culturally. At a time when few of us could see that the genie in the bottle looked very much like a smirking OPEC sheik, and when most of us probably thought that hydrocarbon emissions had something to do with putting bubbles in soft drinks, America took to the open road. Taking full advantage of our vast continent, we pushed ahead toward one last frontier—the relatively open spaces that surrounded our cities even after the Pacific had been reached and settled. The westward push that had dominated America’s consciousness and expressed her vitality for so many years was replaced by an outward push. In every city, East and West, we expressed our expansiveness in this new way, forsaking the clustered way of life that had characterized city life for thousands of years. We created instead a new kind of city, freed from the old constraints imposed by time and distance. The automobile seemed to provide us with a way of keeping in touch, of sustaining the critical mass that is required for a lively culture, and yet enjoying as well the greenery and open space that we have always envisioned as Eden. Now, having tasted of the fruits of OPEC, we are threatened with expulsion from Eden—or perhaps, in the modern case, with house arrest instead of exile: Without the car, how could we get around? The structure of our living, shopping, and working arrangements seems to make the private automobile absolutely indispensable.

Automobiles are the core of our economy as well. Daniel J. Boorstin, historian and Librarian of Congress, asserts, “We cannot understand what we mean in America by competition or by monopoly, by advertising, by industrial leadership, or by know-how, unless we have understood the role of the automobile.”⁴ One in six jobs in America are directly or indirectly related to the automobile (not just in building them, but in selling, distributing, and servicing them; mining or producing the materials; drilling for, refining, and distributing the fuel for them; and so on).⁵ Every twenty-four hours we add 10,000 new drivers and 10,000 new cars to our roads.⁶ Estimates of how much of the average American’s income goes to support his automobile—not just in paying for the car, but in interest payments, insurance, repairs, parking, tolls, fuel, taxes, and so forth—range from one out of ten to almost one out of every four dollars spent.⁷ Indeed, our social fabric seems to be constructed out of automobile parts.

But automobiles are more than just a necessity to us. They are a way of life. Our involvement with them is more than just a matter of practicality; they serve us as a symbol of freedom, strength, speed, and adventure. Perhaps one of the reasons that solo driving to and from work has continued so persistently in the face of serious impracticalities is that it is so conducive to fantasy. Cars are our personal dream machines, and dreams are private experiences.

In many instances cars have been specifically designed to enhance this kind of fantasy. Interior and exterior design, model names, and the contents of ads all converge toward an image of driving that implies not only great speed but also far greater skill than is really involved. Everyday driving is in fact a rather passive, simple task that most of the time requires a bare minimum of skill. The effort to make cars “exciting,” “sexy,” and “supercharged” has helped to obscure the everyday experience of driving and to encourage us to make of cars a vehicle for our fantasies rather than merely a mode of transportation.

Looking into the not too distant past, even our sexual mores can be seen as intimately related to the automobile. Perhaps now that changes in sexual standards have become more pervasive and acknowledged, now that space and discretion are provided the young for their sexual experimentation, fewer initiate their sexual lives in automobiles. But for a transitional generation, the automobile was a boudoir as much as a mode of transportation. The possibility of young couples disappearing together for a few hours in an automobile did not cause a change in sexual behavior in itself. There had to be a receptive culture for this to be permitted in the first place. But the sense of freedom generated by the automobile did contribute to the background sense that young people were independent of and separate from their parents rather than part of a larger unit with a well-defined and delimited place. And the mobility and privacy provided by the automobile did make possible changes in sexual patterns which society at the time was willing to tolerate (and perhaps even encourage) only if it did not have to see or explicitly acknowledge them.

In return for the freedom, independence, spontaneity, and excitement that cars are felt to give us, we have been willing to pay an enormous price—though we have tended to deny the price we pay. For one thing, riding in cars is one of the most dangerous things we do in our daily lives. The highway accident rates we endure are astonishing—50,000 violent deaths, 4.5 million injuries each year,⁸ as many casualties each year as we sustained in the entire Vietnam War. Moreover, like war deaths, highway fatalities take their toll disproportionately on the young. More than half of the victims each year are in their twenties or younger. Indeed, if present trends continue, one out of sixty children born in America today will die in an automobile accident before they are twenty-one.⁹ But though few of us have not known someone who was killed or seriously injured in an auto accident, we relegate this unpleasant reality about the automobile to some nether portion of our consciousness.

The auto executives are probably telling the truth—though a far more complicated and less honorable truth than they would have us believe—when they say that most Americans “don’t want” changes in cars that could make them safer at the cost of higher prices or less “convenience.” Indeed, even the simple expedient of using seat belts and shoulder harnesses is resisted. Though such devices enormously reduce the risk of death or serious injury, it is estimated that they are used by only 15% of drivers.¹⁰ This degree of disregard for the most basic kind of protection against being maimed or killed speaks poignantly to the fantasies of invulnerability associated with the automobile and to our need to feel that we are unconstrained.

Cars are also, of course, a major source of air pollution. Here again, we use psychological mechanisms of denial and refuse to really take into account what we have wrought. Consider: In New York City the level of carbon monoxide in the blood of most taxi drivers is so high it cannot be used for transfusions to people with heart ailments.¹¹ When problems of pollution are brought to our attention, we deal with the issue in the language of “tradeoffs.” We have become used to hearing a familiar litany: No one can live free of risks; life spent continually in fear of consequences is dull and not worth living; America wasn’t built by frightened, cautious men; we need to try to reduce pollution, but we must be “reasonable”; pollution control, after all, is expensive, and someone is going to have to pay for it; a certain amount of pollution is a price we are willing to pay for the personal and economic benefits the automobile provides.

These arguments are not entirely without merit. In the abstract they make a fair amount of sense. But are the actual benefits really as great as we are accustomed to thinking they are? Are they enough to justify the very real risks to health, life, and limb for ourselves and our children?

To ride along a pristine country road on a beautiful spring day certainly is a pleasure, and one worth taking a certain risk to enjoy. A slightly longer life devoid of experiences of this kind may well seem not particularly attractive to many people. But is that what the bulk of our driving consists of? Or is it commuting to work along the Long Island Expressway, New Jersey Turnpike, or San Diego Freeway, stopping and starting and crawling along, breathing the fumes of the car in front; or driving along the “strips” that devour our landscape, stopping at traffic lights, assaulted by ugliness and, again, crawling along like thousands of other drivers, each wishing the others weren’t there? Is such a commute so much more pleasurable than a comfortable train or bus? Is that worth endangering your children’s lungs? And isn’t that what most driving—especially most commuting—really is?

We nurture a sense or illusion of freedom that overrides the daily reality. Most days we do not “trade off’ pollution and the risk of accident for a freer, experientially richer life; we trade these off for still another tradeoff, the daily grind on the expressway, another faulty compromise that mocks the supposed rationality of our decision-making. We eat gruel all week and tell ourselves it’s dessert.

It can be argued, of course, that the transportation alternative I am implying doesn’t exist in most places. Mass transit is often unreliable, uncomfortable, or not conveniently accessible. And even where it suits the needs of commuters, it is often not suitable for shopping. All this is true (though often exaggerated). Later I shall consider some of the social and psychological processes responsible for the poverty of choices we face, as well as some alternatives that might potentially be available. For now, though, I simply want to call attention to the difference between our image of the car in our lives (sometimes fulfilled on certain glorious days) and the reality of the daily commute that accounts for so many of our driving miles.^*

Tons of Cotton Candy

Compared to the automobile, the mixed blessings of most of the other products of our industrial cornucopia are more subtle. Most other products do not so dramatically dominate our lives. They seem not to have the negative equivalent of traffic jams, and they don’t pollute as obviously as the automobile does, where smoke comes out the exhaust as we use it.

Of course, our panoply of consumer items and the way of life associated with it are in fact responsible for a great deal of pollution—for emissions into the air from the factories that build the items and from the electric generating plants that later supply the energy to run many of them; for toxic chemicals spewed into the soil and water in the process of manufacturing; for environmental degradation associated with the disposal of plastics and the broader problem of waste disposal resulting from the hesitance to recycle which is part of our “consumer convenience” psychology. We are not really the “postindustrial” society we are sometimes made out to be. If we were, we wouldn’t have the kind of pollution problems we do. To be sure, we put a greater portion of our effort and income into services than previously. But we are still a people preoccupied with products, and the state of our lungs and livers clearly reflects this.

If we probe further, we find that the pollution properly attributable to any particular consumer item is not limited to that which results from its own manufacture, use, and disposal; it includes as well an effect on how we manufacture other items: By seeking to maximize goods rather than other amenities such as leisure or clean air, we are required to manufacture each item in the cheapest way—that is, the way that leaves the maximum amount of money available for other purchases. If we imposed stricter environmental protection laws and backed them up with stricter enforcement, this would indeed “cost” us something; the price of the items involved would go up, and less would be available to buy other things. In choosing to aim for a large number of these “other” things, we are also ipso facto manufacturing many basic items in a less pollution-free way than we otherwise might. The new computer gadget may be relatively nonpolluting, but—implicitly but powerfully—we permit the manufacturers of other things to dump more into the air, water, and soil in order to have the money left over to buy it. The larger the array of consumer goods we aim for—and there is inevitably an implicit societal decision in this regard even if most of the manufacturing and buying is done privately—the more pollution we are almost certain to permit in the manufacture of each.

But again, these are the tradeoffs we claim to be making rationally and boldly in the pursuit of pleasure. Whereas for automobiles alternatives can readily be imagined that are potentially more pleasant for many purposes,^* it is harder to make a similar case, based on clear experiential negatives, for stereo systems, video games, color TVs, boats, campers, air conditioners, and so on. There are no obvious equivalents of traffic jams here. These all seem to be rather pure plusses in experiential terms—leaving aside for the moment the effects of pollution, waste disposal, and the rest. To question them as real benefits, as something of genuine value to us, seems absurd at first.

But there is an odd phenomenon accompanying the accumulation of these goods. One might label it “the fallacy of the individual commodity.” Somehow, as we examine the experiential impact of all our acquisitions, we discover that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Each individual item seems to us to bring an increase in happiness or satisfaction. But the individual increments melt like cotton candy when you try to add them up. We are not any happier as a nation now than we were twenty-five years ago, despite having a good deal more of “the good things of life.” This is attested to in a number of ways.

For one thing, surveys taken at various times of people’s subjective sense of well-being do not show an increase over time corresponding to the increase in material possessions and comforts. Indeed, a higher proportion of Americans reported being “very happy” in 1957 than at any time in the next twenty years—despite a generally rising “standard of living” in the terms measured by economists.¹²

These findings for different time periods are paralleled by the results of a major cross-sectional study of happiness conducted a few years ago. Summarizing that portion of the study relevant to our present concerns, Jonathan Freedman notes that “once some minimal income is attained, the amount of money you have matters little in terms of bringing happiness. Above the poverty level, the relationship between income and happiness is remarkably small.”¹³ The reason why economic growth no longer brings a sense of greater well-being, why the pleasures our new possessions bring melt into thin air, is that at the level of affluence of the American middle class what really matters is not one’s material possessions but one’s psychological economy, one’s richness of human relations and freedom from the conflicts and constrictions that prevent us from enjoying what we have. Such a state of affairs is a consequence of affluence. In a Harlem tenement, or even more in a village in India, one might well expect improvements in the material basis of life to be strongly associated with improvements in feelings of well-being. But the middle class in the United States, Western Europe, and other industrialized nations constitutes what one might call an “asymptote culture,” a culture in which the contribution of material goods to life satisfaction has reached a point of diminishing returns.

Economists take such matters into account to some degree in their concept of “diminishing marginal utility.” Additional units of an item do not provide as much utility (pleasure, satisfaction, benefit) as do the initial units. Five thousands dollars extra a year does not mean as much to a millionaire as to a day laborer. A third or fourth or fifth helping of food is not the same as the bite we take when hungry.

But the economist’s reckoning of what this implies about policies and values tends to be rather different from that presented here. To most economists, evidence of satisfaction is in effect provided ipso facto by the act of purchasing. That consumers may behave irrationally, that their choices of what and whether to buy, or of whether to opt for goods or for leisure, may be far from optimal for them is not really considered. It is acknowledged that consumer autonomy and rationality are only approximations to reality, but the approximation is assumed to be sufficiently close to rely on. Moreover, it is held that to make judgments about whether consumers really make the right choices is morally and methodologically illegitimate.”^*

As a consequence, most economists do not fully appreciate the degree to which our pursuit of continuing economic growth is self-defeating. People’s responses to the peculiar properties of a society characterized by massive advertising and a competitive economic system are taken to be simple expressions of “human nature.” Lester Thurow, for example, argues that zero economic growth cannot make sense because “it does not jibe with human nature. Man is an acquisitive animal whose wants cannot be satiated.” He further asserts that this characteristic of people in our society “is not a matter of advertising and conditioning, but a basic fact of human existence. To try to straight jacket human beings into ‘small is beautiful’ is to impose enormous costs.”¹⁴

Consider in contrast the perspective provided by Kimon Valaskakis and his colleagues in the Canadian GAMMA group study of the “Conserver Society”:

If Americans were asked point blank whether they would agree to reduce their energy consumption by one-half, many would probably recoil in apprehension and reject the idea. Yet energy consumption in 1960 was about half what it is now. Most of us remember 1960. Surely we had a civilized country then, with roads, electricity, entertainment, and so on. Yet we were consuming only half the energy we are using now. Have we, by doubling our energy consumption, doubled our happiness?¹⁵

Most of us would not have to think very long before answering in the negative. But we might have more difficulty in understanding quite why this is the case. How is it that we seem to enjoy each of the new things we buy and yet when all is said and done these pleasures don’t add up to any greater sense of satisfaction?

The subjective sources of an answer to this puzzle are well captured in the following personal description by Jonathan Freedman, the author of the happiness study referred to above:

As a student, I lived on what now seems no money at all, but I lived in a style which seemed perfectly fine. My apartment seemed then (and in retrospect still seems) like a lovely apartment, though it was not luxurious. I ate out as often as I thought I wanted to. I do not remember denying myself anything because of money, though I suppose I did. When I got a job, my income more than doubled. My rent also just about doubled. I ate out about as often as before, but the restaurants were a little more expensive. I do not remember denying myself anything because of money, though I suppose I did. As my income has grown since then, I have spent more on apartments and on restaurants and on other things, but it has always seemed to be just about the same amount of money and bought just about the same things. The major change is that I have spent more on everything, and I consider buying more expensive items. None of this has had an appreciable effect on my life or on my feelings of happiness or satisfaction. I imagine that if I earned five times as much, the same would be true—at least it would once I got used to the extra money. This is not to say that I would turn down a raise—quite the contrary. But after a while everything would settle down, the extra money would no longer be “extra,” and my life would be the same as before.¹⁶

The point I wish to make is not that nothing makes a difference, that any change will leave our lives the same. It is that prevalent cultural assumptions and the nature of our economic system cause us to look in the wrong direction for a solution, to seek after changes that will not enhance our experience of richness in living rather than those that really can.