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The Challenge of Affluence - Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Hardcover)
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The Challenge of Affluence - Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Hardcover)
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Since the 1940s Americans and Britons have come to enjoy an era of
rising material abundance. Yet this has been accompanied by a range
of social and personal disorders, including family breakdown,
addiction, mental instability, crime, obesity, inequality, economic
insecurity, and declining trust.
Avner Offer argues that well-being has lagged behind affluence in
these societies, because they present an environment in which
consistent choices are difficult to achieve over different time
ranges and in which the capacity for personal and social commitment
is undermined by the flow of novelty. His approach draws on
economics and social science, makes use of the latest cognitive
research, and provides a detailed and reasoned critique of modern
consumer society, especially the assumption that freedom of choice
necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.
The book falls into three parts. Part one analyses the ways in
which economic resources map on to human welfare, why choice is so
intractable, and how commitment to people and institutions is
sustained. It argues that choice is constrained by prior obligation
and reciprocity. The second section then applies these conceptual
arguments to comparative empirical studies of advertising, of
eating and obesity, and of the production and acquisition of
appliances and automobiles. Finally, in part three, Offer
investigates social and personal relations in the USA and Britain,
including inter-personal regard, the rewards and reversals of
status, the social and psychological costs of inequality, and the
challenges posed to heterosexual love and to parenthood by the rise
of affluence.
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