Thrift was so important to Samuel Smiles, the great 19th-century Scottish self-help guru, that in 1875 he published an entire book devoted to it. Smiles’s Thrift was a sequel to his earlier bestseller, Self-Help, which appeared in the landmark literary year of 1859 (when readers first encountered John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species).
[…]How did we get here? The transformation of thrift from a virtue into something verging on a social disorder occurred sometime between the 1880s and 1920s, when America transformed itself from a nation of want into one of, well, wants. Unbridled economic growth (fueled by decades of self-restraint and invested savings) undermined the Protestant ethos of self-denial and reticence, while the rising merchant class did its best to change the country’s long-ingrained aversion to luxury. Consumer credit became more widely available, and religious denominations laid off the hellfire and brimstone in favor of a therapeutic approach to happiness in the present. Vast new big-city “department stores” leveled the full force of their merchandising grandeur at women, who understandably preferred to purchase items they had once laboriously made. Catalyzed by mass communications (which made possible the stimulation of mass desire through advertising) and the rise of an urbanized middle class, consumerism exploded.
The loud noise caught the attention of two important social theorists, one of them famous and the other largely forgotten. It’s yet another irony in the saga of America’s love/hate relationship with thrift that we live by the precepts of the thinker whose name hardly anyone remembers.
First, the one you know about. Thorstein Veblen, the peripatetic Norwegian-American economist (he died in 1929, shortly before the great crash that might have brought him grim satisfaction), is best known today for his theory of conspicuous consumption, which argued that a lot of spending is just a wasteful attempt to impress. In effect, Veblen explained consumerism in terms of status and display, bringing evolutionary ideas to bear on economics and consumer behavior to powerful effect. Reading Veblen is a little like reading Freud or Darwin, albeit on a smaller scale: Do so and you’ll never look at the world in quite the same way again.
As you might imagine, the iconoclastic Veblen took a dim view of all the conspicuous consumption around him, regarding it as a species of giant potlatch in which competitive waste had run amok. You might call Veblen’s the voice of thrift, and it is still heard today from leftist intellectuals who, from their tenured pulpits and Arts and Crafts homes, reliably denounce the spending of others.
[…]But there was another voice heard back when thrift was in its death throes—that of Simon Patten (1852–1922), like Veblen a maladjusted economist who had strong ideas about spending. Patten can seem naive and even crass to us today, for he used his pulpit at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to advocate the very thing that Marx feared: that business and consumer spending should sweep away all the old arrangements and remake the world according to the doctrine of plenty. And he imagined a large role for economists in the running of it.
Unlike Veblen, Patten came on the scene not to praise thrift but to bury it. The old values that “inculcated a spirit of resignation” and “emphasized the repression of wants” must be abandoned, Patten argued, adding, “The principle of sacrifice continues to be exalted by moralists at the very time when the social structure is being changed by the slow submergence of the primeval world, and the appearance of a land of unmeasured resources with a hoard of mobilized wealth.”
Patten was hugely influential in his time, especially in helping liberals to see that something like Adam Smith’s “universal opulence” should be a goal and not a cause for shame. His genius was in recognizing capitalism’s potential for realizing something like a modern Cockaigne, the mythical land of plenty that beguiled the suffering masses in the Middle Ages. Patten’s thinking opened the door to such later fulfillment-oriented intellectuals as Abraham Maslow and Herbert Marcuse, who implicitly (or explicitly) disparaged the idea of deferring gratification—a notion that would come to seem as pointlessly self-sacrificial as postponing happiness until the afterlife.
In important ways Patten and Veblen were both right about consumerism, but of the two Patten was the true radical. Beside his starry-eyed utopianism Veblen’s sour conservatism is plain to see. As things turned out, it’s Patten’s world we live in, even if we use the language of Veblen to understand it.
[…]…modern America has effectively banished thrift by foisting on the world those four horsemen of the financial apocalypse: the automobile, the television, the credit card, and the shopping cart. Besides costing money to buy and operate, cars opened up the landscape so that more Americans could have bigger houses on bigger lots. To fill them up, people enjoyed the dubious guidance of television, which helped them figure out what they should want. Credit cards enabled us to conjure money on the spot to pay for stuff. And the shopping cart, unthinkable in traditional department stores but indispensable in their demotic successors—Wal-Mart and Target—gave Americans a way to get all that booty out to the automobile, which they could use to drive it home.
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Summer2009)
Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Life & Society
