The End of Excess
“Don’t pretend we didn’t see this coming for a long, long time,” Kurt Andersen wrote in his long, long but otherwise excellent essay in Time Magazine last week.
If you want to see just how long we’ve been talking about this, take a look at the original Captive American, published in 1988. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
Andersen begins with a telling collection of historical facts:
From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the ’80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35 percent. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11 percent of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1 percent.
What we are talking about here, of course, is the flourishing of a gilded age established by a generation who had never known the sacrifices of the Great Depression or of World War II, and thus had no reason to believe the good times would ever end. And as Andersen writes, “we started living large literally as well as figuratively”:
From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new house increased by half. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least 20 lb. heavier than the same age back then. In the late ’70s, 15 percent of Americans were obese; now a third are.
This Age of Excess, however, has wider reaching consequences than our heaving bellies and bosoms. Don’t forget the dangerous fatness above our shoulders, in our soft, mushy brains. We can only hope this crash wakes people up. Andersen’s essay echoes so many points in our
conclusion, but more than anything else, we, too, see the current crisis as an opportunity:
- An opportunity to move beyond the paralysis of our two-party system
- An opportunity to renew our nation’s relationship with the rest of the world, and to rethink its role, as Andersen writes, as “still an exceptional country, absolutely, but not a magical one exempt from the laws of economic and geopolitical gravity.”
- And an opportunity to shed our national sense of entitlement and return to a culture that values community and self-sacrifice.
As Andersen puts it:
…way too many of us were operating, consciously or not, with a dreamy gold-rush vision of getting rich the day after tomorrow and then cruising along as members of an impossibly large leisure class. ….Now that our age of self-enchantment has ended, however, each of us, gobsmacked and reality-checked by the new circumstances, is recalibrating expectations for the timing and scale of our particular version of the Good Life.
For too long, we’ve used short-term fixes to try to prevent disaster. But those short terms fixes have only delayed, and worsened, the inevitable.
Perhaps we need to taste hardship now the same way forests need occasional conflagrations. Perhaps these challenges will burn through our selfishness and complacency and allow the seeds of new ideas and a renewed civic spirit to open up and grow.
April 7, 2009
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