Finding Our Way Out of the Mall
Juliet B. Schor's The Overspent American
John R. Muether
October 1, 1998
The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, by Juliet B. Schor (Basic Books, 1998), 253 pp. Here's a news flash: a Harvard economist claims that Americans define their lives by what they spend. "See—want—borrow—buy" has become the liturgy of our culture. We have created markets for products that were unimaginable a generation ago, like gourmet coffee, bottled water, and designer underwear. Early in her book, Professor Schor anticipates her readers' reaction to these findings: "Didn't we know this already?" Christians might be especially tempted to pose that question, the Tenth Commandment and St. Paul's warning against the love of money both being of considerable antiquity. Yet this lively counterpart to the author's previous study, The Overworked American (1991), makes a compelling argument that we didn't know this already. We are participating in a new and more virulent form of consumerism, precisely because we aren't keeping up with the Joneses. We no longer know the folks next door and their spending habits, so we have stopped competing with them. In the absence of neighbors, we create new folks next door—they just happen to be on screen. The characters on prime-time television, invariably upper middle class, have become our imaginary neighbors, and it's they—not commercials—who drive our consumer choices. "TV inflates our sense of what's normal," writes Schor. In one survey group she discovered that every hour of television viewed per week raised consumption an additional $208 per year. Another sobering feature of the new consumerism is its link to education. Contrary to what we would like to think, education does not produce savvy shoppers. Instead, the higher one's level of education, the less ...
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