Here's a quiz from a recent PBS series about spending and materialism
called
Affluenza.
1. Which of the following is comparable to the size of a typical three-car
garage?
a. a basketball court b. a McDonald's restaurant c. an
"RV" (recreational vehicle) d. the average home in 1950.
Answer: d. Many of today's three-car garages occupy 900 square feet, just about the average size of an entire home in the 1950s. Many people use the extra garage space to store things they own and seldom use. Often we hear that Americans have lost ground economically and have less purchasing power. But Americans are buying more luxurious items, partly by working more and going deeply into debt. The homes they live in and the cars they drive today are often bigger and more technologically advanced than those purchased by their parents.
2. The percentage of Americans calling themselves "very happy" reached its highest point in what year? a. 1957 b. 1967 c. 1977 d. 1987
Answer: a. The number of "very happy" people peaked in 1957, and has remained fairly stable or declined ever since. Even though we consume twice as much as we did in the 1950s, people were just as happy when they had less.
3. How much of an average American's lifetime will be spent (on average) watching television commercials? a. 6 months b. 3 months c. 1 year d. 1.5 years
Answer: C. In contrast, Americans on average spend only 40 minutes a week playing with their children, and members of working couples talk with one another on average only 12 minutes a day.
4. True or false? Americans carry $1 billion in personal debt, not including real estate and mortgages.
Answer: False. Americans carry $1 trillion in personal debt, approximately $4,000 for every man, woman and child, not including real estate and mortgages. On average, Americans save only 4 percent of their income, in contrast to the Japanese, who save an average of 16 percent.
5. Which activity did more Americans do in 1996? a. graduate from college b. declare bankruptcy
Answer: b. In 1996, more than 1 million Americans declared bankruptcy, three times as many as in 1986. Americans have more than 1 billion credit cards, and less than one-third of credit card holders pay off their balances each month.
6. In the industrialized world, where is the U.S. ranked in terms of its income equality between the rich and the poor? (First being the most income-equal.) a. 1st b. 5th c. 12th d. 22nd
Answer: d. The income disparity between the rich and the poor is greatest in the U.S.
7. The world's 358 billionaires together possess as much money as the poorest _____ of the world's population? a. 15 percent b. 30 percent c. 50 percent d. 10 percent
Answer: c. Nearly 50 percent. The world's 358 billionaires' combined assets roughly equal the assets of the world's poorest 2.5 billion people.
8. Since 1950, Americans alone have used more of the earth's resources
than:
a. everyone who ever lived before them b. the combined
Third World populations
c. the Romans at the height of the Roman Empire d. all
of the above
Answer: All of the above. Since 1950, Americans alone have used more resources than everyone who ever lived before them. Each American individual uses up 20 tons of basic raw materials annually. Americans throw away 7 million cars a year, 2 million plastic bottles an hour and enough aluminum cans annually to make six thousand DC-10 airplanes.
9. Americans' total yearly waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks
long enough to:
a. wrap around the Earth six times b. reach half-way
to the moon
c. connect the North and South Poles d. build a bridge
between North America and China
Answer: a. and b. Even though Americans comprise only five percent of the world's population, in 1996 we used nearly a third of its resources and produced almost half of its hazardous waste. The average North American consumes five times as much as an average Mexican, 10 times as much as an average Chinese and 30 times as much as the average person in India.
10. Which president feared that untamed American capitalism might create
a corrupt civilization?
a. Jimmy Carter b. Ronald Reagan c. Theodore Roosevelt
d. Abraham Lincoln
Answer: c. President Theodore Roosevelt feared that allowing American capitalism to develop unleashed would eventually create a corrupt civilization. He was a strong proponent of simple living.
11. Which economic indicator counts pollution three times as a sign
of a growing economy?
a. the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) b. the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator)
Answer: a. The GDP counts pollution three times: first when it is made, second when it is cleaned up and third when health-care professionals treat pollution-related health problems. An organization called Redefining Progress developed an alternative economic progress measurement, the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator). GPI takes into account 24 aspects of economic life that the standard GDP (Gross Domestic Product) ignores. The GPI adds value for such activities as housework and volunteerism, and subtracts for the costs of such problems as crime, car accidents and family breakdown.
12. Of the Americans who voluntarily cut back their consumption, what percent said (in 1995) that they are happier as a result? a. 29 percent b. 42 percent c. 67 percent d. 86 percent
Answer: d. Eighty-six percent of Americans who voluntarily cut back their consumption feel happier as a result. Only 9 percent said they were less happy. In 1996, 5 percent of the "baby boom" generation reported practicing a strong form of voluntary simplicity. By the year 2000, some predict this number will rise to 15 percent.
How'd you do? This last question gets at a possible solution to what's ailing many families these days. Life at the end of the 20th century is confusing - It is increasingly the best of times ... the worst of times to quote Dickens. About 100 years ago, one of the first sociologists, Emile Durkheim, charged that modern society was afflicted with a social disease he defined as anomie, or normlessness. It is a notion that is similar to the spoiling of a child. Very simply, the more we get, the more we want; but it is more complicated. The idea is this. We begin life learning about what to expect. We come to count on these expectations and are disappointed when they aren't met. If our desires are satiated beyond our expectations, our appetites for these new rewards increase and so do our expectations, until we expect rewards beyond actual reason.
See if this sounds familiar. With increased prosperity desires increase. At the very moment when traditional rules have lost their authority, the richer prize offered these appetites stimulates them and makes them more exigent and impatient of control. The state of de-regulation or anomie is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. (Suicide (1987).
Merton (1951) further explained. To the degree that regularity disappears in a (person's circle of significant others), the individual is in a normless situation, no matter how firm and consistent normative regulation may be elsewhere in the society ... Few facts are so important in analyzing a society as those concerning the stability of normative patterns in the basic units of person-to-person interaction. thus, divorce, extremely high mobility, and other forms of small group dissolution provide clues to the total state of the social system. In day-to-day social life, what really matters most immediately to the individual is what he can count up-on from his network of personal relationships.
If we were to chart the general course of American Family Life from about 1920 to the present, we would find that access to material goods has increased steadily despite family financial ability to pay for them. Things have become ends in themselves since we have replaced personal involvement and emotional attachment with things. And social thinkers would have us believe that this is bad because there are limits to our ability to provide things.
Both parents working ultimately results in neither
parent parenting. The more we work, the more we purchase, the more we have
to maintain, the less time we have for personally handling the cognitive,
emotional, and social development of those other things in our lives -
children. Children born to such families are probably more likely to get
parenting from television (socialization, at any rate). Since the main
function of media is to sell us stuff (raise our interest in obtaining
things), it only takes a couple of generations of these urchins before
we just want stuff. What's the end result of all this?
Read the paper or watch the news.
Certainly people are caught up in what we used to call the rat race - trying to get ahead (of something), keeping up with the Joneses, looking out for number one. And we hardly ever ask ourselves why we are doing all this.
Voluntary Simplicity is an old solution with a few new wrinkles to modern problems of overwork and dissatisfaction. One of the new wrinkles is the presence of support groups and information services on the internet.
In addition to the PBS Show Affluenza, other media based "specials" are appearing in print media and their online counterpart websites: