In the Oxford University Press Economics catalogue I found Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence. His opening sentence: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’ Offer ‘critiques’ the ‘assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.’ Here is OUP’s blurb for the book:
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.
Consistent choices are difficult to achieve, eh? Freedom of choice does not maximise individual and social well-being, eh? The entire conceptual basis of the last two hundred years of this ‘science’ of economics turns out to be faulty, eh?
Economics is a blessed naivety. It is as though Aquinas and a long tradition of Christian political and ethical thought had never been, as though before utilitarianism and the marginal revolution there was… just nothing at all. Social scientists are people without memory or historical awareness. I thought I would share my amazement with you.
I am so sure that Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence is well worth a read that I have put it on my Amazon wish list. (But remember, this is just a wish list, and the self control that keeps my wishes just wishes makes me at least as happy as acquisition of these titles).
