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TODAY Wednesday 18 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Wednesday 18 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Nostalgia
The big story on the first page of the business section of this morning's New York Times strikes right at the heart of the first baby boomers. There, in a big photograph, we see an edition of Life magazine from 1946, opened to a two-page spread entitled "Family Utopia." The Life layout depicts the American Dream: Dad, Mom, Junior, Sis; detached house with garage and yard; car; fridge, washer, dryer, dishwasher, TV with a screen the size of a manila envelope. This photo layout entices you to devour an excellent article by Louis Uchitelle, who explores the thesis that the late 1990s are re-creating the Golden Age of American prosperity from 1946 to 1973.
"These are the good old days," proclaims Fortune magazine in its current issue. Fortune has never met a market mechanism it doesn't like, but even the crustiest old social democrat has to admit that there is a lot of money coursing its way through American society these days and that -- at the very least -- an astonishingly large number of Americans live at a level of consumption that in 1946 was reserved for a small band of plutocrats. You look at Life's old dream world and you notice how quaint and underwhelming it looks to the '90s eye.
For one thing, what was then a Utopian dwelling has now become a starter cottage for hard-pressed young couples: the median square footage of a new house in 1946 was a little under 1500 square feet; these days the median is close to 3000. For the affluent manager class blessed by fortune (and Fortune), 3000 square feet would be a heartbreaking comedown from the fat gabled cubes which pass as luxury in the contemporary market. Spacious and numerous bathrooms; giant kitchens with granite-topped islands in their middle; and walk-in closets the size of Eau Claire.
And pity the '90s family with only one car in the driveway. We have evolved from a society that in 1946 averaged one automobile for every two households to a society that in 1997 averages one automobile per adult.
Uchitelle points out that, since 1973 at least, median family income has risen only a couple of thousand dollars, that most families now depend on two wage-earners, and that people are working many more hours per day with less job security and fewer benefits. And though medians are better than averages for depicting the great middle of American life, they don't adequately convey the growing disparity between the working poor and the working rich of today, a disparity much more dramatic than that of 1946, when the men who defeated Hitler and humbled Japan came home to an optimists' society of the GI Bill, home ownership, and an unprecedented sense of mobility, physical and social both. We have fulfilled their dreams -- many of us have -- and conjured new ones.
Are we having fun yet? Well, yes, some of us, in many ways, just as those old plutocrats had fun. It was Sophie Tucker who said that she'd been poor and she'd been rich and she liked being rich much better. We know money doesn't buy happiness, but we also know that we incur obligations in life that wear us down, wear us out, and that money -- the focus of so many of our anxieties -- can always come in ironically handy as the balm to soothe those anxieties. Show me the person who doesn't dream of winning the lottery.
But are the six-figure execs of today happier than the vets of 1946? You would think so to listen to the economists now trying to scare everybody about how the American standard of living would plummet if the country actually got serious about energy efficiency. Prosperity and energy use go hand in hand, they argue. In 1946 per capita energy consumption in this country was 25% of what it is today; the increase mostly comes from automobiles, bigger dwellings, and air conditioning. Are we four times more content?
Mind you, this is a question put by a straight white man from the middle class suburbs. My kind of human was supposed to do well under the old order, and even I experienced it as alternately comfortable and stifling. I'm explicitly glad about the changes in mores and strictures since 1946 that allow personal freedoms far greater expression than in the culture of the postwar years. And I am tacitly, guiltily, glad about the material prosperity which allowed for the broad exercise of many of those freedoms. But we may have literally changed the earth in the process, we and our new imitators all around the globe, and we did so before we had a chance to make an honest inventory of what we had before.
TODAY ON THE SITE
A new issue of our free newsletter -- The Grove -- has just hit the racks at the cyber news kiosk. Donella Meadows; inside stories; previews of good stuff to come. Subscribe now or send us a note explaining why not.
6/17: Air War
6/16: Pray for Swelter
6/13: Treating Soil like Dirt
6/12: Cheap Oil and Bargain Cars
6/11: More Taxes
6/10: Clean Air, Hot Air
6/09: Swimming
6/06: Enviros and Transpo
6/05: Fabulous Ethanol
6/04: Swine and Federalism
6/03: A New Measure
6/02: My Front Yard
5/30: Funders
5/29: Quantification
5/28: Over the Top
5/27: Solar Hippies
5/23: Spiffy Cars, Clunker Bikes
5/22: Petroleum Heresy
5/21: We Irish
5/20: Shallow Backpackers
5/19: Songbirds
5/16: Fat, Fat, Fat
5/15: Our Forthright Administration
5/14: Coral Reefs of the Sahara
5/13: (Life Before) Death and Taxes
5/12: Kids
5/09: Free Trade and Hormones
5/08: Sherry Boehlert, Republican
5/07: Fort Davis, West Texas
5/06: Europe (yawn)
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway
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