by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
Sure, all workers would have to learn to live with less—not a bad idea anyway— but no one would be tossed to the wolves. And we predict that everyone would soon love the time off. On the other hand, if we don’t make such plans and millions suddenly face unemployment, then all other negative social indicators—crime, family breakdowns, suicide, depression, and so forth—can be expected to skyrocket again. Remember, you read it here.
RETIRING STEP BY STEP
There are other ways of exchanging money for time. Many academics receive sabbaticals, anything from three months to a year off every several years, usually accepting a reduced salary during the period. Why not a system of sabbaticals every seven to ten years for all workers who desire them and are willing to take moderate salary reductions when they are on sabbatical? We all need to recharge our batteries every so often.
Or how about a system of graduated retirement? For many of us, self-esteem takes a hit and boredom a bounce when we suddenly go from forty-hour weeks to zero upon retiring. Instead, we could design a pension and social security system that would allow us to retire gradually. Let’s say that at fifty we cut 300 hours from our work year—nearly eight workweeks. Then at fifty-five we cut 300 more. At sixty, 300 more. And at sixty-five, 300 more. Now, we’re down to 800 (given no change in the present annual pattern). We might then have the option to stop paid labor entirely, or to keep working 800 hours for as long as we are capable.
What this would do is allow us to begin learning to appreciate leisure, volunteer more, and broaden our minds long before final retirement. It would allow more young workers to find positions and allow older workers to stay on longer to mentor them. It would allow older workers to both stay involved with their careers and also find time for more balance in their lives.
A variation on this idea that also has merit is to allow workers to take some of their “early retirement” at different stages of their careers, perhaps when they need more parenting time, for example. The ultimate idea, promoted in some European countries, is that a certain number of hours would constitute a total paid work life, with considerable flexibility around when the hours are worked.
REMOVING THE BIG OBSTACLE TO WORK SHARING
Of course, one additional public policy change would help make work sharing possible. It is single-payer health care, which would relieve the cost of health care provision for American employers. Because health care is so expensive, businesses find it more cost-effective to hire fewer workers and work them longer than pay benefits for more employees. The cost of employer-financed health care is the single most important factor in reducing the international competitiveness of American firms.
With a single-payer system, Canada manages to cover all its citizens at a total cost per person that is far less than what we spend in the United States. And despite criticisms of the Canadian system by American politicians, Canadians are healthier and live longer than Americans. And Canadians are so fond of their health care system that a nationwide poll to determine “the greatest Canadian of all time,” done by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, ended up bestowing the honor on Tommy Douglas. Douglas, the late Socialist premier of Saskatchewan, was chosen, according to those who voted for him, because he was the father of the Canadian health care system (he was also the grandfather of American actor Kiefer Sutherland, but that probably didn’t affect the polling a whole lot).
In any case, many Americans now work much longer than is healthy just to keep their health benefits, a problem that a public single-payer system would solve.
TAXES
In one sense, the 2000 and 2004 elections were about taxes. Gore and Kerry wanted to tax Americans less, and Bush wanted to tax them even less than Gore and Kerry did. What was missing was a discussion about the kinds of taxes and what they might do.
But a change in the tax system, similar to one already under way in parts of Europe, could considerably help contain affluenza. The first step toward a change could come through an idea called the progressive consumption tax. Proposed by economist Robert Frank in his book Luxury Fever, the tax would replace the personal income tax. Instead, people would be taxed on what they consumed, at a rate rising from 20 percent (on annual spending under $40,000) to 70 percent (on annual spending over $500,000). Basically the idea is to tax those with the most serious cases of “luxury fever” (which seems to be Frank’s synonym for affluenza) at the highest rates, thus encouraging saving instead of spending.
At the same time, we must make it possible for lower-income Americans to meet their basic needs without working several jobs. The old Catholic idea of a family, or living wage, championed by Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, could be accomplished by a negative income tax or tax credits that guarantee all citizens a simple but sufficient standard of living above the poverty line.
Equally promising are so-called green taxes. Their proponents would replace a portion of taxes on “goods” such as income—and payroll taxes, which discourage increased employment—with taxes on “bads” such as pollution or waste of nonrenewable resources. The point would be to make the market reflect the true costs of our purchases. We’d pay much more to drive a gas guzzler, for example, and a little more for this book (to cover the true costs of paper), but no more for a music lesson or theater ticket.
Additional carbon taxes would discourage the burning of fossil fuels. Pollution taxes would discourage the contamination of water and air. The costs of cleaning up pollution would be added as a tax on goods whose production causes it. Such a tax could make organic foods as cheap as pesticide-laced produce. Depletion taxes would increase the price of nonrenewable resources and lower the comparative price of goods made to last.
While such a green tax system would be complicated, it could go a long way toward discouraging environmentally or socially harmful consumption, while encouraging benign alternatives. As things stand, we more often subsidize what we should be taxing—extractive industries like mining ($2.6 billion in subsidies a year), and air and auto travel. We could, and should, turn that around, subsidizing clean technologies and activities (see chapter 25) like wind and solar power or organic family farms instead of oil and agribusiness. One excellent idea for doing so is the New Apollo Initiative (see www.apolloalliance.org).
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
Another way to reduce the impact of consumption is to require that corporations take full responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products, an idea gaining widespread acceptance in Europe. The concept is simple and well explained in the book Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins. In effect, companies would no longer sell us products but lease them. Then, when the products reach the end of their useful lives, the same companies would take them back to reuse and recycle them, saving precious resources.
This cradle-to-grave idea is winning considerable corporate support already, with leadership from Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Corporation, an industrial carpet company, and from businesses that have joined the Natural Step movement, agreeing to full life-cycle responsibility for their products. The Natural Step movement seems to be spreading rapidly in Europe and is also gaining adherents, including the governors of several states, in the United States. If companies take such full responsibility, they will have to include the attendant costs in the price of their goods.
GOING DUTCH
Such responsibility will be made law by 2006 in the European Union, for automobile companies at least. But with so many companies and so many products traveling all over the world, a Dutch law may provide a more effective solution. In the Netherlands, car buyers pay an additional “disassembly tax” when they buy their vehicle. When the car reaches the end of its useful life, they take it to an auto disassembly plant, where it is carefully stripped of anything that can still be used. Then only the metal shell is crushed and recycled (in the United States everything— wires, plastic, and so forth—just gets crushed, and a large percentage is simply lost as waste). By 2001, the
Dutch plants were taking 90 percent of all end-of-life vehicles and recyling 86 percent of the materials from them.
The plants, which are cheap and low-tech, employ many workers and take any cars. The disassembly tax is part of the Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan (or “Green Plan") and is being extended to include many other consumer goods.5
STOPPING CHILD ABUSE
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has called the recent upsurge in marketing targeting children a form of “corporate child abuse.” It’s as if marketers have set out knowingly to infect our children with affluenza by spreading the virus everywhere kids congregate. It’s time to protect our kids. At a minimum, we can keep commercialism out of our schools, starting with Channel One. The fight against Channel One unites Left and Right—Nader and Phyllis Schlafly both testified in Congress against it—and offers a place to begin building bridges in a country increasingly torn apart by ideology.
Second, we can begin to restrict television advertising targeted to children. Already, places such as Sweden and the Canadian province of Quebec don’t allow it. If you’re a parent, you probably long for relief from TV advertising’s manipulation of your kids. Moreover, a stiff tax on all advertising would send a strong message to corporate America that curbing the spread of affluenza is serious business.
CAMPAIGN-FINANCE REFORM
There are, of course, dozens of other good anti-affluenza legislative ideas, but none will come to fruition as long as those who profit most from affluenza pull the strings in our political system. The sheer cost of elections—a single New Jersey Senate race in 2000 resulted in $100 million in spending—leaves candidates beholden to those who pay, and those who pay are those that have and want to keep.
So the first anti-affluenza legislation has to be campaign-finance reform, taking the PACs out of politics and offering competing candidates equal media time to present their ideas, but no time for clever, yet meaningless thirty-second commercials. Former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower has it right. “The water won’t clear up,” he says, “until you get the hogs out of the creek.”6
THE POLITICS OF WELL-BEING
An exciting development along the lines we’ll be taking is now happening in the United Kingdom, where Labour Party economists and ordinary citizens of different political persuasions are working to create a “Politics of Well-Being.” Based in part on the ideas of eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that the goal of government was to seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, the new politics is centered on creating tax and other policies that give people more time and support for important nonmaterial sources of happiness, such as friendships, family, and good health. These ideas are well explored in the books Happiness, by Richard Layard, and Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives, by Madeleine Bunting. Many of the examples in the books are British, but wholly appropriate to the situation in the United States. The new movement in the UK also has an excellent Web site (www.neweconomics.org) and a stirring manifesto.
BUT WON’T OUR ECONOMY COLLAPSE?
What if Americans started buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, driving them less and keeping them longer? What if we took fewer long-distance vacations? What if we simplified our lives, spent less money, bought less stuff, worked less, and enjoyed more leisure time? What if government began to reward thrift and punish waste, legislated shorter work hours, and taxed advertisers? What if we made consumers and corporations pay the real costs of their products? What would happen to our economy? Would it collapse, as some economists suggest?
Truthfully, we don’t know exactly, since no major industrial nation has yet embarked on such a journey. But there’s plenty of reason to suspect that the road will be passable, if bumpy, at first, and smoother later. If we continue on the current freeway, however, we’ll find out that it ends like Oakland’s Interstate 880 during the 1989 earthquake—impassable and in ruins.
Surely we can’t deny that if every American took up voluntary simplicity tomorrow, massive economic disruption would result. But that won’t happen. A shift away from affluenza, if we’re lucky enough to witness one, will come gradually, over a generation perhaps. Economic growth, as measured by the gross domestic product, will slow down and might even become negative.
But as Juliet Schor points out, there are many European countries (including Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) whose economies have grown far more slowly than ours, yet whose quality of life—measured by many of the indicators we say we want, including free time, citizen participation, lower crime, greater job security, income equality, health, and overall life contentment—is higher than our own. Such economies show no sign of collapse. Indeed, their savings rates are high, their deficits are low, and their currencies, especially the euro, are increasing in value while the dollar plummets. Their emphasis on balancing growth with sustainability is widely accepted across the political spectrum. As former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers, a conservative, put it:
It is true that the Dutch are not aiming to maximize gross national product per capita. Rather, we are seeking to attain a high quality of life, a just, participatory and sustainable society. While the Dutch economy is very efficient per working hour, the number of working hours per citizen are rather limited. We like it that way. Needless to say, there is more room for all those important aspects of our lives that are not part of our jobs, for which we are not paid and for which there is never enough time.7
TIME FOR AN ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
If anti-affluenza legislation leads to slower rates of economic growth or a “steady state” economy that does not grow at all, so be it. (As we argue in the next chapter, growth of GDP is a poor measure of social health anyway.) Beating the affluenza bug will also lead to less stress, more leisure time, better health, and longer lives. It will offer more time for family, friends, and community. And it will lead to less traffic, less road rage, less noise, less pollution, and a kinder, gentler, more meaningful way of life.
In a ’60s TV commercial, an actor claims that Kool cigarettes are “as cool and clean as a breath of fresh air.” We watch that commercial today and can’t keep a straight face, but when it first aired, nobody laughed. Since that time, we’ve come to understand that cigarettes are silent killers. We’ve banned TV ads for them. We tax them severely, limit smoking areas, and seek to make tobacco companies pay the full costs of the damage cigarettes cause. We once thought them sexy, but today most of us think they’re gross.
Where smoking is concerned, our attitudes have certainly changed. Now, with growing evidence that affluenza is also hazardous, it’s surely time for another attitude adjustment.
CHAPTER 29
Annual Check-ups
The gross national product includes air pollution
and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to
clear our highways of carnage. It counts special
locks for our doors, and jails for the people who
break them. . . . It does not allow for the health of
our families, the quality of their education, or the
joy of their play.
—ROBERT KENNEDY, 1968
A patient in remission from cancer requires routine check-ups to evaluate how things are going. It’s the same with affluenza. Once we’re on the road to recovery, annual check-ups help prevent costly, energy-sapping relapses. Lingering germs like debt, susceptibility to advertising, and possession obsession can cause recurrences not only in individuals, but communities and national economies as well. Check-ups help track these germs down where they hide, and wipe ’em out!
We argue here that quantitative indicators such as return on investment, tax revenues, and GDP can’t tell us everything we need to know about our health. We present alternative indicators that give a more holistic picture: personal consumption audits, community indicators, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), and even a Fever Index, to be tracked by the authors and publisher of th
is book and reported annually to the press.
IS OUR TEMPERATURE RISING?
The Fever Index includes ten key variables that indicate whether affluenza is getting better or worse in the United States each year:
1. The Guzzle Gauge measures fossil-fuel consumption per capita.
2. Wiggle Room measures the average size of new homes.
3. The Bull Sheet tracks expenditures per capita for advertising.
4. The Fat Cat Factor reveals the amount of income earned by the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of the population.
5. The Waste Line measures the volume of obsolete electronic products that are thrown away (not recycled).
6. The Clock Market reports on the average amount of vacation time, sick leave, and family or maternity leave provided by employers.
7. The Waist Line divulges the average amount of obesity.
8. Wing Nut Weight is the number of miles traveled in airplanes every year.
9. The Debit Sheet tallies the amount of consumer debt per capita.
10. The Care Share measures per capita contributions to charity and other tax-deductible giving.
In 2005, our national temperature is hovering at 101 degrees, the level at which students are requested to stay home from school. Each year, if one of the ten factors above gets worse, the temperature will rise 0.2 degrees. But if improvement is shown for a factor, the temperature will fall by 0.2 degrees.
Recovery from affluenza is not a simple matter, but it CAN be beaten!
ENOUGH?
Too often, life’s complexities get boiled down to a single, nagging question: “Do we have enough money?" Vicki Robin, the coauthor of Your Money or Your Life, believes this question is far too narrow. Pointing out that money is really what we trade our life energy for, she asks,
