Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  We try to buy real wealth with money, often unsuccessfully. There’s no price tag for some of life’s most essential values; for example, an abundance of memorable moments completely free of stress. Real wealth is the calmness and contentedness that comes with feeling good, physically; the sense of well being that makes anything seem like an event. Real wealth is finding the rhythm of natural cycles, and jumping in. It’s understanding how the world works and substituting information and brilliant design for resources.

  Consider the bonds between people—what some call “social capital.” This kind of wealth never runs out; in fact, the more we spend, the more we have! Similarly, the stocks of natural capital are the best investment we can make because they are based on the most reliable source of income—the sun. If nature is rich on a continuing basis, we don’t have to be. Many other assets are also self-perpetuating, like curiosity, which stimulates more curiosity. When we’re surfing the Web or completing a master’s degree in a field we love, curiosity pulls us along like a large puppy on a leash. Similarly, the more creativity and inspiration we spend, the more we seem to generate; one developing skill often leads to another; cultural traditions constantly build on and perfect themselves. Sexual desire keeps coming back, delivering “interest” that has nothing to do with corporate profits. And democracy is an empowering, self-fulfilling prophecy, a source of real wealth, if we just join in.

  When we choose real wealth, we can have things like healthy, great-tasting food; exciting hobbies and adventures; work that challenges and stimulates us; and spiritual connection with a universe that’s so much larger than we are. Instead of more stuff in our already-stuffed lives, we can have fewer things of higher quality; fewer visits to the doctor and more visits to museums and to see neighbors. More joyful intimacy, more restful sleep, and more brilliantly sunny mornings in campsites on the beach—bacon and eggs sizzling in the skillet and coffee brewing in the pot. Greater use of our hands and minds in creative activities like playing a flute, knitting a sweater, building a table, or harvesting the season’s first juicy, heirloom tomato. These are the things that matter, and we can choose them, if we spend less time, money, and energy being such conscientious consumers.

  How many people do you know who convey the message, “I am enough. I have enough. I’m content.” When people reach this stage of self-acceptance, they often make very poor consumers, because if they are enough they may not need or want more. I believe this is where America’s collective psyche gets scrambled; too few of us feel that we’re good enough; that life is intrinsically abundant. However, in this group therapy session called America, many do move beyond personal doubts and insecurities by being less absorbed in their own fortunes and more involved with the real wealth of the world.

  Imagine how much lighter we’ll feel if we work together to meet the huge challenges that lie ahead. Why carry mountains of stuff when our needs can be met more precisely with great design, ingenious efficiency, and a few basic changes in our priorities? Why settle for confusion when we’re well equipped with human strengths like community, creativity, and compassion? Why permit our minds to be filled with useless static when clarity and purpose feel so much better?

  The new, emerging lifestyle described here is not about guilt, shame, judgment, or sacrifice—it’s about a strategic, enlightened reduction in our use of resources, and a corresponding, deliberate increase in efficiency, quality, care giving, trust, and teamwork. Using tools like these, it’s quite possible for each American to gracefully reduce her or his resource consumption by half, along with all the stress, anger, and dysfunction that often go with it. This book offers many ideas for how to do that, showing that by reducing our reliance on energy hogs like aluminum cans, airplane travel, feedlot meat, and suburbs-without-stores, we can each reduce our “ecological footprints.” By meeting basic physical and psychological needs better we can and will make the transition to a lifestyle that feels more comfortable in the present and does not clear-cut the future. As a special bonus, we can also ensure that the planet we call home does not ultimately resemble a fried egg, sunny-side up.

  While the material in this book is mostly very good news—how we can make a few fundamental changes to live life rather than trying to buy it— we can’t just ignore the not-so-good news if we want to permanently rid the world of the affluenza virus. As I organized the book, it didn’t make sense to put that not-so-good news at the end, so it’s up front with the findings, forecasts, and suggestions of dozens of biologists, psychologists, economists, geologists (and unicyclists). Together, we conclude that continuing to consume excessively as a way of life is neither desirable nor possible. The epidemic has nearly depleted our resources as well as stripped away our resolve and passion. It’s time to create a more moderate, more enjoyable, less frantic American lifestyle.

  How to Prepare a More Delicious Lifestyle

  Ingredients:

  Flexibility, foresight, instinct for happiness, self-knowledge, pride, quality, equality, connection, health, vitality, sensuality, natural abundance, useful skills, durability, purposeful work, passionate play, exploration, adventure, experience, delight, efficiency, precision, sufficiency, appropriate scale, information, knowledge, ingenuity, curiosity, design, compassion, respect, grace, gratitude, hindsight, cooperation, community, generosity, aesthetic brilliance, democracy, courage, vision, tradition, moderation, trust, loyalty, wisdom, spirituality, grace, humility, mutuality, contentment.

  Instructions:

  Mix ingredients together in the workplace, political arena, home, neighborhood, media, marketplace, and natural world to create cultural prosperity. Don’t overcook!

  1

  Taking Stock

  How Foresight Can Cut Our Losses

  Currently, more money is being spent on breast implants and Viagra than on Alzheimer’s research. So in the very near future there should be a large elderly population with impressive breasts and magnificent erections, but no recollection of what to do with them.

  —Sally Feldman

  We’ve been born into a cult that has made a god of numbers. We worship rankings, quantities, statistics, profit margins, and polls … We want to know first, last, biggest, best, most, least, latest, and how much the baby weighs. We’ve mapped the genome. We’ve captured the quark. By God or by Newton we will know.

  —Marilyn Ferguson

  It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

  —Albert Einstein

  We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.

  —Al Gore

  I have an embarrassing confession to make, right up front: I’m not a “confident consumer.” This morning’s New York Times may report that consumer confidence has risen to its highest level in more than three years, but as I begin writing this first chapter, I’m not any more confident than I was back then that our mainstream lifestyle can take us where we need to go. I’m confident enough in general, I guess, but I’m very uncomfortable being labeled a “consumer.” We’re far more than consumers, aren’t we? We’re a brilliant species that creates human-scaled tools and art, works cooperatively, takes care of natural assets, and uses its awesome brainpower to solve both small and large challenges. But we aren’t giving ourselves the time, permission, or focus to do these things well.

  What’s up? We aren’t eating like humans who need energy and vitality to feel great. We’re not taking care of the children the way humans have always done. We’re not designing products that last. And we’re overriding many of our most tried and tested instincts, taking direction mostly from the relatively “new,” rational side of the human brain that creates assembly lines, profit-and-loss statements, and missiles. We’re suppressing the more playful, empathetic, and intuitive side, missing great opportunities for fun and fulfillment.

  I have a proposal. Rather than settle for
a passive/aggressive, dysfunctional American Dream, let’s just recycle it. The people who track “consumer confidence” have their metrics on backward, in my humble opinion. Overconsumption is clearly a fundamental problem, not solution, in the maintenance of a healthy economy and planet. I believe it’s not just oil production that’s about to peak, but also human satisfaction. If we picture our position on a graph called “The Benefits of Consumption,” it appears we’re on a slope of diminishing returns. We’re consuming more now but enjoying it less, to paraphrase an old cigarette commercial.

  Here are what I consider to be the two most critical economic screw-ups: First, our economy is out of alignment with the values that make us feel grateful to be alive. Values such as health, relationships with people, connection with nature, satisfying work, a sense of purpose, abundance of personal time, and freedom of expression are the real wealth, far more valuable than money and mountains of manufactured stuff. If we obtain these values directly, without money as a constant, meddling middleman, we don’t need as much money, and we don’t need to tear things apart to get it. The whole industrial metabolism of civilization—what some call “throughput”—can slow down to match the rhythms of nature.

  Second, although we’re trained to think of the environment as a subset of the economy, when we think about it, we see it’s just the opposite. Everything is inside the environment. The economy is really just an opportunistic system of ideas and rules we made up, but the environment is reality itself—a wonderful place for our homes, farms, schools, and businesses to locate—as long as we’re trustworthy tenants. But without a more grounded, respectful ethic, we’ll never get back our damage deposit. In this era of overconsumption, production is allowed to be careless, and, as a result, the faster we produce and consume, the faster natural and cultural assets get trashed. For example, of the roughly five thousand languages now spoken in the world, fewer than 20 percent will still be spoken by the year 2100. The disappearing languages, though rich in tradition, ties to the land, and loyalties to people, simply don’t translate in the global economy.1

  It’s important to remember that the economy was invented when world population was ten times smaller but the planet seemed infinitely large and filled to the brim with resources. It seemed foolish not to produce and consume all we wanted, especially since this seemed to liberate the downtrodden individual. But in the guardian economy now being born—that acknowledges how small the world really is and how fragile its web of life—only the interest provided by nature will be consumed, never the principle. In the new “mindful money” lifestyle, there will be more sensible boundaries and constraints, just as there is when an architect begins to design a house on a new site. The lot is only so big, with a certain type of soil, certain solar exposure, and so on. We can be as creative as we want within sustainable parameters, but the limits of the Earth are as tangible and finite as the characteristics of a building lot.

  Changing just one idea can change the whole world: the accumulation of money and consumption of manufactured stuff is not why we’re here. There are other ways to meet human needs, many of which are not currently being met. When we change the way we think about value, the world will begin to regenerate, almost overnight. We’re ready! One piece of evidence is that, according to the World Values Survey, a near majority of Americans (61 percent) believe that protecting the environment should be a higher priority than economic growth; that we should prevent the natural world from coming unraveled even if that were to mean some loss of jobs and a slower-growing economy. The good news is, saving our civilization from collapse will create jobs and help the economy, which can’t flourish in a battered, depleted environment.

  Cutting Our Losses and Reinventing the Economy

  In the book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, my coauthors and I observe that people in the money-obsessed societies of the world—especially the United Sates—are victims of a disease with crippling impacts on individuals, families, communities, cultural traditions, and the environment. It leaves people feeling disoriented and disconnected—ideal consumer traits from a business perspective! We point out that affluenza is far from being a disease of the rich; the compulsion to purchase and possess happiness has now infected all economic sectors in most countries of the world. Consumer researcher Van Kempen saw farmers in Mali wearing digital watches without batteries, and Tibetan nomads who proudly display their cell phones even though there’s no reception. And it’s the same in American low-income neighborhoods, where iPods, high-end running shoes, and leased or illicit Porsches are frequently on display. In a full 98 percent of American homes, at least one color TV beams thousands of behavior-defining commercial messages into occupants’ jingle-filled brains every week.

  Isn’t this barrage of media a primary reason why so many people can readily identify one hundred commercial logos but fewer than ten plants? In a recent poll, average Americans were asked to name three Supreme Court Justices, and while only 17 percent could do that, 59 percent knew the names of the Three Stooges. This is America, where we spend more on garbage bags than ninety of the world’s countries spend on everything. Where, in 2005, more than two million filed for bankruptcy yet 13 percent of all homes purchased were second or even third homes. As Homer Simpson observed in an episode of The Simpsons, animals at the zoo are “bored, obese, and have lost their sense of meaning. The American Dream.”

  Many of the symptoms we reported in Affluenza have gotten worse since the revised edition came out in 2005. The world is in effect spinning even faster; the global economy is heating up the new millennium with activities that are often inefficient, unjust, and unnecessary. Americans now fly 750 billion miles every year (an average of 2,200 miles per person, up from 650 in 1970). Even more astonishing, we collectively drive the equivalent of a billion times around the planet’s 25,000-mile circumference every year. No wonder we, and the Earth, are tired! We annually throw away more than 2.5 million tons of obsolete computers, TVs, cell phones, and other electronic products. We each burn the equivalent of 2,500 gallons of gasoline annually, when all energy uses are considered. It takes a lot of time and human energy to accomplish all this. The question is, do we deserve an award or a subpoena?

  This year’s annual “directory of billionaires,” compiled by Forbes magazine, lists 15 percent more ultra-rich Americans than last year. The rich get richer, that’s nothing new. But what is new is the scope of the problem: the top 1 percent of American households now own 58 percent of all corporate wealth, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Yet, about 50 percent of Americans do not own any stock at all. In 2004, the top one percent of earners, including CEOs, received 11.2 percent of all wage income—up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and almost twice the 6 percent from three decades ago.2

  Admittedly, most Americans are fascinated that software magnate Larry Ellison’s private yacht, the Rising Sun—453 feet in length—is as imposing as a luxury cruise liner (or battleship); and that Paul Allen’s slightly smaller yacht sports its own, portable submarine. But if we really examine the spectrum of wealth in America, it’s easy to see that many can’t even afford to float a Wal-Mart rubber ducky in their bathtub, since the price of tap water is rising as steadily as the price of petroleum. (Since 2001, its price has risen an average of 27 percent in the United States, according to the Earth Policy Institute). In fact, many at the very bottom of the economy don’t even have a bathtub. (Nearly one in three hundred are homeless and twice as many are in prison.) But while street people manage to fit all worldly belongings into a shopping cart or packing crate, we middle- and upper-class Americans, almost universally infected with affluenza, can’t seem to cram our stuff into houses twice the size of a typical 1950s American home.

  In recent years American household budgets have skyrocketed for day care, elder care, health care, lawn care, pet care, house care, and hair care—in direct proportion to our often-frustrated quest to be “carefree.” Much of U.S. spending is for purchases far beyon
d subsistence, but there’s a growing segment of American society whose boats haven’t risen at all in the economic high tide of recent years, as the prices for such essentials as housing, food, health care, education, and transportation continue to creep up. Close to fifty million Americans are without health insurance; hundreds of thousands have had their retirement benefits cut; and tens of thousands have recently waved good-bye to jobs that were shipped overseas. From 1998 to 2005, U.S. consumer debt almost doubled, from about $1.3 trillion to $2.16 trillion, according to Federal Reserve analysts, and in 2006, Americans spent one percent more than they earned, the worst “savings” rate since the Depression. Many homeowners regard home equity as a “savings” account, and collectively they borrowed almost a trillion dollars from their equity in 2006. But experts say that financial well is going dry.

  Where will the capital come from to keep consumer spending pumped up? Says Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for The Washington Post for the last thirty years, “The great workhorse of the U.S. economy—consumer spending—will slow. For six decades, consumer debt and spending have risen faster than income, but we’re approaching a turning point.”3 Since consumers are responsible for more than two-thirds of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, what will happen when household debt, lack of savings, an increase in the cost of living and other variables combine to reduce consumer spending?