Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus · 10 Mar 2009 · 454pp · 107,163 words
power rise, but they have also become increasingly insecure in terms of their employment, retirement, health care, and community. What results is what we call insecure affluence, a kind of postmaterial insecurity that is profoundly misunderstood when viewed as poverty. The worldview of materially affluent and postmaterially insecure people is vastly different
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constantly telling Americans how poor and vulnerable they are—which is quite possibly the last thing insecure Americans want to be told. The rise of insecure affluence has caused social values to evolve in two directions simultaneously. Rising insecurity has fueled the move away from fulfillment values and back toward lower-order
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during the Great Depression and New Deal, the insecurity felt by reactionary Kansans is postmaterial, not material—what we will describe throughout this chapter as insecure affluence. Frank points to Kansas’s slippage since the early seventies but ignores its astounding prosperity during the thirty prior years. Kansans today struggle not with
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time when other people’s material success was being widely publicized in hit TV shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The seeds of insecure affluence were planted. In his 2005 book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman assembled an impressive body of evidence showing how, during times of
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, our “residential properties” (because of the ways we have arranged to pay for them) are a source of our vulnerability.48 8. The problems of insecure affluence are exacerbated by America’s failure to create a new social contract appropriate for our postindustrial economy. For the last twenty-five years, conservatives have
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dramatic, collective, and public fall from prosperity—are not being repeated today, nor are they likely to be repeated anytime soon. Today’s reality of insecure affluence is a very different burden. It is time for us to draw a new fault line through American political life, one that divides those dedicated
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, 297 (n43) clean energy development and, 123–24 Inglehart, Ronald, 280 (n7), 282 (n11), 282 (n13) inner-directed (fulfillment) needs, 28, 162, 164, 282 (n12) insecure affluence. See also status insecurity ecological programs and, 39–40 lack of new social contract and, 175–80 late 1990s social transformations and, 171–75 moral
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needs and values, 187, 191–92, 249 prosperity and, 15–16, 269–71 Rorty and, 210 postmaterial values and needs. See also inner-directed needs; insecure affluence; outer-directed values baby boomers and, 254–56 conservative power and, 158–60 development in Brazil and, 50–52 evangelicals and, 189–91, 198–200
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, 207 historical progressive movements and, 193 insecure affluence and, 14–15, 39–40, 171–75 liberal politics and, 207–9 Maslow’s hierarchy and, 5–7, 27–28, 29 material values and needs
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and, 35–37, 164–65, 167, 177–80 new social contract and, 177–78 new vision of, 269–71 obesity and, 169–71 origins of insecure affluence and, 165–67 politics of possibility and, 15–16, 269–71 postwar optimism and, 161–62, 163–65 rise of
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insecure affluence and, 167–69 wealth in Brazil and, 44–45, 46 Protestant ethic, 247, 249 public education, 209 public health research, 82–83 public opinion. See
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, 195–98 social change, 111, 160, 193–94, 218–19 social context, and social values, 87–88, 162, 166–67 social insecurity. See economic insecurity; insecure affluence; status insecurity social psychology research, 150, 222, 307 (n30) social safety net, demise of, 172, 175, 177 social values. See also ecological concerns; postmaterial values
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and needs authoritarianism and, 35–36 change in social context and, 162, 166–67 Environics survey and, 33 insecure affluence and, 14–15 move to postmaterialist values and, 161–62 needs and, 6–7 new social contract and, 175–80 prosperity and, 244–45 quest
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–85 Sociovision (research firm), 315 (n43) Sorkin, Aaron, 258 species, definitions of, 316 (n8) State of Fear (Crichton), 139–40 status insecurity. See also insecure affluence emergence of insecure affluence and, 171–75 obesity epidemic and, 169–71 social values and, 168–69, 184–85 Stern, Nicholas, 15, 118–19 “Stern Review,” 118–19
The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts · 1 Sep 2014 · 324pp · 92,805 words
advancing economically as rapidly as those earlier generations had. Many of us had entered what Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have called a state of “insecure affluence,” where our material needs were still largely met, but our desires for better status, or more self-esteem, or other postmaterial aspirations, were being thwarted
Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley · 27 Dec 2008 · 204pp · 67,922 words
. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger elaborate on Inglehart’s concept in their book Break Through to suggest that we now live in a condition of “insecure affluence.” See, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 2. Fred