Skip to main content

The Overspent American by Juliet Schor

Everyone knows Americans spend too much, consume too much and borrow too much. But why? What drives our consumerism?

The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need seeks to answer these questions, and author Juliet Schor explains in this fascinating book why so many Americans work more than ever, spend more than ever, own more stuff than ever--and yet somehow, despite living in a land of plenty, more and more of us feel increasingly dissatisfied with our lives.

Schor argues that humans, just like all other higher mammals, place a high value on social status; in fact, our desire for status among our peers is so instinctive that often we aren't even aware of it. And the fact that we are blind to these instincts explains why we so easily confuse needs with wants, and why we unconsciously compare ourselves to people who are simply out of our league: "friends" on TV who live in homes that cost two or three times what we can afford, or colleagues at the office who may make five or ten times our income.

And that, in turn helps explain why so many Americans, despite being among the wealthiest people on Earth, go about their day believing, preposterously, that they live in a state of privation.

If there ever was a book that described the entire pickle that Americans, right now, have gotten themselves into--with our big mortgages and the expensive cars that we borrow to buy, and the credit card debt we've taken on in order to fill our lives with "stuff"--it's this one.

On rare occasions, Schor will dip into sociology-speak (the best jargon example I found was "because the social comparison aspect is salient for the escalation of norms"), but the vast majority of this book is readable, concise (just 173 pages, not counting footnotes) and utterly fascinating.

I highly recommend this book. The Overspent American was written in 1998, but it is a particularly timely book for right now. As equity and credit markets melt all around the globe, and as we head into what seems likely to be a 12-24 month recession (or worse?), many Americans will need to rethink their respective definitions of needs and wants.

Reading List for The Overspent American:
Once again, this book yielded an exceptional reading list that was unfortunately far too long to put into this blog post. I've carved out the best-sounding 10 books below. Let me particularly strongly recommend Your Money or Your Life, a book that had an enormous positive impact on my life.

As always, if you are interested in the entire reading list, which contains an additional 26 titles for further reading on the subject of consumerism, email me at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com and I'll be more than happy to send it to you.

Full Disclosure: if you purchase any items from Amazon by following the links provided, I will receive a small commission. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to readers for all of your support!

1) Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
2) The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture by David E. Shi
3) Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things (New Report, No 4) by Alan Thein Durning
4) The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
5) The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
6) The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living by Janet Luhrs
7) The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure by Juliet Schor
8) The Status Seekers by Vance Packard
9) The Winner-Take-All Society by Robert Frank and Philip Cook
10) The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

Related Anti-Consumerism Links:
Center for a New American Dream
New Road Map Foundation
Adbusters.org
Center for Screentime Awareness/TVTurnOff.org


Labels:

More Posts

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre [fictionalized bio of Jesse Livermore]

"History repeats itself all the time in Wall Street." A fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of history's most famous speculators. This is an enriching book, worth reading every decade or so across your investment career. And it's a genuinely fun read, conveying the free-wheeling investment culture of the days before the Securities and Exchange Act. When you're young and beginning to invest, this book thrills you with all the bravado of speculating. When you're older, after you've seen a few things and learned many of the manipulations and other techniques the investment industry uses to extract money from you, the book becomes more of a cautionary tale of things not to do, traps not to step in, things to avoid. This is the third time I've read this book (I'm now in my fourth decade as an investor, so I guess that makes me one reading behind schedule), and what struck me most this time around was Livermore's self-admitted weaknesses:...
Read more

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...
Read more

Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...
Read more