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

The Prophet of Edan by Philip Chase [The Edan Trilogy #2]

We all have our part to play and our duty to perform. This is a beautiful novel about performing your duty with honor, even in the face of almost certain failure. Author Philip Chase has an unusual gift for telling a compelling story, and The Prophet of Edan works on two levels: on the individual level, with characters we care about and root for, and on the grand, civilizational level, where entire nations  hurl themselves at each other in a desperate war of survival. And the geopolitical dramas in Philip's world of Eormenlond are downright Kissingerian --with betrayal, realpolitik and honor, all in equal measure. Now, any story with a large cast and a lot of moving parts presents the author with a structural challenge: how do you help the reader keep everybody and everything straight, but yet do it in a way that's organic to the story? After all, this is the second part of a trilogy,  and a lot happened in Book I . So I'll share an example here of what this author does,...
Read more

H.R. by Edwin Lefevre

I wouldn't recommend this odd book for its story. But H.R. is interesting for its social and psychological commentary on early 20th century New York society, as the Gilded Age gave way to the so-called Progressive Era. Edwin Lefevre is the author of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator , the famous (at least among investors) pseudobiography of Jesse Livermore. This book, in stark contrast, is a forgotten and comparatively forgettable work.  But not totally forgettable. The reader watches the life arc of a young man who catapults himself across several caste barriers, starting as a frustrated New York City bank clerk who quits and, implausibly, starts a union of sandwich-board advertisers. He then uses this sandwich board advertising platform (you could think of it as an early 1900s "new media" platform) to gain influence throughout the city, ultimately parlaying his way into joining New York's social and economic elite. At its heart, this book is about power and influ...
Read more

The Art of War in the Middle Ages by Charles Oman

A wonderful, information-dense book surveying the evolution of warfare across the Middle Ages, and a glorious starting point for readers to contextualize an enormous amount of European history. There's a great deal of historical knowledge here that author Charles Oman assumes in his readers.  And so the very act of reading this book (and looking up the author's near-constant historical references) equates to a semester or two--at least--of upper-level undergrad European history. Read this book and spend some time looking things up. Then read several more books like this [1].  Pretty soon, enough osmosis happens such that the various battles and historical figures this author mentions casually will be things you start mentioning casually: Cannae, Adrianople, Brunanburh, Hastings, Robert Guiscard, Durazzo, Tours, Crecy, Agincourt, Arnold von Winkelried, Albrecht von Wallenstein, and so on. (This will be an inner monologue of course, because we all know how much every...
Read more