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164 7 A Flawed Measure: Critics and Realities As a nation we spend an inordinate amount of time feeling our indices, trembling when freight car loadings drop and rejoicing when they rise. Apparently as our supply of reassuring statistics increases, our need for reassurance grows. Robert Lekachman What good is happiness; it can’t buy money. Henny Youngman Economic metrics may have become a dominant way to gauge America’s success as a nation and culture and its people’s worth in the decades after World War II, but not everyone bought this message. And by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the U.S. economy itself no longer churned out such unambiguously positive data suggesting that America— a nation measured in economic terms—was an across-the-board success. Some intellectuals, politicians, and economists had chipped away at various aspects of this equation of America with its economy since the mid-twentieth century. Critics of consumerism and the idea that material riches are the measure of an individual or nation can be found from the Puritans to Thorstein Veblen in the early 1900s to the present. The Puritans took to heart Jesus’ injunction that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of his possessions.” Quakers and others preached the virtues of the simple life. The word consume emerged in fourteenth-century England as a pejorative meaning to “waste, devour, or use to the point of exhaustion.” The Puritans and early republican theorists such as Benjamin Franklin valued hard work; luxury and consumption were viewed as wasteful vices throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . Max Weber’s famous discussion of the Protestant ethic spoke of the value placed on work and thrift—or what some have called a “producerist ” orientation. Radicals and hippies of the 1960s certainly criticized it in spades. Some conservatives, especially since the late 1970s, have taken aim at the idea 165 A Flawed Measure: Critics and Realities that government’s role is to ensure an ever stronger economy, and many have returned to a neo-Puritan distaste for unbridled consumption. Critics from the left and right, secular and religious, have found common ground in arguing that the economy and abundance are not the true measure of America or the paramount goal or concern of public policy or individual striving. After World War II, some criticized abundance as a shallow national obsession, and others, who addressed poverty and unmet national needs, saw it as a national illusion. By 1960, questions of what defined America’s “national purpose” beyond expanding incomes and consumption, as well as a new awareness of poverty and what John Kenneth Galbraith called “public squalor,” percolated up into broader public debate. Such ideas began to dim the view of the United States as a model of economic plenty and success. Many poorer Americans undoubtedly saw this as a chimera, if not a downright lie. Some critics had considerable influence. However, their messages were not widely or clearly heard by most Americans and they hardly expressed the dominant visions of American culture. The premise that America could and should be measured in economic terms was entirely plausible during these good years. Whether or not one subscribes to Gramscian ideas of hegemony or C. Wright Mills’s conception of a power elite, there is no question that those singing the praises of rising GNP and classless abundance had overwhelmingly greater social and cultural power. The stellar performance of the U.S. economy and its macroeconomic maestros from the 1940s through the 1960s obviously made it easier, if not natural, for elites and citizens to equate American success with economic success and America with its economy. Postwar critiques of the equation of America with its economy largely fall into four often overlapping categories: moral criticism of American materialism, selfishness, and a shallow preoccupation with status, at the expense of “higher” values of the spirit, art, the community, and democratic , civic engagement; attacks on capitalist manipulation of public buying and beliefs; a focus on poverty and unfulfilled public needs in the midst of abundance; and questioning of the priorities, metrics, methodologies, and assumptions of the economics profession. The first and third categories were not entirely dissonant with visions of America as an economy becoming ever richer through careful economic management, as many critics believed that abundance held the key to eliminating poverty, meeting all public needs, and giving Americans leisure to cultivate spiritual and [18.217.73.187] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 01...

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