Cognitive dissonance about quality of life in the U.S.?
Jared Diamond, the scientist and author, just had an op-ed piece in the Jan. 22 New York Times warning of the continued excess consumption of resources by first-world countries such as the U.S., and the impossibility of sustaining such a pace, given that China and other countries aspire to the same. In fact, Diamond points out, the West will be forced sooner or later to lower our consumption, whether we like it or not. Obviously, here in the U.S. we don’t like; we make motions in this direction, such as “recycling” paper and cans in the most wasteful manner possible, but what we imagine to be our comfort still comes first. The irony of this shall shortly become clear.
What really interested me about the Diamond article was this nugget, here with the salient point in bold:
“Real sacrifice [to improve the situation] wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts.”
Reading this reminded me how vigorously even liberals in the U.S. will defend the status quo, using the argument that we do pretty much everything better than anybody else, including the morose Scandinavians, the pitiful Irish, the inefficient French, the humorless Germans, the corrupt Italians, etc. Are we vulgar? Yes. Is the gap between rich and poor widening in the U.S. faster than in Europe? Yes. But hey, keeping our style of life pretty much the same is OK, because we do it better ….
Except we don’t. A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on Standard of living in the United States establishes that although we lead in some areas, such as having more radios, TVs, computers, and other consumer gadgets per capita than anyone else in the world (how many remotes do you have?), Diamond is indeed right; when such trivial matters as life expectancy, literacy, education, and overall standard of living are taken into account, we lag considerably. By the UN’s measure of such things, at the time I’m writing this we are 12th in the world, behind Iceland, Norway, Australia (Australia!), Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, France, and Finland. Our vaunted comfort turns out to be not so comfortable in comparison.
This seems a massive example of culturally communicated cognitive dissonance. Ask yourself if you thought the U.S. ranked that low compared to other developed countries; and watch in particular how quickly your mind comes up with all sorts of reasons why this is OK. (We have the burden of defending the free world; socialism is bad, so we must avoid it at all costs; the gap between rich and poor is lamentable, yes, but that’s the price of greater individual opportunity; etc.).
Diamond has been to other countries in a role as other than tourist, but the majority of us see places like France and Iceland as mere holiday destinations. Granted these countries too are consuming more than they ought or will be able to sustain in the future, but they seem a ways ahead of us on the path to sanity. Now would be a good time to start asking what it is they are doing better than us - if our self-image can stand it.
Add comment January 3rd, 2008