'Affluenza' epidemic hits U.S.

well-to-do; Stress follows wealth, poll finds

The Washington Times (Washington, DC), November 24, 2003 Byline: Jennifer Harper, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Anxious but affluent, rich but unhappy. Oh, dear: The moneyed have their troubles, too.

And Americans are the unhappiest rich folks of them all.

A new survey of some 11,000 high-income people from 11 countries found that Americans - followed by the Australians, Japanese and Canadians - are the most anxious among the well-heeled.

Two-thirds of Americans who make more than $60,000 a year say they're stressed out several times a week; 63 percent of Australians, 60 percent of Japanese and 58 percent of Canadians in similar circumstances felt the same way.

The survey was conducted by Roper Starch for American Express over several months this year and released Thursday. .

And where there is stress, there is a psychological syndrome, of course. In the case of troubled rich folks, it's called "affluenza," a term coined by Milwaukee-based therapist Jessie O'Neill, who said the moneyed can have "a dysfunctional relationship with wealth, or the pursuit of it."

Among other things, the afflicted affluent have trouble tolerating frustration. They also suffer from a false sense of entitlement, loss of motivation and self-confidence, and low self-esteem and self-worth.

But the moneyed aren't always a mess.

Residents in Hong Kong are the most laid back, the survey found, followed by the Brazilians, Germans, Italians, Mexicans, French and British.

"We were intrigued that a busy place like Hong Kong is the home of the most easy-going people," Elizabeth Coleman of American Express said Friday.

"Most of them typically work over nine hours a day, and they typically have an hour commute to work, too," she continued. "The only thing we can figure is that the Hong Kong residents have a kind of optimism, a belief that things will get better. Hong Kong residents have become accustomed in recent years to rapid change in their economy or living conditions. They just seem to go with the flow."

The survey revealed other cultural mysteries, too.

Relaxed Brazilians - 24 percent of whom said they "never" feel stressed - spent the most time with their families, about 74 hours a week. The average is typically 40 hours a week among respondents from all 11 countries.

Yet affluent Americans reported the more time they spent with their families, the more stressed they felt. Those who spent 45 hours a week with family were anxious every day, while those who felt "occasionally" stressed spent 36 hours.

"Things are so busy in America that even time spent with family become stress time," Miss Coleman said. "It's a difference in culture."

The rich, in the meantime, fret about other things.

Terrorism preoccupies the nation's wealthiest residents more than ever, but for economic rather than personal reasons: 86 percent say they worry it will disturb the economy and securities market, according to a survey released Nov. 1 by U.S. Trust, a financial-management group. The figure stood at 76 percent last year.

Wealthy women have their own sets of travails.

According to a survey of 900 affluent women by the Journal of Epidemiology released earlier this year, 71 percent of them are "dissatisfied with their bodies," compared with 58 percent of women who lived under average financial circumstances.

"In wealthier neighborhoods, the culture probably magnified the importance of thinness," the study noted.

By Jennifer Harper, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Does Money Buy Happiness?

In most of the world, yes. In the United States, not any more. By Ross Douthat and Don Peck Historically the province of philosophers and theologians, the relationship between wealth and happiness has recently been taken up by a cadre of social scientists seeking to quantify and The results of their research, thus far, are clear: money does buy happinessbut only to a point. Study after study shows that inhabitants of richer countries are, on average, significantly happier than those of poorer ones. This is true even controlling for other variables that rise with income and that may influence personal happiness: education, political freedom, women's rights, and so forth. National income appears to be one of the best single predictors of overall well-being, explaining perhaps 40 percent of the difference in contentment among nations. For individual countries, with few exceptions, self-reported happiness has increased as incomes have risen. The attached chart shows survey data on happiness for fiftyfour countries, compiled throughout the 1990s by the Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven. These data indicate a robust, if inexact, relationship between per capita income and "life satisfaction."Veenhoven's findings provide an unexpectedly sunny view. First, they indicate that most people worldwide say they are fairly happy. It is debatable whether most people have ever viewed life as nasty, brutish, and short; but on balance, they don't now. (Even citizens of impoverished or politically star-crossed countries, such as the Philippines and Romania, or of countries with high levels of income inequality, such as Brazil and the United States, report being at least somewhat happy on average.) Moreover, though the fact that richer countries are in general happier than poorer ones may not seem

terribly surprising, it does suggest that continuing economic development will generate rising happiness worldwide. That said, there are clear limits to what money can buy. Although improvements in income produce large improvements in happiness for poor countries gains that continue to rise with income well above the level where basic food, shelter, and sanitation needs have been met the law of diminishing returns takes effect at higher income levels. Above about $20,000 per capita, increases in wealth yield at best minimal increases in happiness. This effect takes place at both the individual and the societal level. In poor societies those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder are significantly happier than those at the bottom; in highly developed societies there is little class difference in happiness. (In fact, oddly, in wealthy nations both those in the top 10 percent of the socioeconomic spectrum and those in the bottom 50 percent appear to be slightly happier, on average, than those in between.) Robert E. Lane, a political scientist at Yale, argues that the leveling off of happiness in wealthy societies reflects more than just diminishing returns. Lane suggests that happiness is derived largely from two sources material comfort, and social and familial intimacythat are often incompatible. Economic development increases material comfort, but it systematically weakens social and familial ties by encouraging mobility, commercializing relationships, and attenuating the bonds of both the extended and the nuclear family. In less developed countries, where social ties are often strong and money is scarce, the tradeoff works overwhelmingly to society's advantage the gains in material comfort more than outweigh the slight

declines in social connectedness. At some point, however, the balance tips and the happinessdiminishing effects of reduced social stability begin to outweigh the happiness-increasing effects of material gain. Lane believes that the United States has passed this tipping point, and that we will actually become unhappier as incomes rise further. Lane's argument is controversial. It is unclear that happiness is actually falling in the United States. Clinical depression is rising, which Lane cites as one basis for his argument, but it still afflicts only a small percentage of the population. Nonetheless, it is true that happiness in the United States has not risen over the past fifty years, despite an average increase of more than 85 percent in the real value of family income. And although the weakening of the relationship between money and contentment perhaps ought to have induced Americans to look elsewhere for sources of happiness, that hasn't happened. Indeed, as the graphs below show, American have become more materialistic over the past three decades. The Western notion of progress was shaped during a centuries-long period when rising wealth almost certainly bought rising happiness. Only recently have we left that era behindand our society has not yet adjusted. Conditioned to value financial achievement, we may cling to materialism even as it makes the contentment we seek more elusive.

Brendan O'Neill, "When Ignorance Is Bliss," New Statesman, vol. 137, January 28, 2008, p. 52(3). The following is an excerpt from Consumerism Is Not Linked to Mental and Emotional Problems (ONeill) Condemning Consumerism Herbal-tea socialism has a new bible in Oliver James's The Selfish Capitalist. James is a clinical child psychologist. In his last book, Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane, he claimed to have uncovered a new virus. "Affluenza", he said, is brought on by the rampant materialism and cult of consumerism nurtured under "Blatcherism" (that's Blairism [Tony Blair] and Thatcherism combined). As we are encouraged to lust after stuff, to aspire to live the mock-Tudor lifestyle of a superwealthy, blinged-up footballer's wife, we begin to neglect non-material matters such as friendships and family relations, argued James; we become emotionally distressed, destructively perfectionist, and discontented, sex-addicted and domineering to boot. The Selfish Capitalist promises to trace the "origins of affluenza". One of James's central claims is that there is twice the prevalence of emotional distress or "mental illness" in English-speaking "selfish capitalist" nations there is in the "unselfish capitalist" nations of mainland western Europe. This suggests that materialism is driving us Brits mad, literally. There are just a few problems with James's thesis. He never convincingly demonstrates that mental distress is higher in the "selfish capitalist" world than it is elsewhere. He shows no direct causal relationship between materialistic desire and levels of emotional distress. And the implications of his argumentwhere, in effect, the government is encouraged to manage our well-beingare so borderline Orwellian [evoking the works of George Orwell] that they make Blatcherism look almost progressive. Yes, "selfish capitalism" leaves us edgy and unfulfilled; but what we might refer to as the therapeutic socialism that James seems keen to instal would turn us into mental slaves. James says that where 23 percent of people in "selfish capitalist" nations (the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) have suffered emotional distress in the recent period, only 11.5 percent of people in "unselfish capitalist" nations (France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Italy and Japan) have been distressed. This finding is the foundation on which he builds his thesis about the perils of life in a neoliberal society. Yet James has to play the role of research contortionist to arrive at the claim that people in the selfish capitalist sphere are twice as likely to be unhappy. He kicks off by citing the findings of a study by the World Health Organization [WHO] into the "percentage of the population [in different countries] that has suffered a mental distress in the past 12 months". Of the 15 countries probed to date, the US and New Zealand come [out on] top: 26.4 percent of Americans and 20.7 percent of New Zealanders claim to have "suffered a mental distress" recently. Must be that pesky selfish capitalism they're forced to live under. But what's this? Ukraine, better known for its poverty and unemployment than for any epidemic of Posh-and-Becks-style [British celebrity couple Victoria and David Beckham] materialism, comes third in the WHO's "league of woe": 20.5 percent of Ukrainians say they have recently suffered mental distress. Colombia (17.8 percent) and Lebanon (16.9 percent), hardly nations in which

disposable income is sloshing around, come fifth and sixth. Most strikingly, Shanghai is at the bottom of the WHO's list of screwed-up territories: only 4.3 percent of its residents have recently been seriously stressed. Yet it is hard to think of a country where naked ambition and the desire for stuff is stronger than China right now, where two coal-fired power stations are erected every week, gleaming new skyscrapers poke holes in the clouds, and tens of thousands are abandoning back-breaking tasks in the countryside to get proper jobs (and TVs and cars) in the city. Neat and Tidy Explanations If "selfish capitalism" and its sidekick rampant consumerism provoke mental distress, why aren't the Chinese suffering but people in Colombia are? James has some neat and tidy explanations. Colombia and Lebanon might be distressed as a result of "social unrest and civil war"; Ukraine is probably emotionally under the weather as a result of its "economic crash"; and the people of Shanghai seem not to be stressed ("yet ..." he warns) because "the Chinese conceptualize questions about mental states differently from westerners". I see. Moreover, Britain, Canada and Australiathree "selfish capitalist" nations to which James refers frequentlywere not even part of the WHO study of distress. Instead, James uses completely different surveys of national distress for these countries, which he confesses is a "debatable" tactic, because "these studies have not used identical instruments for measuring distress to those employed in the ... WHO study". On page 31 of this book, he notes: "Comparison can be safely made only between studies in different nations which used the same instruments, in the same way." Yet, ten pages later, he is marrying completely different studies, explaining away the high levels of distress in poor countries like Colombia and the low level of distress in rising capitalist tigers like China. Other parts of the book suggest that he might also have a tenuous grip on history. He writes: "Industrialisation and urbanisation are arguably the fundamental causes of high rates of emotional distress." So why didn't people complain about suffering from "low self-esteem", "anxiety" or "impulse disorders" during a historic upheaval such as the British Industrial Revolution? Then, a nation was transformed within a generation: Vast cities were built or expanded and swaths of the population moved from farm work into factories. Life was tough, smelly, unforgiving, yet people somehow survived without the likes of Oliver James or Oprah or Jeremy Kyle [British talk show host] offering them emotional guidance. No one can possibly believe that people in Britain today have harder emotional lives than those women in shawls who sold soap on misty bridges in Dickensian times, and who had a life expectancy of 46 if they were lucky. Perhaps it is simply that people are more likely to complain about mental hardship these days? Therapy Culture Is Rampant James fails fully to interrogate one possible, simple explanation for why Americans, Canadians and Brits allegedly suffer, or rather claim to suffer, from higher levels of mental distress than others: the "therapy culture". Over the past 30 years, precisely the period in which James says there has been an increase in levels of emotional distress, America has spawned a culture in which we are positively encouraged to discuss everyday problems, from overwork to sadness, as "illnesses" that require therapeutic intervention. In his brilliant Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, the American academic Christopher Lane painstakingly shows how the category of "mental disorder" has been expanded in recent decades, so that what were once considered normal emotions or everyday foiblesshyness, rebelliousness, aloofness, and so on

have been relabelled as phobias, disorders and syndromes. The influence of America's therapy culture has been greater in other English-speaking nations (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) than it has been in China, for example. It's not that their citizens are more distressed than, say, people struggling to make ends meet in Nigeria (where only 4.7 percent of the population claim to have mental issues), but rather that they are more likely to understand and discuss their problems in these terms. As you sift through James's claims and data, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that what we have here is plain old prejudiceagainst garish consumerism, especially of a kind indulged in by the nouveaux richesdressed up as a scientific study. At heart, this book is deeply conservative: It rehashes the age-old warning that riches will make you unhappy, so you're better off living a simple, smiley life. Because they see overconsumption as the greatest evil, herbal-tea socialists such as James end up not offering solidarity to workers, but constantly warning them that their "greed" will come back to haunt them in the form of a mental disorder. They have rehabilitated the sin of gluttony in pseudo-scientific terms. I say we should resist the attempts by James and others to relieve us of our "emotional distress". Prickly emotions are frequently the triggers for change, making people strive for better and more meaningful ways of living. James, who advises the government on social policy, argues that "well-being should be a high governmental priority". No, it should not; government-imposed "happiness" or "satisfaction" would only churn out an emotionally complacent populace trained to be satisfied by the simple life. We may all be on the edgebut some of us are looking over it, to see what will come next.

The following is an excerpt from The American Economy by Kim Masters Evans

The American Consumer

The use of money is all the advantage there is in having money. Benjamin Franklin, 1736 Americans love to spend money, and their aggressive spending helps fuel both the American and the global economies, as imported goods are widely available and popular in the American market. In fact, consumer spending is the single largest contributing factor to the nation's growth in gross domestic production. High consumer spending rates produce a ripple effect that spreads across many other macroeconomic sectors, including employment, wages, corporate profits, and interest rates.

THE RISE OF THE CONSUMER CULTURE

World War II
World War II (193945) is generally credited with lifting the United States out of the Great Depressionthe period of economic disaster that lasted from 1929 through the early 1940s. The urgent need for weapons, tanks, planes, and other war goods led the government to invest heavily in getting the nation's factories running again, especially after the United States joined the fighting in late 1941. At the war's end, many factories were converted into facilities to manufacture civilian products such as appliances and automobiles, for which demand was especially high after the war. RATIONING AND THE WAR PRODUCTION BOARD During the war, citizens were encouraged to exercise restraint in spending in order to conserve materials for the war effort. Some items were temporarily banned from public use; for example, platinum was declared a "strategic metal" to be used only in the manufacture of military goods, so its use in jewelry making was halted. The government also established rationingtight controls over how much of an item a person could use or consume in a certain amount of time. All citizens were issued coupon books for rationed items every six months; once they used up their coupons for the month, they had to wait until the next month to buy more rationed goods. Coffee, sugar, meat, butter, and canned vegetables were rationed, as were gasoline, rubber, silk (which was used to make parachutes), fuel oil, and other goods put to military purposes. "Victory gardens" became common as the government encouraged Americans to plant their own vegetables rather than buying them.

The Postwar Boom

When the war came to an end in 1945, Americans were divided about becoming consumers again. While some had felt deprived for so long that they could not wait to start spending, others were reluctant. To help create jobs for the tens of thousands of soldiers returning to the workforce from the war and build on the country's newfound economic prosperity, the government, along with businesses and marketing firms, began a campaign to stir up consumer activity. Spending was promoted as a civic duty and an expression of patriotism rather than a personal indulgence.

THECOLD WAR: BEATING COMMUNISM BY SHOPPING By the late 1940s the cold wara decades-long period of political tension between the United States and the former Soviet Union that began just after World War II and ended in the early 1990swas well underway. To contrast the U.S. open market system with Soviet socialismunder which private ownership was generally disallowedU.S. politicians argued that widespread ownership of more possessions would create greater social equality, thereby proving the superiority of the market system. Consumer spending, therefore, acted as a function of the drive to defeat communism. HOME OWNERSHIP Foremost on the list of items that many American citizens wanted was new housing, and the ideal housing, according to the standards of the time, was a mass-produced single-family home in the suburbs. According to Lizabeth Cohen ("The Landscape of Mass Consumption," February 2003, http://www.nthposition.com/landscapeofmass.php), residential housing construction after the war occurred at rates never before seen in the United States, with the federal government helping veterans buy homes with guaranteed loans and connecting the new suburbs to cities with an immense system of federally built highways. Between 1947 and 1953, the number of people living in the suburbs increased by 43%, and by 1960 62% of Americans owned their own homes. AUTOMOBILES Home ownership generated the need for many items, but few had more far-reaching effects than automobiles. With such a large proportion of Americans living in the suburbs, the ability to commute to work and shopping centers became essential, so a family car went from being a luxury to being a necessity in the 1950s. This was the birth of the American car culture. Then, as now, a new car represented a substantial investment. The average income in the 1950s was $3,216 per year, and the cost of a Ford automobile was between $1,399 and $2,262at least half of a family's annual income. Car ownership led to more travel, which spawned more business opportunities. Fast food restaurants allowed people to eat in their cars. Motels ("motor hotels") provided inexpensive places to stay (and park cars) overnight. Convenience stores sprang up along the new highways, encouraging drivers to stop and shop while they were on the road. Even the camping and outdoor industry saw a rush to its products, as Americans purchased campers and other outdoor equipment and took to the road for family vacations. By 1950, 60% of American households had a car, and transportation-related expenses accounted for one out of every seven dollars spent by the typical American household (Jerome Segal, Cynthia Pansing, and Brian Parkinson, "What We Work for Now: Changing Household Consumption Patterns in the Twentieth Century," Common Assets Program, December 2001, http://www.rprogress.org/newpubs/2001/whatwework.pdf). TELEVISION Along with the widespread ownership of automobiles, the introduction of television into daily U.S. life represented one of the most important social, economic, and technological changes of the twentieth century. Television was promoted as a social equalizer that would, again, prove the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism. With such unprecedented access to information, U.S. citizens were predicted to achieve equality across all classes and social groups. In 1945 there were about seven thousand working television sets and nine television stations in the country; in 1950, when the total U.S. population was about 151 million, 3.8 million homes, or 9% of all households, had television sets. By the end of 1952, the number of households with TVs had

grown to twenty million, and there were more than ninety-eight television stations ("The History of Film and Television," http://www.high-techproductions.com/historyoftelevision.htm). In 1993, 98% of American households had at least one television, and 64% had two or more. Like automobiles, televisions were substantial financial investments for families in the middle of the century. A typical Philco Model 1403 TV cost $199, while the higher-end Admiral Home Entertainment TV System cost $549. Television commercials provided a new way to advertise consumer products in American homes, and advertisers were quick to recognize their effectiveness. In 1952 advertisers spent $288 million to purchase commercial airtime, an increase of more than 38% over the previous year.
The following is an excerpt from

Whats Your Consumption Factor?

By JARED DIAMOND (Op-Ed Contributor) Published: January 2, 2008 The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say thats a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenyas more than 30 million people, but its not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the worlds fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets. Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but lets suppose they rise to our level. Lets also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including Chinas) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. Chinas catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent. Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I havent met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people. We Americans may think of Chinas growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile. The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesnt have enough resources to allow for raising

Chinas consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean were headed for disaster?