Stranger in a Strange Land

Sixty-five percent of Books & Culture readers have graduate degrees, 98 percent attended college, and 39 percent plan to continue their education in the next five years. But if Juliet Schor, director of the women’s studies program at Harvard, is right, all that education doesn’t make us smarter spenders.

In her recent book, The Overspent American (Basic Books, 1998), Schor reports on her study of workers at a telecommunications firm with 85,000 employees. Education, she discovered, has a clear correlation with savings, spending, and shopping. Mapping out her subjects at “Telecom” by educational level, she discovered that “controlling for other factors, … the more education a person has, the less he or she saves. Each additional level of education (going from a high school diploma to some college, for instance, or from a college degree to a postgraduate credential) reduces annual savings by $1448.” That is a significant amount given the fact that the average employee at Telecom saves $10,450 per year, including retirement savings.

Less saving means more spending, and women with graduate degrees spend more time shopping than individuals in any other category. “Apparently,” Schor writes, “people with more education are more status-oriented, more tuned in to identity and positional consumption, and more concerned about keeping up with the upscale groups to which they aspire and belong.”

Schor does not talk about keeping up with the Joneses but keeping up with upscale groups to which her subjects aspire. Middle-class Americans no longer keep up with their neighbors, their natural reference group. In their “competitive acquisition,” they focus instead on reference groups that are two or three levels above them. This is due to new patterns of finding friends at work and to the invention of fantasy friends in the entertainment media.

Compare the lifestyles of, say, Lucy and Ricky Riccardo or Ralph and Alice Kramden, on the one hand, with those of Cliff and Clair Huxtable or Murphy Brown on the other. The upscaling of our media friends has outrun the more gradual lift of the American economic tide. As a result, many Americans perceive the cars, houses, clothes, and jewelry of their media reference groups as “normal” and find themselves dissatisfied with the lives made possible by current incomes. (On average, each weekly hour of television watching reduced annual savings of Telecom employees by $208. A typical 18-hour TV week would mean over $3,700 less salted away each year.) Through the magic of plastic, they not only spend to the detriment of retirement or rainy-day savings, but also incur incredible consumer debt at high rates of interest.

All of this is about world-view. How we spend our money depends a great deal on the stories we tell ourselves about what is important and where our lives are headed. When some people discover that the story presupposed by their working and spending patterns doesn’t jibe with their real values, they “downshift,” in Schor’s terminology, taking less demanding jobs, reducing the hours they work, going back to school, dropping a second job. From 1990 to 1996, nearly one-fifth of adult Americans made a voluntary lifestyle change (excluding regularly scheduled retirements) that entailed earning less. Nearly all of them (85 percent) are happy about the change they made.

Schor contrasts these downshifters with their historical antecedents: ascetic sects and utopian communities. Much of today’s consumption is driven, not by communitarian impulses, but by the myth of individual differentiation—that somehow we express our individuality and differentiate ourselves from the masses by buying Gap jeans rather than Wranglers or by buying Calvin Klein underwear rather than Fruit of the Loom. And even though these downshifters have seen through that myth, they match their spending to their individuality rather than to religious or community values.

A biblical economic vision is hard to reconcile with the ethos of expressive individualism. Part of Schor’s critique is embodied in her chapter title “When Spending Becomes You.” The new consumerism is largely about creating your identity through the acquisition of highly visible products in highly recognizable brands. But Schor fails to see that the alternative is not simply controlling spending to serve the individual, but channeling spending to serve the common good. A biblical vision stresses stewardship above ownership and recognizes that we exist for each other.

In her single brief reference to the influence of religion on economic life, Schor treats it as an erstwhile teacher of simplicity, moderation, and sufficiency as well as a critic of avarice and luxury. But, she writes, “by the early twentieth century, these restraints had been largely lifted. … Spending, even spending to excess, was extolled as good for the ego, if not for the soul.” By treating religion as a thing of the past and by failing to investigate the role generosity might play in the lives of those she studied, she has seriously impoverished her understanding of the American consumer.