March 1961
After reading Miss Ward, Mr. Packard’s third survey of the American way of life has a paradoxical significance which is perhaps even more shaking than he intended. Americans, he says, have used more of the world’s resources in the past forty years than all the people of the world had used in the four thousand years of recorded history up to 1914. This is not really so surprising, but it does open up the question of what man actually needs, as opposed to what he can be induced to want.
This survey is of the methods that have arisen in American to combat over-production; planned obsolescence, or death dates for supposedly durable products, the worship of ‘consumerism’, the admonitions to waste as much of everything as possible (each person in American is using up to an average of eighteen tons of materials a year, and each family today spends 500 dollars of its income each year just for the packaging of whatever it is that they are buying): the continuous temptations arising from the fact that families watch and listen to three hundred hours of commercial advertising on TV per year and are encouraged to use limitless H.P. - even children are using ‘credit cards’, and everyone is exhorted to feel ashamed of anything ‘used’. The population is rising at the rate of one every eleven seconds, with the results that beneath the glittering gadgetry, basic raw materials and social services are both in dangerously short supply. Materials such as water, oil, wood and various minerals are seriously depleted, and water is in some places a real and immediate problem; social services have never, at any point, caught up with the fast expanding society they are supposed to look after - health and education are two of the major inadequacies. Increased automation means either spreading unemployment or increased consumption of the products, and this spiral has not been successfully stabilised, although Mr. Packard points out that a few enlightened people are beginning to see the necessity for helping under-developed countries towards a higher standard of living - in fact, that there is a mutual advantage in thinking and acting in international terms in order that the discrepancy between waste and want should not be so horrific and isolating.
Mr. Packard is painstaking, sometimes amusing, sometimes repetitive, courageous and frightening and his message is one we cannot afford to ignore here: it may well be that a fridge is a fridge is a fridge, but in Miss Stein’s terms, there is a certain decadence in requiring three of them to make one’s mark.