Trying times on Easy Street

The multibillionaire Warren Buffett, a folk hero of the age of affluence, once reminded disciples of his hugely successful investment techniques that ‘money can’t change how many people love you’. Avner Offer’s potent analysis of 50 years of socio-economic data makes a similar point in less folksy style: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’

As Oxford’s Chichele Professor of Economic History and a fellow of All Souls, Offer is scrupulous about defining terms. ‘Affluence,’ he says, is ‘a relentless flow of new and cheaper opportunities’; ‘impatience’ refers to the tendency of affluent societies and individuals to exercise this dazzling freedom of choice in ‘myopic’ ways that satisfy short-term desires rather than ‘prudent’, long-term needs. Half a century of rising prosperity in Britain and America has brought better nutrition, housing, education, health and leisure, less harsh working conditions and greater freedom for women; yet it has also brought increases in family breakdown, addiction, mental disorder, obesity, insecurity, violence and crime. It has caused communities to unravel and interpersonal trust to decline. It may even have damaged the capacity of human beings for enduring love.

We all know what love is, and Offer helpfully lists the symptoms, including ‘an acute longing for reciprocation’ and ‘a physical aching of the chest’. But in the affluent postwar era love has had to compete for attention with many other opportunities and distractions. Consequently people are single for longer, and divorce more often; abortion and single parenthood have multiplied; sexual behaviour has broken free of all social restraint. These changes are seen by some as benign outcomes of a deliberate process of liberalisation; but to Offer they are ‘tentative, short-of-optimal resolutions of the intractable dilemmas of choice’, and failures of self-control.

In seeking ‘an elusive happiness’, he says, we have succeeded only in allowing the rising tide of novelty to corrode ‘the pillars of commitment’.