Incurable American Excess - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...incurable-american-excess.html
consumption US self-help self-interest solidarity social individualism overconsumption lifestyle global warming obesity culture
shared by Javier E on 06 Aug 15
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A few years ago, Americans and Europeans were asked in a Pew Global Attitudes survey what was more important: “freedom to pursue life’s goals without state interference,” or “state guarantees that nobody is in need.”
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In the United States, 58 percent chose freedom and only 35 percent a state pledge to eradicate neediness. In Britain, the response was the opposite: 55 percent opted for state guarantees and just 38 percent for freedom. On the European Continent — in Germany, France and Spain — those considering state protection as more important than freedom from state interference rose to 62 percent.
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Americans, who dwell in a vast country, sparsely populated by European standards, are hardwired to the notion of individual self-reliance.
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Europeans, with two 20th-century experiences of cataclysmic societal fracture, are bound to the idea of social solidarity as prudent safeguard and guarantor of human decency.
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The French see the state as a noble idea and embodiment of citizens’ rights. Americans tend to see the state as a predator on those rights.
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To return from Europe to the United States, as I did recently, is to be struck by the crumbling infrastructure, the paucity of public spaces, the conspicuous waste (of food and energy above all), the dirtiness of cities and the acuteness of their poverty.
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It is also to be overwhelmed by the volume and vital clamor of American life, the challenging interaction, the bracing intermingling of Americans of all stripes, the strident individualism.
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In his intriguing new book, “The United States of Excess,” Robert Paarlberg, a political scientist, cites the 2011 Pew survey as he grapples with these divergent cultures. His focus is on American overconsumption of fuel and food
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Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are about twice those of the other wealthy nations of the 34-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. American obesity (just over a third of American adults are now obese) is running at about twice the European average and six times the Japanese.
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A resource-rich, spacious nation, mistrustful of government authority, persuaded that responsibility is individual rather than collective, optimistic about the capacity of science and technology to resolve any problem, and living in a polarized political system paralyzed by its “multiple veto points,” tends toward “a scrambling form of adaptation” rather than “effective mitigation.”
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Whether it comes to food or fuel, they don’t want measures where “voting-age adults are being coerced into a lifestyle change.”
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Individualism trumps all — and innovation, it is somehow believed, will save the country from individualism’s ravages.
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Rather than cut back, they prefer to consume more — whether fuel or food — and then find ways to offset excess.
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With the strong policy measures needed to control excess consumption — taxes, regulations and mandates — blocked, political leaders are “tempted to shift more resources and psychological energy toward the second-best path of adaptation,
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Easier, and potentially more profitable, to develop drought-resistant farm crops or improve coastal protection systems than tackle global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
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His conclusions are pessimistic. The world should not expect America to change. Its response to overconsumption is inadequate.
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On global warming, the country adapts but does not confront, content “to protect itself, and itself alone.”
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On obesity, it shuns the kind of coordinated policy action that will help the less fortunate, particularly disadvantaged minorities.