From Plenty to Scarcity
Why the world has taken a right turn
My dear granddaughter,
In my last letter I explained to you how, by way of the ideas of political scientist Ronald Inglehart, you and I are both the products of a postmaterialist society—a culture in which its participants take their basic sustenance for granted and thus focus on ways, occupational and otherwise, where they can achieve fulfillment on psychic rather than physical terms. My hope is that this paradigm will continue to hold as you move through the first decades of your life.
As I indicated to you, Inglehart’s theory rests on this relatively simple core idea, but it has a series of nuances. He notes, for example, that where you grow up matters a lot (North Korea is a very different place from Sweden, for example). Events that may take place in your lifetime can also affect the degree of your postmaterialism; people who lived through the fall of Communism in Russia, for example, experienced both a decline in their economic conditions and falling collective morale. Even events in affluent societies can affect attitudes: in my adolescence, the United States experienced a real sense of malaise in the 1970s, and this was reflected in the data Inglehart collected on attitudes toward postmaterialism. Such nuances notwithstanding, his overall point was that over time, postmaterialist youth would gradually begin to outnumber their materialist elders, and this would be apparent in things like liberalizing attitudes toward sexual and personal expression, falling church attendance, more grass-roots (as opposed to party) politics, and so on.
Toward the end of his life (he died in 2021), Inglehart recognized that world events seemed to contradict key aspects of his theory. All over the world, right-wing populist leaders—including, of course, Donald Trump—came to power with political coalitions that directly challenged some of the key ideas of postmaterialism. They rejected social progressive ideas, particularly those surrounding immigration, which they sought to shut down cold. They challenged liberal economic approaches (like free trade) with support for protectionism that mainstream economists regarded as reactionary. And they questioned the confident assumptions of economic growth that had guided economic policy, because their lived experience made it clear that some of the core foundations of everyday experience—affordable housing, education, a living wage—were becoming increasingly unattainable.
Inglehart realized the world was changing. He noted a key phenomenon that many observers in recent decades have discussed: growing economic inequality in a winner-take-all society. (He seemed to suggest, but never fully elaborated on the idea, that relative wealth, perceptions of wealth, could affect a person’s place on the materialist/postmaterialist spectrum.) Inglehart also recognized, years before Artificial Intelligence became a fact of everyday life, that it would profoundly affect many societies. The de-industrialization of the western world destroyed many factory jobs; now, he noted, AI would destroy professional class jobs, an outcome would likely affect social stability, even as it made any number of tasks easier and more rewarding, much in the way personal computers the internet, and social media have done over the course of the last three generations.
We of course don’t know what this will mean for you. You may find, for example, that you have to work much harder to secure the quality of life your parents and grandparents had. Even if you don’t, the logic of postmaterialism as Inglehart describes it may undermine itself: fully postmaterialist societies are already finding themselves outpaced by nations that are less fully invested in it, much in the way that Catholic countries began to catch up with Protestant ones in productivity, both of which are now outpaced by Confucian ones. But over time, all of them seem to learn that there are more important things than money and the material comforts it brings.
If there’s one thing I do know, it’s that a baseline has been established for you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will have your postmaterialist heritage as a measuring stick—something to be embraced, rejected, or modified as you chart your way. I find it highly unlikely that you will see the world the way your dear old grandfather did. But my hope is that knowing how he understood himself will help you understand yourself. It’s my intention to elaborate on this in the coming days.