What’s the Matter With Graham Hill’s 'Living With Less'

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/173328/whats-matter-graham-hills-living-less


Walmart shoppers on Black Friday. (CC 2.0.)

For the past few days, one of the most popular stories on the New York Times website has been Graham Hill’s op-ed “Living With Less. A Lot Less.” In a majestic display of guileless narcissism, Hill, an Internet multimillionaire, congratulates himself for downsizing his life and getting rid of all the stuff—the homes and cars and gadgets and sectional sofas and $300 sunglasses—he accumulated over the past decade. Now he lives in a 420-square-foot studio and has only six dress shirts and “10 shallow bowls” that he uses “for salads and main dishes.” Imagine that. Eating off the same plate. Twice. In one meal.

There are too many phrases to mock (“Olga, an Andorran beauty”; “My space is small. My life is big.”), and the Internet has already done a great job pointing out how obnoxious it is for a multimillionaire to hold himself up as a model of moderation when so many Americans are being forcibly downsized from already cramped lives.

But let me make one serious point—because scrubbed of its irritating tone, Hill’s cautionary tale is a familiar one that both the left and right like to tell to slightly different effects. It’s the moralizing force, for example, behind the appeal of Annie Leonard’s viral video “The Story of Stuff,” A&E’s hit show Hoarders, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles and Glenn Beck’s theory of the 2008 economic crash: Americans are spending more and more of their money on stuff! Oh no! The left attributes this trend to advertising and corporate consumerism; the right blames individual choices and cultural decline. But either way, it is taken as gospel that Americans are spending increasingly untenable amounts of money on stuff and this is what’s making us (as households and as a nation) both bankrupt and unhappy.

This may feel true, but the economic data from the past half century tell a different story. As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi persuasively document in The Two Income Trap, Americans are not going broke buying clothes, books, music, furniture, cars, appliances and other consumer goods. Rampant consumer spending is not the source of their increasingly precarious lives. They call this mistaken narrative “the myth of overspending.” In fact, the share of income we spend in those categories has dramatically declined. For example, in 1949, the average American household spent 11.7 percent of its annual budget on clothes; today it spends just 3.6 percent. By the early 2000s, when Warren and Tyagi wrote their book, American households were spending 44 percent less on major appliances, 30 percent less on furniture and 20 percent less per car than they did just a generation ago in the late 1970s.

[DonCoquixote]

1. amen

Even the Chinese know that a lot of "affluence" is false; we are in hock to the companies that gamed the system so we would be in hock. The whole idea that we are just spending for jollies shows how clueless this person is.

When someone like a Bill gates or Buffett brags about making sure their kids do not inherit a lot, they fail to realize they are making a choice, a choice few people will ever get to make. This fellow quoted failed to see he was making a CHOICE. We in this nation are losing choices, day by day, thanks to people that decide that a Billion dollars is not enough. He will join us only in that the billionaires will eat the millionaires, the same way they ate us.

[MadHound]

2. Excellent reply to Hill's tripe,

And much more polite than my rant when I first read Hill's piece.

[dotymed]

3. In many cases (mine) increased

"buying of stuff" is medical. It costs so much to survive and maintain some measure of health, not much is left.

[annabanana]

4. “the myth of overspending"

The "overspending" narrative is just another chorus of Moral Hazard's greatest hit "Blame the Victim"

And a-one and a-two. . .

[JHB]

5. Comparison "shopping"...

From one of the links in the article at The Nation:

[nonoxy9]

9. Great chart. Thanks for sharing

We're making less and paying more in housing and medical. His little loft probably costs more than most folks houses but they don't see that.

[Zoonart]

6. It's the STRESS stupid

What really bothers me about this piece is the smug self congratulation for discovering the virtue of simplicity.
Marie Antoinette like to pretend to live the "simple life" too, at Le Petite Tirianon... a peasant cottage built on the grounds of Versailles Palace.
I have, by Hill's standards, been living this virtuous life for years, but not by choice. Austerity came down hard on me and mine over five years ago and we made lots of adjustments. We were never accumulators of Stuff, yet we cut all of our purchases to the bone. What's not addressed is the difference between forced and chosen austerity. It is all fine and well to live an austere life of choice when you never have to worry where your next meal is coming from. What can't be measured is the STRESS that comes with austerity when you are not rich.

When I lie in bed and night unable to sleep I do not pray for clothes or trips or handbags....I pray that one day I will be free of the constant worry that grinds me down every day. Worry, that my ten year old car will quit, that my 40yr old roof will not withstand the next super-storm, that my rusted oil tank will begin to leak. What a luxury it would be if I simply did not have this constant anxiety.

[Myrina]

7. ^^ This, for the win ^^

Well stated, and welcome to DU!

[lonestarnot]

10. I'm with you zoonart! Welcome to DU!

[Gormy Cuss]

8. K &R

[yellowcanine]

11. People don't want to hear about rich people "downsizing" any more than they want to hear about all

the money they give to museums. A true philanthropist does not bray about how simply they live or the money they give away. They just do it and let the satisfaction of having done it be their reward.