The Politics Of Simple Living

The Politics of Simple Living A New Direction for Liberalism by Charles Siegel ISBN: 978-0-9788728-2-3 Copyright © 2008 by Charles Siegel. Cover illustration copyright by Andrew B. Singer, www.andysinger.com. Published by the Preservation Institute, Berkeley, California. www.preservenet.com Contents Chapter 1: A Green Majority ........................................................... 5 Chapter 2: Downshifting and Work-Time Choice...........................8 Losing the Fight over Work Time..............................................9 Choice of Work Hours .............................................................12 Compulsory Consumption .......................................................17 Chapter 3: Livable Cities and Neighborhood Choice ...................18 Cities in the Consumer Society ...............................................18 Traditional Neighborhood Design ...........................................21 Transforming American Cities ................................................23 Cities and Simpler Living........................................................30 Chapter 4: Family Time and Child-Care Choice...........................31 Instead of Day Care .................................................................32 More Money or More Time for Children ................................35 Activities or Commodities.......................................................38 Chapter 5: Optimism About the Future .........................................39 Taxes and Equality...................................................................40 A Carbon Tax Shift ..................................................................44 Two Possible Futures ...............................................................46 Chapter 6: From Old Left to Green ...............................................53 The Decline of the Left............................................................53 A Convenient Truth..................................................................56 Notes...............................................................................................60 Chapter 1 A Green Majority Our political thinking has not caught up with the unprecedented change that occurred in America during the twentieth century, the change from a scarcity economy to a surplus economy. In the year 1900, the average American’s income was near what we now define as the poverty level. Large-scale industry was expanding production dramatically, and there was widespread hope that economic growth could relieve poverty. Socialists – joined later in the century by New Deal and Great Society liberals – wanted the government to make sure that economic growth would benefit working people. In the year 2000, the average American’s income was more than five times what it had been a century earlier. During the twentieth century, America was the first society in history to move from scarcity to wide-spread affluence. Yet liberals kept focusing on the same policies that they supported to alleviate poverty early in the century: the government should spend money to provide more health care, provide more education, provide more housing, and provide other services. Liberals kept focusing on the problems of scarcity. We still have not caught up with the fact that, for most Americans, the age-old problem of scarcity has become less important than the new problems caused by affluence – problems such as traffic congestion, urban sprawl, shortages of natural resources, and global warming. Most important, liberals have not realized that supporting the consumerist standard of living is a huge burden for most Americans, leaving us without enough time for our families and for our own interests. They have not realized that most of us would be better off if we could downshift economically and have more free time rather than consuming more. Environmentalists focus on the problems caused by economic growth, but they have not come up with a positive vision of the future that would help relieve these environmental problems and would also give us a more satisfying way of life than we have in today’s consumer society. ... - tailieumienphi.vn