By Gary Alan Fine, November 23rd, 2012 
A dozen years back Goodman David Brooks entered the cultural pantheon through an oddly incisive book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The title charmed as Brooks asserted that a new generation of elites was upon us. Living well – not political clash – was the best revenge. What Brooks recognized and what Mitt Romney missed was that aesthetics mattered as much as economic interest in establishing political culture.
I think of Bobos when I assay the broadsheet of Brooks’ current employer, The New York Times. One can count on the editorials of the Times to embrace the most progressive respectable position: the stance of the established Statist elite. And one can count on the adverts in the Times to inspire the warm glow of Veblenian pecuniary emulation. I think of Bobos, too, when I peruse the New Yorker or even such ostensibly apolitical, but fully progressive, sources such as Time Out New York (or, from my prairie perch, Time Out Chicago).
These journals are committed to the goals of redistribution of income, environmental sustainability and ecological responsibility, and rabid, compulsive consumption capitalism. Perhaps there is no inherent contradiction between caring about people and caressing things, but the sections of the paper rarely seem as one. Recently in the Sunday Review, the Times’ editorialists promoted more regulations on health care and financial services, a more welcoming immigration policy with support for new arrivals, and one of their columnists, Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahmbo’s brother, Ezbo) is in high dudgeon about companies providing the wrong snacks for their employees (“an additional serving of potato chips every day led to a 1.69-pound weight increase over four years”). The mandarins of the Times did not comment on sea levels or climate change, but wait.
Along with these exhortations, the Times also delivered a posh 156 page Style Magazine: a testimonial to Ferragamo, the Ritz, and the Caymans. The best of living if living well is the best of life. The two sections as juxtaposed represent the Bobo . . .
Read more: All-Consuming Liberalism
By Irit Dekel, August 2nd, 2011 
In Israel, for over three weeks, there have been demonstrations initiated by young people. They were first directed against the high cost of living, but they seem to be developing into something much larger, a movement for a systematic social change, addressing the growing disparities between rich and poor and the difficulty of living well, concerned about issues of social security and the deterioration in the provision of education and health care. What had begun with a consumer uprising against the high prices of cottage cheese over a month ago, leading to a boycott on dairy products (since in Israel they operate as a cartel, not open for competition), appears to be the beginning of what Rosa Luxemburg describes as ”an exercise in democratic action.” I observe the exercise as an Israeli living in Berlin, basing my commentary on newspapers, blog posts and conversations with friends at home.
The “cottage cheese revolt” is no trivial or accidental thing. Israeli dinner tables usually contain this staple, together with a salad. The most popular cottage cheese, Tnuva, has an illustrated home on its package and a well known advertising trope: “the cheese with the home.” Fighting for home is not only for affordable housing or the cost of living. The protesters also talk about the quick decline in the freedom of speech and of the Israeli democratic system under the current government. However, the demonstrators delay, for the time being, what they see as “political demands” for possible negotiation with the government. They fear this would compromise the call for “social justice,” and more immediately, could scare off some of the right-of-center demonstrators. According to Ha’Aretz today (August 2), “a document setting out the demands of the tent protesters in the areas of housing, welfare, education, health and economic policy is being drawn up by the movement’s leaders.”
The tent city in Tel Aviv . . .
Read more: The Tents Movement Uprising in Israel
By Vince Carducci, January 7th, 2011 
“Austerity” is a watchword in the media these days in both domestic and international economic news. The recent downturn, the story goes, has meant that governments can no longer sustain entitlement obligations or take on any more debt. So too must citizens reduce their expectations and assume more personal responsibility, accepting less in return.
In her book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and sociologist Juliet B. Schor presents a different narrative, one that suggests the current environment is an opportunity to live a more satisfactory, which is to say richer, life. She offers a solution to the “work-and-spend” dilemma of modern consumerism she initially described in her 1992 bestseller “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” and continued in the follow up “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need” of 1999. Her thesis rests on four principles: freeing up time by reducing work hours outside the home, shifting that free time to more self-provisioning, developing low cost, low impact but high satisfaction consumption, and reinvesting in community and other forms of social capital.
Why “Business As Usual” No Longer Works
One of Schor’s main assertions is that we must find another way to define wealth and well-being because, in a phrase, there is no alternative. The supposedly endless cycle of material expansion that fueled economic growth as part of what historian Lizabeth Cohen calls the “consumers’ republic” of the postwar era has been exhausted in America at least. Double-digit unemployment, evaporating home equity, and eroding pension balances have taken the gloss off the consumer spending that accounted for between two-thirds and 70 percent of the US economy in recent years.
But more than that, business as usual (or as Schor refers to it “BAU”) has run into another, less malleable barrier: the environment. Mainstream economics has by and large failed to account for the environmental effects (so-called externalities) of growth, a charge many progressives will no doubt find familiar. In particular, Schor debunks the Environmental Kuznets Curve that projects a bell-shaped ratio of . . .
Read more: Juliet B. Schor’s Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
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