The “I want it now!” society

(This is the sixth in a series of posts analyzing each chapter in Jim Wallis’s new book, Rediscovering Values.)

According to Jim Wallis, the three symptoms that drove our society to the Great Recession are greed is good, it’s all about me, and I want it now. That was the thrust of this section of his book, Rediscovering Values. In a biting critique of our instant gratification society, Wallis points out how cheap credit and easy money drive us all to believe that we can have what we want at any time with no thought for whether or not we actually have the money to buy what it is that we want. What used to be unthinkable—buying things on credit that were not investments into our future—is now the norm.

It makes sense, really, when you think about it. After high school, not only are many banks willing to loan for education, the government is willing to back those loans. No need to “earn” money for college tuition: the job at the end of the education will pay it back… eventually. Buying a car is easy… just put no money down, and get the car you want. If it’s a new one, it’ll last longer, even though you’re paying more. Need to buy a house? No need to save and put a nice down payment; just go into a bank and they’ll figure out a way to lend the money. Need an iPhone? Put it on the credit card and pay it off in installments. It’s become so crazy that the Garfield cartoon short where heating something for a single second in the microwave is becoming incredibly too lengthy a process for us.

Any reader of this chapter can “feel the heat” when reading about such instant gratification. Most of us have iPhones or some piece of technology that gives us instant gratification, and when we don’t have access to it our lives quickly turn to shambles (or we’re scrambling to ensure that it won’t).

Decrying unnecessary debt and easy money, Wallis nevertheless misses a perfect opportunity to point out that easy money and cheap credit are merely symptoms of an institutional problem. Nobody can drink too much alcohol if the alcohol was being served freely and without much discretion. Money doesn’t grow on trees in the natural world, yet printing money as if it did is exactly the reason cheap credit and instant gratification are obliged and rewarded in the I-want-it-now society. Wallis could have taken this opportunity to explain how the virtue of savings provides the proper basis for ethical and productive borrowing by businesses at the higher order ends of production. He could have pointed out that price-setting the interest rate distorts the business cycle, producing errors in judgment. Coupled with an endless supply of money from a central bank willing to insure the vast majority of the loans through federal lending programs, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

But blaming such personal and societal vices such as greed and selfishness are easy targets. They are easy explanations that nobody could retort aren’t actually issues, because they obviously are. Yet blaming excessive greed and selfishness is like blaming gravity on a plane crash. In the absence of gravity, of course a plane wouldn’t crash. But why wasn’t the gravity of greed kept in check by other dynamic forces that keep the aircraft stable? The fact of the matter is, no matter how much we decry personal and societal vices, the source (or sources) of the problem is left unchecked. Ignoring them won’t make them go away.

I’m sure I sound like a broken record, yet it seems as if there are numerous opportunities for Wallis to point out a major societal enabler is the source of the problem. Yes, it is true that greed, selfishness, and impatience are societal problems that we must repent of. Yes, we need to return to values that are not harmful to ourselves and to society. There is no argument with those things. The issue is, how exactly do we promote common good and virtuous behavior when the foundation of our entire economy is in stark contrast to those principles?

Wallis concludes the chapter with remarks about efficiency and social costs, blaming deregulation (which was pursued for the sake of “efficiency”) for harmful results such as deaths from peanut butter and lead paint in children’s toys. What’s amazing is not that Wallis wants safer foods at the expense of efficiency, but that he believes that a single institution ought to have a monopoly over the safety of our food and drug distribution, let alone is capable of of protecting us. Instead of promoting responsibility and social cooperation to achieve a better way to keep us safe, he instead advocates that we trust a single agency to keep us safe. But unlike other firms which fail to provide what they promise (and what we pay them to deliver), when the FDA fails to keep us safe, the “solution” to the problem is that it needs more funding! Further, he praises the efforts of state legislatures to outlaw texting-while-driving, a law that is inconsistent at best and unsuccessful at worst. He also explains the environmental damages done by the activities of those who wish to have what they want, when they want it, with no regard for the environment. But these are minor quibbles, so I needn’t go into defending the abolition of the FDA or our right to texting-while-driving, but should point Wallis to Butler Shaffer’s book, Boundaries of Order.

The bulk of this chapter provides an appropriate admonishment that new values ought to be embraced in place of the socially dangerous “values” of greed, narcissism, and impatience.