Summarize these lines in 3 sentences. Our materialism is oddly abstract, a path toward an
ideal. The things we acquire are less important than the act
of acquiring, the freedom to choose, and the ability to forget
what we have and to keep on choosing. We don’t aspire, as
people in China did during the 1970s, to “Four Musts”: a
bicycle, a radio, a watch, and a sewing machine. We aspire
instead to such intangibles as comfort and modernity,
qualities for which standards change so rapidly that the
buying can never stop. “Progress is our most important
product,” Ronald Reagan used to say during his tenure as
spokesman for General Electric. And in 1989, after the Berlin
Wall fell, multitudes throughout Eastern Europe disappointed
intellectuals in the West by behaving as if freedom was the
same thing as going shopping. Even China moved on in
the 1980s to the “Eight Bigs”: a color television, an electric
fan, a refrigerator, an audio system, camera, a motorcycle, a
furniture suite, and a washing machine. Now China is moving
beyond the specific “Bigs” and aspires to more, a quest that
will never end. A large super-store chain is opening
stores there. It is amazing to think that from the dawn of time until
the time of Adam Smith,[2] a bit more than two centuries ago,
people believed that wanting and having things was a drain
on wealth, rather than one of its sources. That doesn’t mean,
however, that they didn’t want things or that they didn’t, at
times, go to great lengths to attain them.
Now, as I move, mildly entranced, behind my cart at a
super store, grabbing items I feel for a moment that I need, I
am assumed to be increasing the prosperity not merely of my
own country, but of the entire world. Indeed, in the wake of
the World Trade Center attacks, Americans were exhorted not
to sacrifice, as is usual in wartime, but to consume.
There are those who disagree. Can the massive deficit that
the United States runs with other countries, which is driven
by our hunger for ever more low-priced goods, be sustained
indefinitely? Does our appetite for inexpensive goods from
overseas exploit the low-wage workers who make them, or
does it give them new opportunities? And more profoundly,
are there enough resources in the world to provide everyone
with this kind of living standard and still have enough clean
air and clean water? How many super-store shoppers can one
planet sustain?