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Obesity, which is rising in affluent societies, is bad for health, expensive to treat and stigmatising. Its prevalence is higher in market-liberal societies than in those with a more extensive welfare state. This book explores the hypothesis that obesity is a response to stress, and that market-liberal societies are more stressful due to the greater intensity of economic and social competition, and to lower levels of social protection.

This chapter outlines the transformation of tallymen from Victorian itinerant pedlars to late 20th-century moneylenders, the controversies that dogged them, and the scale and scope of the sector. At the heart of critiques was the belief that tallymen used high pressure sales to dupe working-class wives into costly credit deals behind their husbands' backs. Attempts by tallymen to re-brand themselves as credit drapers, and then credit traders, are explained. Their business methods are outlined, stressing the importance of their relationship with customers. They engendered much loyalty. Customers appreciated weekly collections and the discipline this imposed on tight budgets did not focus on the system's high costs. There was a great deal of intergenerational use of tallymen by customers and the sector initially did better than expected in the affluent society. However, it began losing the ‘cream’ of its customers in the 1960s to less costly forms of credit.

Television programs featuring hillbilly characters and settings reflected both contemporary social concerns about Southern mountain people and a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement. The repeated use of hillbilly routines in 1950s variety shows and situation comedies such as The Real McCoys illustrated tensions stemming from the massive migration of Appalachians to midwestern industrial cities. Similarly, the phenomenally successful Beverly Hillbillies of the mid-1960s aired in the same years that Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs focused renewed attention on impoverished and isolated white mountain folk living in the midst of “the affluent society”. By presenting the Clampetts as safely domesticated comic buffoons who remain morally upright despite the venality that surrounds them, the show helped ease public concerns about economic and social inequality by minimizing the plight of the people of the Southern mountains, and portraying their poverty as simply part of their folk culture.

The transformation of Europe, from postwar ruins to the era of the economic miracles; the ‘revolutions of rising expectations’ and their fulfilment through the recipes of growth; unique, temporary force of the American model of private, cconsumerist, unlimited prosperity, and its effects at level of popular culture, inc debate over the birth of television for all, critical reactions such as French ‘nouvelle’ vague; search for balance between welfare state and ‘growth’. The chapter ends with evidence of the fading of the American myths of the era as west European societies regain confidence and develop their own syntheses of tradition and modernity.

This chapter discusses how private mass consumption and the balance between private and public spending became important issues of public debate in the United States and in West Germany. The context and the outcome of the debates, however, were dramatically different, and both reflected and perpetuated the transatlantic differences in the politics of mass consumption between the two countries. While public spending and consumer policy remained separate issues in the United States, by the late 1960s, the German government was consciously promoting an approach to the politics of mass consumption that addressed both private and public goods and services; product labeling and subsidized housing, for example, became equally part of federal consumer policy. These differences in policy approaches were indicative of divergent conceptions of what an affluent society should look like.

The rationale for the book’s focus and themes is outlined. The Affluent Society is ‘one of those books’ that define the economics discipline, standing in a long line starting with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations – books that are deeply subversive of accepted ideas and theories, slow burns. It is a book that caused interest and effects beyond the economics discipline. Many of the themes raised speak to current concerns in our age of uncertainty sparked by the global financial crisis that erupted fifty years after it was published.

This chapter describes the challenge of the myth of an affluent society in the 1950s and early 1960s. Social experts transformed a technical and statistical knowledge into a political project that reintegrated poor people into the American society. Their crusade reinvigorates the old belief in the Western World of putting an end to poverty.

Chapter 7 explores how the ideal of creativity evolved within the postwar culture industries, with a particular focus on developments in advertising and industrial design. Following the defeat of the Popular Front, many culture workers from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s came to believe that their rising affluence set them in a new realm of freedom beyond necessity. Nonetheless, the ethos of creativity in postwar America clashed with the forces of consumer capitalism that still constrained the autonomy of culture workers. This tension was particularly evident in the creative revolution that swept New York’s advertising industry during the 1960s, but, as the chapter shows, it also influenced the evolution of industrial design theory and practice during the heyday of postwar prosperity.

This book is about the politics of race and poverty in America. It tells the story of the North Carolina Fund, a pioneer effort to improve the lives of the “neglected and forgotten” poor in a nation that celebrated itself as an affluent society. Governor Terry Sanford created the Fund in 1963, at a time when the United States stood at a crossroads. A decade of civil rights activism had challenged the country to fulfill its promise of equality and opportunity. Not since the Civil War and Reconstruction had reformers raised such fundamental questions about the political and social foundations of the republic. It was, however, by no means clear how Americans would answer. Alabama governor George C. Wallace spoke for one possibility.

Given an average of 2 per cent economic growth and a doubling of the material standard of living every 30–35 years, one would assume that most people would be more than satisfied by now, experience saturation, and not be particularly interested in greater consumption. However, this is hardly the case. Few, except a handful of ‘green’ activists portrayed as naïve and development- hostile, doubt the value of growth and increased consumption. Economic growth is broadly viewed as a self-evidently rational and positive objective, and any stagnation, or a mere 1 per cent growth, is viewed as problematic. This is partly a matter of securing employment, of course, but equally if not more important is the increase of consumption. Why is there no satiation? Why these continual complaints that many groups in society are not getting sufficient increases in pay or grants to have a satisfactory material standard of living? Such questions are addressed in a review of a number of theories and themes that cast doubt on the great consumption project: Why does higher consumption, on the whole, not lead to greater satisfaction in life? Among other things, I touch on the need problem, the difficulty of making wise decisions, and the role played by consumption propaganda in forming and, perhaps, distorting the priorities in life and driving up expectations and claims. All these create considerable ambiguity and uncertainty around wants and consumption as a way of meeting these. I also address the significance of fashion and brands, making consumer satisfaction temporal and contingent upon living up to rising standards for what is acceptable. Finally, I discuss the time aspect and how people with increased consumption possibilities run into time constraints. One could talk here about the time limits of growth. I will also be returning to this book’s principal thesis about the social limits of growth and the problem of much consumption in post-affluent societies being of a positional character and leading to zero-sum games about benefits and satisfaction. The concept of ‘need’ is tricky. It is certainly true that we need food, water, oxygen, warmth, and sensory stimulation.