So argue the new moralists of the left, especially the anti-consumer greens. A new book entitled The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 advances the idea that consumer choice, affluence and progress have brought us to a moral abyss. Prof. Christie Davies of the British think tank The Social Affairs Unit savages the thesis:

British sobriety was built at an earlier time of increasing affluence, indeed alcohol consumption fell in the last decades of the nineteenth century because the men’s beer money was diverted into consumer goods. The problem today is that it has been diverted back again. Yet the worst of all alcohol problems, one that knocked several years off life expectations, was produced in the old Soviet Union – a land of rising money incomes, no consumer goods, high levels of personal saving, no advertising and a population that got fat on bread and spuds, stank of rank tobacco and rolled drunk in the snow. But according to Offer, it’s all the fault of capitalism and advertising…
Offer does not suggest how we (and in their different ways the unhappy Americans and the shrinking childless peoples of Eastern and Southern Europe) get out of the pit of affluence but his snide remarks about Conservative politicians imply he likes leftist solutions incorporating the evils of social justice. Sensible people know that it is only through a return to a society based on our old loyalties, traditional values and primordial commitments that a solution could be found. Maybe there is no solution at all but this is the only path with any promise at all. You certainly won’t solve the crisis by letting the economy collapse and setting up committees on happiness.

Of course, a lot of what Prof. Davies says applies to the “crunchy con” theory too.