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Growing out of two recent PBS documentaries (Affluenza and Escape from Affluenza), this book uses the metaphor of a disease or addiction to tackle a serious subject: the damage done--to our health, families, communities, and environment--by the obsessive quest for material gain. The authors show that problems such as loneliness, rising debt and bankruptcies, longer working hours, environmental pollution, family conflict, and rampant commercialism, are actually symptoms of this disease.
The authors define Affluenza as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more." Their stated aim is "to encourage a national dialogue about the American consumer dream." They trace the root of the malady to "the obsessive quest for economic expansion that has become the core principle of `the American dream.'"
They describe the situation this way: "We in the United States have the best gas prices, awful weather, continued economic growth, persistent poverty, consumer confidence, spiraling debt. All are connected. In each of the past four years, more Americans declared personal bankruptcy than graduated from college. Our annual production of solid waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks stretching halfway to the moon. We have twice as many shopping centers as high schools. We work more hours each year than do the citizens...