The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life - Hardcover

Schwartz, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393036464 ISBN 13: 9780393036466

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1994

Synopsis

Argues that materialism has eroded the value of freedom, family, friends, work, education, health, and leisure and that students are turning from idealism to cynicism

About this title

About the Author:

Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He is the author of several books, including The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life and The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. His articles have appeared in many of the leading journals in his field, including the American Psychologist. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

From Kirkus Reviews:

This broad-brush essay starts from the premise that ``there can be too much freedom in life, and that too much freedom has a serious moral, social, and emotional price.'' Schwartz (Psychology/Swarthmore) is concerned with the darker side of the seemingly limitless choices of middle-class American life. Addressing the psychic toll exacted by too fervent a pursuit of money, power, and position, he catalogues many disturbing features of our time: predatory corporations, the status of medicine and law as self-regulating monopolies, the commercialization of professional sports. Ultimately, he concludes that we must sacrifice some individual freedom for community values and ``reform our institutions so that being a good person is less costly.'' The author is at his best is when he draws on his psychological expertise to make arguments about human nature, our attitudes toward consumption and status, the components of love, the value of work, and the importance of classroom attitudes that foster lifelong learning. Schwartz's grasp of politics and economics is less solid--he doesn't mention the communitarian movement, whose critique of individualism and advocacy of a sense of social responsibility would seem to make it a natural ally. Similarly, he offers only sketchy analyses of what's needed to reorient law and medicine, how to revamp college sports or foster model retail outlets such as consumer cooperatives. He offers an absorbing discussion of his own return to Judaism through a congregation rife with conflict over the relation between religion and politics, but he might also have explored whether institutions other than religious ones can help us ``reintroduce the language of responsibility and morality into our public life.'' Schwartz's ambitious reach understandably exceeds his grasp. But his effort is worthy, and his conclusions contain much sense. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0393036464
• ISBN 13: 9780393036466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 394