The 'good life' gets more elusive

[QC]

From vacation homes to cars, consumers are intent on living well. More people consider such possessions essential to the good life than did so during the boom times of the late 1990s, according to a RoperASW survey that's tracked consumers' definition of the good life since 1975.

Consumers "continue to want it all," said Carey Silvers, vice president of the market research firm. "Even if they get knocked down a rung, they'll look to get back up as soon as possible."

Fifty-two percent of Americans say a second car is essential to the good life, up from 43 percent in 1999, the heyday of the economic boom, according to the survey of 2,004 adults conducted in February.

Forty-eight percent said a vacation home would be necessary, up from 35 percent four years ago.

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid={F84C17F9-BE06-4F15-B8AF-13F94E6336F9}&siteid=mktw&dist=nwhwk&archive=true

Half of all Americans think a second car and vacation home are necessities?

Hmmm. Am I the only one who sees a real disaster for those in power when these expectations run up against the reality of corporate neofeudalism?

[punpirate]

1. No disaster as long as those in power...

... keep telling these people, "stick with us, it's right around the corner, the effects of those tax cuts are about to kick in, any moment now, just keep watchin' the hand with the magic wand...."

[bigwoody]

18. Just like if you always say the market is going to go up(or down)

you'll eventually be right!:evilgrin:

[Stephanie]

2. "corporate neofeudalism"

You coined it. Let's spread this one around. Really sums it up.

Corporate Neofeudalism

[QC]

3. Thanks! I'm not sure if it's mine, though.

[punpirate]

4. I think the phrase...

... first showed up in some anti-globalization articles, and was used frequently during the micro-FM vs. FCC debates.

It's a descriptive and accurate term, wherever it originated.

Cheers.

[Stephanie]

5. Maybe Corporate Feudalism is better

There wasn't any corporate the first time, so what's neo about it now? Scans better anyway.

Corporate Feudalism.

[jafap]

6. I raise a toast to all of us

who are breaking our backs every day
if wanting the good life is such a crime
Lord, then put me away, yeah - here's to ya'

Still, I think I would rather see those people get some sense slapped into them (what can I say about that metaphor, that I'm a guy who thinks he can fix his TV by banging on top of it? At least I am using an open hand.) than to see the economy improve enough so they can get their wishes.

It is past time to redefine the good life. How about we start with
1) jobs, grocery stores, libraries, and schools within walking distance.

Oops, I guess that will not work, because for an American "walking distance" is about two feet - the distance from here to the remote on the other side of the couch.

I would also suggest mass transportation, but the middle class does not want to mingle with the canaille any more than Bush does. Too bad the good life does not also include a good society - it is an individual, atomistic, selfish thing. What's in it for me?

[Mairead]

7. You have nailed it! That is the attitude that must change.

Looking around here at DU, I don't know whether I have any faith that it will, though.

One theory says that people like DUers should be vanguards (think denotation, not connotation), being exposed to enough good stuff here to kickstart their brains, but I don't believe we're seeing that.

The other theory says that people like DUers are generally more privileged, and are thus retarded rather than vanguards, insulated from the harsh realities that would kickstart their brains.

Which is true? I hope the second is, but I have no evidence. What I'm pretty sure of, though, is that if DUers are exemplary of our chances...then we're probably fscked.

[QC]

14. I think it's probably the second one, much as I wish otherwise.

The 60s Left had some fine legacies, but one of the less admirable ones was the bizarre notion that the proles were the forces of reaction and the real revolutionary vanguard was affluent college kids.

The main effect of this bourgeois takeover of the Left is that very few Leftists have a personal sense of what class means. I'm sorry, but learning politics from one's Marxist comparative lit professor in a graduate seminar is not the same as growing up in a mining camp, as my father did, or in a factory worker's home, as I did, and seeing the class system up close. (I say this as a blue-collar kid who got to go to grad school and sit in lots of seminar rooms listening to Marxist professors who have never once had to worry about how they were going to pay the rent.)

Look around DU and you'll see plenty of snide commentary about the proles, how ignorant and silly and gauche they are. That sort of thing can only come from very comfortable people who have been insulated from the sort of hardships that are part of everyday life for most folks.

[Mairead]

22. I can remember a number of kids in the '60s

who seemed to imagine that they'd invented social consciousness along with sex and drugs. They didn't grasp that Marxism simply wasn't figural for 'vernacular' socialists and commies who'd never had the chance of a uni education.

[QC]

8. I really do see some interesting possibilities here.

My dad, now retired, was a factory worker when I was growing up. His dad was a miner. Both of them expected to be laid off or canned from jobs. As they saw it, that was just the way things worked, and it sucked, but what are you gonna do about it?

So when the layoff came, they went out and looked for another job. Some of them were shitty. I remember my dad, in the early 70s, taking a job putting tar on roofs for $1 an hour because that was all he could find. He hated it, of course, but hey, what are you gonna do?

Now, though, it's not just blue-collar types who are getting "rightsized." It's the privileged, those who bought into the bossman's old lie that they are better than the guys on the loading dock because they work in the office and have clean hands. They are finding out that the bossman really didn't have any more respect or consideration for them than for the loading dock crew.

It's already having some interesting effects. A lot of the folks who were "cyberlibertarians" three years ago are now sounding like protectionists. There's new interest in so-called "white-collar unions." Yuppies are sweating their $3000 house payments. Brytneigh, Dakota, and Meighan are now facing the possibility of attending public school.

I suspect the newly proletarianized don't find blue-collar anger quite so crude and ridiculous anymore.

These are the sort of people who will get righteously pissed, rather than just write it off as how the system works, like my father did. And these people are the GOP's base.

So we could be in for some very interesting times when those who have high expectations figure out that they're just proles like the rest of the bottom 90%.

[punpirate]

9. A very interesting take on...

... current events. Let's see how many of the upper-middle class take note of their situation in political terms. I've worked both sides of the fence, and know both environments and the kinds of people occupying each. I don't wish anyone ill, but, sometimes, politically, it's good for the country that the BMW drivers/McMansion owners get a taste of what the laborers endure daily. Solidarity comes in all forms and in many ways.

Cheers.

[QC]

10. I hope that happens.

As someone else pointed out up the thread, we can expect the GOP to do what they've always done--make promises and divert people's attention--so there's always the possibility that the new proles will not see their situation in political terms.

But I do think they Democratic Party could win big if they would make the case that what is happening to workers in this country is political and the GOP is behind it.

[prolesunited]

11. Don't have time now

to dig up the newspaper article, but there was a story a while back in which the McMansion owners who lost out in the Enron debacle were flooding social service agencies in search of assistance.

They were appalled that there were no government programs or charities that would help people pay their $2,000+ mortgages, SUV notes or private school tuition bills. The agency workers were amazed by the attitudes and delusions they encountered, like private school was a right, not a privilege, and perhaps they couldn't keep their McMansion. I guess they swallowed that myth about the welfare queen driving the caddy to the store to buy steaks. It was definitely the epitome of karmic justice.

I'm not wealthy by any means, but I do OK and really want for nothing. However, I also recall subsisting on welfare for a year and living in poverty for about the next five. It kind of puts everything in perspective. I've been there and that's why I fight, to help those that are there now. I guess some people just go the other way, though. I got mine, so screw you.

I agree, though, that if we're not in the top 10%, we're proles. That's why we have to unite. ;-)

[QC]

12. I remember that article.

I also remember being pretty staggered by it. I thought it was no longer possible to shock me, but....

[punpirate]

13. It related to the experiences of...

... people manning an office for emergency help for people unable to meet their immediate bills in Plano, TX.

Do a search for "Plano" and "assistance" and you'll probably nail it.

Cheers.

[trof]

15. I'm doing my best.

;-)
I'm living in my "vacation" home.
We bought it and moved in 10 years ago.
I've never owned more than one home.
OK, I don't "own" this one.
But as long as I keep making the mortgage, insurance, and tax payments, "they" let me live here.
The good news: In October I get a $1400 a month pay raise. Start collecting Social Security.
Our "first" car is a 1998 Dodge Caravan that just turned 100,000 miles.
Our second car is a 1988 Ford Ranger pickup with 120,000 miles on it.

I guess we're kind of at the low end of the good life crowd, but we cope. We cope.

[QC]

16. Sounds like you haven't got the good life after all!

Greed is good! Or so we're told, anyway.

[Clete]

17. What I want to know is how ordinary working people

can be expected to pay half a million for an ordinary family home?

[Ellen Forradalom]

19. The good life means getting rid of the car altogether

and the job required to support it.

[thermodynamic]

20. That's proof America has learned nothing since the OPEC oil embargo of '73

OPEC will either slam another one on us...

but that won't matter once the damn stuff runs out.

The pukes gave us the mess we're in and with the amount of them whining "depdence on foreign oil", one has to wonder why the US continues its reliance on foreign products and globalization. How can America survive as an isolationist country if we're relying on others to do the work and to give us the energy we (mis)use?

Bush and his cronies want it both ways. The sooner reality hits them the better but it'll be a dark day for the rest of us.

[Terwilliger]

21. nahhh...just vote Democrat

everything will be AOK :eyes:

[QC]

25. What do you recommend?

I think most of us agree on what's wrong, so what would you have us do to fix it?

[QC]

26. Seriously, Terwilliger.

What should we do to make things better. Surely you have something more to offer the discussion than a one-liner and an emoticon.

[TheBigGuy]

23. a second car most certainly is a necessity if you don't make much

depending on where you live.

If you dont have much education and are married most likely you and your wife are working, just to pay the rent or mortgage..to make ends meet.

And if you live in rural parts of the USA, or in smaller citys with bad mass transit you AND your wife are most likely going to have to drive, to get to work, take yr kid to day care, etc.


So yeah, a second car has become a "necessit"y to alot of folks, and not the folks you might thing.

[QC]

24. Agreed about the second car.

Most places outside cities have lousy public transport, if any.

The vacation home part is pretty amazing, though. It's odd that people's material expectations are increasing so much at a time when their prospects are falling through the floor.

[TheBigGuy]

27. well..the thread header did say "Good Life"

for me that means affluence. Not necesssity.

So I think if you think what would be needed to live an affluent, well-off lifestyle...ie the Good Life....Id say a second home would be a necessiity.


Now to just live a normal average life, you wouldnt need a vacation home, but might need a second car.

[union_maid]

28. The Good Life for me..

would mean that the one car and the one home were paid for. That would be sweet. Of course, my husband and I have a combination of circumstances that allow us to share one car without hardship - we live very close to other family so loaners and/or rides are possible in emergencies and we work near enough to one another with similar schedules so it's a matter of a few extra minutes a day to share. The Really Good Life would involve time and money to take that one car on more road trips. Never wanted a second home of any sort. I'd rather just be able to get in the car and go somewhere when the mood strikes.