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Book Reviews: Enough Is Enough
Author: Jeffrey L. Seglin (more by this author)
Source: inc.com - July 02, 1996

Some good books are worth reading about... even if they go out of print too quickly! Here's a 1996 article by Inc. magazine Editor At Large Jeffrey Seglin. You will have to scour your local used booksellers, the library, on-line book auctions or other book repository to find the books Jeffrey discusses. We'll add links to related books and Sohodojo content soon along with search queries to our affilitated used booksellers.

In 1991, Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange tell us, more than "2 million more Americans found themselves in poverty than in 1990, bringing the total figure to 35.7 million people, or to 14.2 percent of the American population." They go on to observe that "more people are homeless than at any time since the Great Depression" and that between 1979 and 1989, a time at which the gross national product (GNP) increased more than 25 percent, "the rate of child poverty increased by 21 percent in the United States."

Poverty sucks. We know that. But what can we do about it? It seems that the more we try to produce solutions, the wider the trouble begins to spread. What's more, it turns out that some of our solutions may be exacerbating the problem. Or so Goudzwaard and de Lange argue in their 1995 book Beyond Poverty and Affluence: Toward an Economy of Care. The authors believe that the traditional economic view that "restoration of industrial production growth will remedy poverty, environmental degeneration, and unemployment," is "thoroughly simplistic" because "like a virus that has developed a resistance or immunity to the cure ... these economic malaises have now become immune to the remedy of increased production growth."

In their short, thoughtful book, the authors articulately lay out the framework for an economic model that is more accountable than the traditional economic view that "rejects any possibility of assigning the responsibility for economic damages and ailments to their economic agents." Instead we should embrace an economics of enough by adopting "income and employment levels (and with them, indirectly, production and consumption levels) in such a way that they serve the objectives of providing sufficient care for human subsistence needs, the quality of labor, the sustainability of agricultural and urban ecosystems, and improved development opportunities, especially for the poorest countries of the Third World."

The noble goal of the authors is to get us to rethink our priorities. And our top three priorities should be meeting the needs of the poor, reorienting the priorities of the rich, and giving weight to the needs of future generations. All good and righteous deeds, for sure. But as Goudzwaard and de Lange observe, we're just too damn busy to pay attention to what's going on around us. "In the midst of wealth," they write, "we have less and less time on our hands, and we find our daily activities more harried than ever before."

In an introductory essay to another new book, Rethinking Materialism, editor Robert Wuthnow observes that this struggle to keep the squirrel wheel spinning leads us to replace the spiritual side of our lives with a devotion to more materialistic pleasures.

The common thread that lies at the heart of Rethinking Materialism and Beyond Poverty is this wake-up call for us to begin living in a more responsible manner, a manner that takes into account our impoverished people and planet. While these are important issues, they are not particularly new messages. (E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973) is perhaps the bible of the limits to growth [Goudzwaard and de Lange's "economy of enough"] movement.)

The authors in Wuthnow's collection fall short of their task to create clarity: they observe, rethink, but rarely do they lay out prescriptive hands-on stuff we can do to turn our lives and the fate of the beleaguered planet around. They observe well how consumed and distracted we all are by the day to day consumption of our lives--so why do they add to our overwhelmedness? Don't take 300 pages of deforested woods to restate what we already know about our miserable state without telling us--beyond the don't-believe-everything-consumer-driven-buy-it-all-and-then-some society tells you--concretely what we can do. (Upon finishing a read-through ofRethinking Materialism, I was reminded of retired cantaloupe packer and longshoreman Reg Theriault's wry observation about Karl Marx's theory of the working class in How to Tell When You're Tired: A Brief Examination of Work (W.W. Norton & Co., 1995): "Marx, it appears, lacked insight into the reality of day-to-day work, perhaps because he never really held down a job.")

Goudzwaard and de Lange, on the other hand, lay out an ambitious 12-step program for economic recovery that includes prescriptive measures for everything from the way we can incentivize businesses to develop policies of care for the environment to an appeal to us to change our Western life-style.

But even in Goudzwaard and de Lange's vision there's a tremendous hurdle--the gap between the worlds in which observations such as theirs are made and the worlds in which the problems exist.

Harvard professor Michael Porter, for instance, recognized this gap in his essay, "The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City (The Rise of the Urban Entrepreneur)" (Inc., State of Small Business, 1995) when he observed how suspect nonprofit inner-city agencies are of for-profit businesses offering assistance. While the nonprofits and for-profits both may have similar goals in eradicating inner city poverty, the suspicion of one toward the other stymies any real progress. Porter called for a suspension of suspicion since he believed that it was for-profit enterprises that could turn around a community.

In both Rethinking Materialism and Beyond Poverty and Affluence, business does not come off particularly well. It's the evil, growth-at-any-cost machine that blinds us to our materialism and gets in the way of erasing poverty at all levels. A vision such as this doesn't do much for bridging the gap between non-profits and for-profit businesses. What's more, it's tough to get for-profit enterprises (and let's face it, it's their money and growth the authors want redirected) to listen up when you're spending most of your time recounting a laundry list of evils they've released on mankind destroying everything from seaways to spiritually-meaningful lives.

Some writers have begun to lay out models for how to do business with concern for the earth and its inhabitants in mind. There is, for instance, Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce (HarperBusiness, 1993), excepted in Inc. in the November, 1993 article "Seven Steps to Doing Good Business" and Michael Rothschild's Bionomics (1990), discussed this week as Inc. Online's "Issue of the Week". But that still doesn't close the chasm that's ripped open between private sector businesses and non-profits that are traditionally charged with addressing the effects of poverty.

One writer who has put forth a new model that could bring these two worlds together is Bill Shore, founder of Share our Strength, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C. which enlists the talents of chefs, restaurateurs, writers, business leaders, and others to help fight hunger. Shore's model is basically that non-profits should learn to make money, which in turn could empower them to make change.

"The nonprofit sector of society," writes Shore in Revolution of the Heart (1995) "is rich in compassion and idealism, but it is entrepreneurially bankrupt, stuck in the posture of settling for that tiny margin of the financial universe that consists of leftover wealth--the excess funds people are willing and able to donate after their other primary needs have been met. Depending on leftover wealth to fight poverty is like trying to get a tractor trailer to the top of a hill by depending upon passersby to push it in their spare time rather than creating a powerful engine that will take it there."

Like the authors of Beyond Poverty and Affluence, Shore recognizes how urgent the problem of poverty has become, but rather than call for the radical reformation of capitalism as it's come to be practiced, he finds an innovative way to tap into the idea that wealth creation can solve the problems of the ill-fated non-profit organizations.

That still begs the question of how in our ever-increasingly consumed lives we muster even the energy it would take to do anything to participate in helping to make this change. And perhaps the answer to that question is indeed to take a leap of faith, to embrace the vision of a different lifestyle that would enable us to revisit our values and desires.

While they don't suggest how to motivate ourselves off the squirrel wheel and into a new world vision, Goudzwaard and de Lange do eloquently argue that once we accept that that's where we want to head, we might get there by "developing a way of life that is content with 'enough' and that demonstrates this contentment by a conscious acceptance of a level of income and consumption that does not escalate."

Jeffrey L. Seglin is an Editor At Large for Inc. magazine

• Rethinking Materialism: Perspectives on the Spiritual Dimension of Economic Behavior by Robert Wuthnow, Editor. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995, 276 pp.)

• Beyond Poverty and Affluence: Toward an Economy of Care by Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995, 165 pp.)

• Revolution of the Heart by Bill Shore (Riverhead Books, a division of G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995, 168 pp.)

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