Media Spotlight: Affluenza
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By Oliver James
In Bret Easton Ellis’ classic novel American Psycho he describes the life of a young New York finance executive called Patrick Bateman who is obsessed by appearances.
Bateman judges everyone by the labels on their clothing, where they live, where they eat and, most famously, even the print design on their business cards.
But while financially successful, he is actually desperately unhappy, alienated from everyone around him and, depending on how you read it, is either fantasising about murdering or actually wiping out many of the people he comes into contact with.
Apart from the killing, many of the real people Oliver James describes in his bestselling book Affluenza are not too far from Easton Ellis’ creation.
At the beginning of the book James describes an encounter he has with a stockbroker called Sam in New York.
Sam earns about £20m a year, stands to inherit billions when his father dies but is paranoid and lives a life detached from the real world in his palatial Manhattan pad.
His alienation is coupled with total lack of concern for the welfare of others and an addiction to sleeping with teenage girls rather than forming meaningful relationships.
By contrast James speaks to a Nigerian taxi driver who has few worldly goods but leads a relatively happy life.
So the question at the heart of his book is why so many people in the developed world appear to have everything but feel like they have nothing and always want more. This condition he describes as a social virus and terms it affluenza.
For the book James interviewed 240 people around the world to find examples of people in the grip of affluenza and those who have overcome it.
He reveals that a quarter of Britons suffer serious emotional distress such as depression and anxiety and finds another quarter on the edge of affluenza.
He also discovers a significant proportion of people on good salaries who nonetheless describe themselves as not having enough money to buy everything they want.
That pretty much covers the last debt boom and parallel housing boom. Credit card spending and remortgaging rocketed as people used the cash to buy ever more household goods.
In fact keeping your mortgage affordable is one of his tips in the second half of the book where he presents a guide on how to combat the affluenza virus.
In the section headed “Consume what you need (not what advertisers want you to want)” he makes the point that 50 years ago living on the never-never was regarded as morally dubious if not dangerous, whereas during the past 10 years it became standard practice.
Borrowing ridiculous sums for a property, he argues, disconnects you from reality.
It’s difficult to dispute much of what James says and no doubt we’ve all met people in the mortgage industry suffering from affluenza. But it was published at the height of the boom in 2007 written just before everything started to crumble.
Many of us have since had to substantially reduce our spending and this is having major repercussions on firms and jobs in the UK.
But if money doesn’t make you happy, with luck we’ll at least all be cheerier as a result.
- Review by Robert Thickett
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