A generation obsessed with material wealth

From Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land:

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders. Relative indifference to wealth for its own sake was widespread in the postwar decades. In a survey of English schoolboys taken in 1949, it was discovered that the more intelligent the boy the more likely he was to choose an interesting career at a reasonable wage over a job that would merely pay well. Today’s schoolchildren and college students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

The survey of English schoolboys is cited in T.H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class.

No one talks about this anymore

At the end of the introduction to his book, Judt quotes a comment he received on his New York Review of Books essay “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?”, which contained the theme of Ill Fares the Land:

“What is most striking,” she wrote, “about what you say is not so much the substance but the form: you speak of being angry at our political quiescence; you write of the need to dissent from our economically-driven way of thinking, the urgency of a return to an ethically informed public conversation. No one talks like this any more.” Hence this book.

The title of the book comes from Oliver Goldsmith:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

More on Ill Fares the Land in upcoming posts.

Resources:

Photo source: Politics Prose

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?, The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009