The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [61]
For several decades, the federal government, largely through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), maintained at least some regulatory control on private broadcasters to enforce some public-spiritedness and competition.9 As in so much of American society, however, the corporate-owned media escaped the grasp of public regulation during the 1980s and 1990s, so that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the media stood unchallenged by government and indeed had become a full-fledged propaganda partner with Washington.
One key stop on the journey of the private sector’s complete takeover of the airwaves came in 1996, with the Telecommunications Act signed into law by President Clinton. Yet again, Clinton proved that corporate empowerment is bipartisan, without much difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. The new act effectively undid the remaining barriers to media concentration in TV and radio and unleashed a wave of corporate mergers, creating the mega–media companies. As of today, the media giants include Disney, Comcast, Westinghouse, Viacom, Time Warner, and News Corporation.
The media and the politicians now live in splendid symbiosis. The airwaves promote corporate products, consumer values, and the careers of friendly politicians. The politicians promote media deregulation, low taxes, and freedom from scrutiny of performance and public service.
Measuring Hypercommercialization
Though I can’t prove that America’s mass-media culture, ubiquitous advertising, and long hours of daily TV watching are the fundamental causes of its tendency to let markets run rampant over social values, I can show that America represents the unhappy extreme of commercialism among the leading economies. To do this, I have created a Commercialization Index (CI) that aims to measure the degree to which each national economy is oriented toward private consumption and impatience rather than collective (public) consumption and regard for the future. My assumption is that the United States and other heavy-TV-watching societies will score high on the CI and that a high CI score will be associated with several of the adverse conditions plaguing American society.
I include six items in the Commercialization Index, each item designed to measure a distinct aspect of the public-private or current-future dimensions of social choice. In each case a higher score signifies a higher degree of commercialization:
The national consumption rate (private plus government consumption as a share of GDP)
The average hours worked per year by a full-time employee (low leisure time, high orientation to market consumption)
The national nonvoting rate (lack of public participation)
Private health care spending as a percentage of total national health care spending (health care as a private good rather than a public good)
Private education spending as a percentage of total national education spending (education as a private good rather than a public good)
Private consumption spending as a percentage of national (private plus public) consumption (private consumption as the dominant form of consumption)
To keep things simple, each of these measures is scaled from 0 to 1, with 1 being the most commercially oriented score. Each country’s overall Commercialization Index score is calculated as the simple average of the six component measures. The overall ranking and the six components are shown in Table 8.1.
The United States is by far the most commercialized country in the sample, followed by Switzerland. America ranks first in one of the six variables (the share of private health care spending) and second in three of the remaining five. Generally, the rankings on the various components of the index are highly correlated across the countries. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States tend to rank high on most dimensions of commercialization. The Scandinavian social democracies