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Highly commercialized societies like America are more likely to leave the poor behind. A high CI score is strongly associated with a high national poverty rate (measured by the OECD as the share of households below 50 percent of the median income), as we see in Figure 8.3. A high CI is also associated with a low level of development aid to poor countries, measured by official development assistance as a share of GDP. The high-CI countries are also those with the largest share of household income accruing to the richest 1 percent of households. It’s fair to say that in the highly commercialized economies, market values trump social values: the poor, both those at home and abroad, are more or less forgotten. I would surmise that in such societies, individuals are so overwhelmed by market values (bargaining, self-interest, competition) that they lose touch with other values (compassion, trust, honesty).

Figure 8.3: Relationship Between Commercialization Index and National Poverty Rate

Source: Data from the RTL Group and OECD.

Table 8.1: Commercialization Index

Source: OECD Statistical Databases and International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). Note: U.S. rankings are in parentheses,

Whatever the cause, the United States is privately rich but socially poor. It caters to the pursuit of wealth but pays scant attention to those left behind. And though American culture emphasizes individualism and the pursuit of individual wealth perhaps more than any other society, that focus does not lead to greater happiness.

Of course such worries about hypercommercialism are not new. Karl Marx famously critiqued the “commodifaction” of social life from the perspective of the left. Yet trenchant criticism of excessive consumerism has also come from the religious and moral right. The famous German free-market thinker Wilhelm Röpke launched a famous and powerful critique against soulless advertising and mass consumerism in his book A Humane Economy in the middle of the twentieth century. Röpke observed that advertising “separates our era from all earlier ones as little else does, so much so that we might well call our century the age of advertising.”10

Our great sociologists and economists also remind us that it’s not only mass society that has succumbed to mass commercialization, but also the rich. Early modern capitalism was built not on the goal of luxurious consumption by the rich, but rather on the virtue of prudent consumption and high saving by the entrepreneur. The German sociologist Max Weber described the highest ethic of early capitalism to be “the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life,” as befitting the Protestant values of the time.11 The British economist John Maynard Keynes made a similar observation about the moral underpinnings of British capitalism in the late nineteenth century. The point, he wrote, was that late-nineteenth-century society tolerated the rich because they lived properly and correctly, by accumulating vast wealth but not consuming it. As Keynes put it:

Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the capitalist system. If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a régime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.… The capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of “saving” became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.12

As another example, America’s greatest late-nineteenth-century capitalist, steel man Andrew Carnegie, similarly distinguished between the worthy calling of making money and the proper use of the wealth once made. In his famous and enormously influential