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and 2004, the largest increase over a single year’s time in fifteen years.29 In 2005 we had ten times as much clinical depression as in 1945. The use of antidepressants tripled between 1994 and 2004.30 As many as 40 million Americans are now allergic to their own homes—to the chemicals in paints, cleaning products, treated wood, wallpaper, and plastics. We average 20 percent less sleep at night than we got in 1900.31 Americans work more hours than people in almost any other industrialized country.32 The debts of individual consumers have been growing at twice the rate of incomes.33 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2005 Americans carried approximately $832 billion in credit card debt, a number that is expected to balloon to $1.091 trillion by 2010. This works out to approximately $5,000 in credit card debt per cardholder (projected at nearly $6,200 by 2010).34 Despite the spending beyond our means, our country still faces devastating levels of income inequity, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and the lack of health insurance.

According to Knox College professor of psychology Tim Kasser, who has written extensively about materialism, it’s not just that money can’t buy us love and Stuff doesn’t make us happy. According to comprehensive studies of people of all different age groups, class backgrounds, and nationalities, materialism actually makes us unhappy. In Kasser’s surveys, people were identified as having materialist values when they agreed to a number of statements along the lines of “I want a high status job that pays well,” “I want to be famous,” “It’s important to have a lot of expensive possessions,” and “I want people to comment on how attractive I look.” According to Kasser, “The studies document that strong materialistic values are associated with a pervasive undermining of people’s well-being, from low life satisfaction and happiness, to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as headaches and to personality disorders, narcissism, and antisocial behavior.”35 And Kasser goes even further to document how these afflictions (low satisfaction, physical and mental health problems, and antisocial tendencies) then fuel more consumption.36 We fall back on the conventional “wisdom” that a little shopping therapy is just what we need to lift our spirits. And so it becomes a vicious cycle.

Unhappy Nation

Even though we’re consuming way more resources like energy, paper, and minerals and more manufactured Stuff than most other countries, the United States scores lower on many indices of well-being. The United Nations Development Programme’s Human Poverty Index—which examines factors like poverty, longevity, social inclusion—lists the United States last among industrial counties.37 Another measure, the Happy Planet Index, looks at how happy a country is (measured by a combination of life expectancy and life satisfaction) compared with how many resources it uses: basically it is a measure of how well a country converts resources into well-being. Out of 143 countries evaluated in the 2009 Happy Planet Index, the United States rates a dismal 114th. Scoring above us are those Scandinavian countries, of course, as well as every European country except Luxembourg and all of Latin America, the Caribbean, and pretty much every other region except Africa. Of the 28 countries that ranked lower than the United States, 25 are in Africa. Even war-torn Congo comes in a couple of spots ahead of the United States.38 The country with the highest score in the 2009 index is Costa Rica, which, by the way, abolished its military back in 1949, freeing up all those funds to divert to education, culture, and other investments that contribute to a long, healthy, and meaningful life. In contrast, the United States has the biggest military budget in the world, spending $607 billion, or 42 percent of global arms spending.39 We could buy a lot of well-being with that kind of money, by spending it on items like health care, education, clean energy, and efficient mass transit.

The New Economics Foundation, the think tank that produces