On Affluenza and Other Things

Here is a hard-hitting critique of what is behind a great deal of social malaise - where it is all work, work, work.

In some respects, Oliver James, to use an old-fashioned Brit derogatory term, can and does come off as something of a prat (and he willingly acknowledges this): he writes as he talks - of his swanning off around the world to chat to millionaires and billionaires, whilst throwing out off-the-cuff psycho-analyses of their mental and physical states. The little woman, of course, holding the baby and everything else together in the home, meantime.

He has a beef, against the System. But not against capitalism per se, but what he calls selfish capitalism, of the kind first made popular' by Thatcher, then by Blair, at least in the UK, though he makes it clear that this is a global issue: where, as Thatcher famously, or rather, infamously declared: 'There is no such thing as community.' No subsidised education, nor childcare, nor welfare dependency - just the freedom to keep in earning for bigger and shinier goods. Or, in overusing credit cards in order to get these. All in compensation forthe fact that the working hours are more and more insanely long.

This can only be something that can be powered through enough emotional deprivation to make Wanting Things seem even more attractive - this is where James gets psychoanalytical again, with his diagnosis lent to the title cover 'Affluenza.'

Money, points out James, however, cannot in any case buy you love, not everyone can manage to get to be a millionaire, and can we really afford an unbridled dystopia of neurotic over-achievers and over-spenders forever?

James's solution is elegant: the cure for Affluenza is Back to Basics. As in provison of childcare that is less likely to result in the kind of avarice and workaholism borne of severe emotional deprivation in the first place, and he points to the Danish way of doing things, which whilst maybe flawed in other ways, maybe serves as a possible paradigm (though he was unable to resist a more 50's-style critique on relatively-Utopian solutions of the reds-under-the-bed kind 'You will also be bland emotionally and creatively, but you will be so happpyyyy!'

It is a pity he did not also examine other Scandinavian systems of childcare, which also look at the impact of compulsory childcare for small children: it may somewhat stolid citizens make, but also has been cited as a way of avoiding certain kinds of social inequality......

Over all, a most interestingly and timely book.....