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People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Walgreen Foundation Lectures)

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This is one of the seminal books on understanding what it means to be an American, and on what makes our character distinctive, if not utterly unique. Potter was a remarkable professor of American History at Stanford, where his final lecture in my Junior year taught me what the phrase " the crowd lept to its feet" meant. Among other remarkable traits, Potter never once uttered that or any other cliche in those lectures or in this extraordinary book. The work of a giant, engaging and accessible to almost anyone.

"The People of Plenty" is one of the most interesting books I have read in the past two years: informative, instructive, entertaining, challenging, provocative. The book deals with the effects of economic abundance on the American national character as a relationship between history and the behavioral sciences. It is organized in two major parts. Part I outlines the concept of national character from the viewpoints of the historian and behavioral scientist. Part II is about how economic abundance has shaped the American character.

To begin with, if Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is correct that "History is to a Nation what Memory is to an individual", national character is the changing memory of a nation. This is no new assertion, but the author argues that popular generalizations of national character are incorrect. They weave traits and habits in there descriptions, and so they "show how badly the true analysis of national character will be hindered if historians, like the blindmen who examined the elephant, mistake the part for the whole" (p. 13). The problem is that nations are made up of people, and people's characteristics are cultural, political, economic, historical, and so on. Rather than nation units defining character, national character may be conceived as a national culture expressed as a political unit called a nation.

Previous explanations of national character, and here the author sweeps the canvas as only a historian can do, have been flawed. Many paid little attention to what character actually is, or "how they would define the `nation' as the unit to which the character is attributed" (p.20). The historian's generalizations of character have ranged all over the place, from such things as that (a) character is God-given (chosen nations); (b) character is driven by environmental factors like technology; and (c ) character is a genetic disposition like race. For the behavioral scientist national character stems from any number of behavioral factors: psychological traits, group propensities brought about by socialization, and so on.

From the literature the author gathers that the American character is a measure of success. Success, "the American measures as his own worth by the distance which he occupies; he esteems high current income more than the possession of long-accumulated wealth. Mobility and change are natural by-products of his quest for success, and departure from the patterns of the past is a matter of course" (p.48). This passage suggests that "the American character is a large measure of group responses to an unusually competitive situation" (p. 60) - an early indication of the hypothesis that national character is a function of economics - the subject of the second part of the book.

Abundance leads to the American character, but abundance is simultaneously a function of human and nonhuman factors, with human factors being more important and less exhaustible. Hence, the national bounty of a nation increases with human productivity. Increased productivity enables social mobility, which in turn ensures equality of opportunities. However, equal opportunities are not equal outcomes, since the former does not eliminate barriers so that social stratification is often inevitable. Nonetheless, the Americans belief in equal opportunities and the social mobility it implies is simply a rejection of status, because status is failure to progress.

American tend to believe that abundance is positively related to freedom of choice, and so to democracy. "To succeed as a democracy, a country must enjoy an economic surplus to begin with, or it must continue to attain one" (p. 116). And so abundance = freedom = American world mission. The book uses the "frontier hypothesis" to strengthen the idea that abundance is central to the American character. The frontier represents the individual spirit liberated from institutional restrictions to pursue his/her self-interests - the present is better than the past, the future preferred to both the present and the past. However, this representation is both a benefit and a cost. The benefit is obvious; the cost is that too much individualism is less democratic and civil, both being inconsistent with freedom and mobility. Thus the frontier ceases to determine national character when it is no longer a source of abundance.

The book claims that advertising is a key institution of abundance; advertising helps in spreading the economic surplus by educating, instilling, training, and hastening the consumer to adopt new tastes and preferences. It helps character formation. Abundance affects the family (a form of social structure), which in turn affects a child's character. Abundance affects society by affecting the basic human needs: food, shelter, clothing, and culture. For example, states the book, "the economy of plenty has influenced the feeding of infant, his regime, and the physical setting within which he lives. The material conditions alone might be regarded as having some bearing upon the formation of his character, but the impact of abundance by no means ends at this point" (p. 198). Child rearing is another important consideration.

As far as I am concerned the book has successfully presented and defended it case: A uniquely American character is made up of traits, experiences, ideals, time, and institutions. These are strung together by a thread called economic abundance. Now whether one agrees or disagrees is a secondary point. As an economist I have trouble with the phrasing "economic abundance", because the term "economic" means "scarce", so that "economic abundance = scarce abundance - which is an oxymoron. Yet the book goes beyond economic determinism in a refreshing manner even today, fifty-three years later. I strongly recommend this book to anyone, especially to those in positions that require or authorize them to speak on behalf of America and Americans.

Amavilah, Author

Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies

ISBN: 1600210465