Issue 9: Individual, Family, and Community Life
What impact does affluence have on individuals, families, and community life?
Study Questions
- To what extent does affluence contribute to family and community cohesion?
- To what extent does affluence allow for a broad definition of family?
- What are the relationships between faith and affluence? Does affluence render religion irrelevant?
- To what degree does your analysis of affluence change when you measure it in terms of material goods versus money acquired?
- What opportunities does affluence afford individuals, families, and communities to give to others? How has this changed over time?
- Does affluence make families and marriages more or less stable?
- To what extent is the pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” more prevalent among the affluent?
- How can creating and maintaining affluence move people toward or away from core/family values?
- To what extent have affluence and the development of technology led to isolation for individuals within communities?
- What undesirable qualities can affluence produce? Can affluence breed selfishness? Can affluence breed laziness or complacency? Can affluence breed guilt? Can affluence breed fear or envy?
- To what degree does affluence breed a desire for more affluence?
- What role does “affluence envy” play in conflicts among individuals, families, or communities?
- To what extent does affluence allow more choices for individuals, families, and communities? What problems may occur from having more choices?
Honors in Action
Project description: Research children’s books that relate to the paradox of affluence and families. Organize an Honors Study Topic reading hour at a local elementary, preschool, or library for which chapter members read the selected books that fit the age of the students in the reading group. Recommend the books related to the paradox of affluence to the school librarian for inclusion in the permanent collection. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Service, Fellowship
Project description: Organize a film series that focuses on the paradox of affluence as it relates to individuals, families, or communities. Invite faculty members to suggest their favorite films on the topic and have a chapter member work with each faculty member to develop a program to introduce each film. Ask teams of faculty members and chapter members to moderate discussions following the showing of the films. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Fellowship
Project description: Research recycling options in your community. Make a commitment with your family to recycle and/or set up a composting station at your home or in your community. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Service, Fellowship
Project description: Invite the senior class from a local high school to participate in an essay contest with a theme that ties the paradox of affluence to your local community. Organize a panel of faculty and students to judge the entries. Arrange to publish winning essays in your college newspaper and make arrangements for the essays to be published in your local paper as well. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Fellowship
Project description: Develop a Leadership Institute on your campus utilizing the Phi Theta Kappa Leadership Development Program. Research great local, state, national, and global leaders, those qualities that make them great, and those qualities that have led leaders to abuse their affluence while in positions of power. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Fellowship
Project description: Research and identify the organizations in your community that need and accept book and food donations. Promote the work of these organizations and contribute to their impact in the community by leading Project Graduation: Feed a Body, Feed a Mind for your college’s commencement ceremonies. (http://projectgraduation.org/) Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Service, Fellowship
Project description: Using the short story Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell,* examine how affluence affects individual and group decision making processes. What other factors influenced Orwell’s decisions and the community’s decisions? When should matters of affluence be the basis for decision making? How might awareness of the influence of affluence change a leader’s decision making process? Use the short story for the basis of a decision-making leadership development workshop for student leaders. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Fellowship
Project description: Get together with chapters in other regions to research and discuss the paradox of affluence as it relates to your lives, families, and communities. Start a discussion board for all involved chapters where you can share your research and thoughts on the subject. Share your collective work with your regions at educational forums. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Fellowship
Project description: Research options for recycling Christmas trees in your community. If there is currently an option available, organize a Christmas tree recycling event in your community. If there is no tree recycling in your community, work with community leaders to establish and implement a program. Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Service, Fellowship
Project description: Start a “Lecture of a Lifetime” series on your campus. Ask members of your faculty to present lectures on the paradox of affluence as if these were the very last lectures they will give. What wisdom on the subject would each professor share with the audience if this was the lecture of a lifetime? Hallmarks addressed: Scholarship, Leadership, Fellowship
Bibliography
- Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. 1992.
- Coontz looks at the way Americans’ historical memories of the 1950s are as much fiction as fact. She argues the ideal of the family as portrayed in television and films did not exist in real life the way it does in our remembrances.
- Daly, Herman E. and John B. Cobb, Jr. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. 1989.
- The authors explore the relationship between growth-oriented industrial economies and the current health of the environment. The book examines the connections between economics, public policy, social ethics, and environmental issues.
- Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. 2005.
- Diamond explores how environmental damage, climate change, population growth, and poor political choices have led to the demise of some societies while others have found solutions and survived.
- Goff, Brian and Arthur A. Fleisher, III. Spoiled Rotten: Affluence, Anxiety, and Social Decay in America. 1999.
- This work is a series of thirteen essays by writers with varied perspectives on affluence, consumption, and the resultant paradoxes and anxiety in contemporary culture.
- Helgesen, Sally. Thriving in 24/7: Six Strategies for Taming the New World of Work. 2001.
- Helgesen discusses the ways the boundaries between work and home have been blurred, and strategies for creating balance between a person’s work and home lives.
- O’Neill, Jessie H. The Golden Ghetto: The Psychology of Affluence. 1997.
- O’Neill tells the story of people struggling with “affluenza,” or difficulties with wealth and affluence, and explores the psychology of affluence.
- Pekar, Harvey. The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland. 1993.
- An irreverent look at life in urban Cleveland that has become something of a cult classic, the illustrations and dialogue are potent observations on the changing social landscape and observations about the forces of change and stability.
- Ransome, Paul. Work, Consumption, and Culture: Affluence and Social Change in the Twenty-First Century. 2005.
- Ransome examines the changing importance of work and investigates whether consumption has displaced production as the defining characteristic of people’s lives in the developed nations.
- Schor, Juliet. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. 1998.
- Schor explores how overwork, insecurity, dissatisfaction, advertising, and television imagery have led to overspending and under-saving among the American middle and upper-middle class.
* material is included in Phi Theta Kappa Leadership Development Studies: A Humanities Approach. This book is available online at www.ptk.org/recognitions/catalog/.
