Nate,

The real problem with shifting people's utility functions (as it were) is the problem of unilateral disarmament.

Many of us recognize that we could collectively be happy with less money and fewer things, and more time and more friendship.

Unfortunately, we also realize that the benefits of those potential actions are partly related to living in a society in which everyone steps back from the competitive game a little.

The danger for me in stepping back, while my society races ahead, while my neighbors invest more in their kids education, more in their jobs, more in their personal success is that I and my family will personally fall behind. There is a real chance that I will experience the inequality in ways that negatively counterbalance the value of what I gain.

We also know that unequal societies (and particularly the experience of being low on social hierarchies) have direct somatic effects on individual health and longevity. It takes a very strong will and sense of self to pursue a status lowering path alone or alone with one's family. Most people are afraid of doing so, and with good reason.

For this reason, I think that there needs to be a collective decision to move in a direction away from competition, material acquisitions, status seeking, etc..

It is very hard to imagine how the U.S. will get to that collective decision. Perhaps that is one reason that phenomena like Peak Oil which might force a reorientation of daily life, or global climate change which might (how?) require a governmental response, seem to offer disaster mixed with hope, particularly for the U.S.

Will nature force us to do what we clearly lack the collective will to do? Disaster might be our only hope. Unfortunately disaster could also be simply disastrous.

Then again, if we consider the Cuban experience, we can observe a disaster (demise of Soviet Union and loss of its oil supply) that in some ways may have improved a society. Did Cuba only succeed in coming through because of its authoritarian but collectivist ideology? Could the U.S. make positive hay of a peak oil crisis, or is the only response we could put together in the U.S. essentially an every person and every industry for itself response that would only deepen inequalities and fragment society?

Now, I've posited a contrast between purely individual actions versus collective actions. But I wonder what you really mean when you say:

These convenient truths are thus prescriptions not for less, but for ways we can have more of the things that really matter.

Is that we "each of us", or we "all of us"? The path matters, and I don't think the individual path will get us there. Perhaps you are proposing that lots of people committed to individual actions could push us toward collective action. Maybe that is true. Let's hope so. But let's also remember that stepping out of the rat race in a rat race society is a very scary step for most people. Figuring out how to reward and support that step is critically important.

(Universal health care might be a good start... by the way. Imagine that... universal health care, enables people to adopt jobs and lifestyles that are less damaging to the planet, and thus becomes an essential component in slowing global climate change. What a nice thought. So many employment decisions today stem from the need for health care coverage, leading people into the embrace of large organizations that require them to work too long for goals that ultimately harm the planet. Just enabling people to break the corporate embrace if they wanted to do so could be a wonderful thing for old Planet Earth.)

Miles