S P & A  0144 – 5596 V. 41, N . 7, D  2007, . 787– 797 SOCIAL Book AUTHORS reviews POLICY RUNNING & ADMINISTRATION, HEAD: SOCIAL POLICY VOL. 41,& NO. ADMINISTRATION, 7, DECEMBER 2007 VOL. 41, NO. 7, DECEMBER 2007 Blackwell Oxford, 0144-5596 XXX © Social SPOL Blackwell Policy UK Publishing Publishing & Administration Ltd Ltd. 2007 REVIEWS The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since  B A O Oxford University Press, Oxford, . ISBN ---; price £. (hbk). ISBN ----; price £. (pbk). ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing.’ So opens Avner Offer’s quite remarkable exploration of the ironies and pathologies inherent in the modern pursuit of well-being. It’s a deceptively simple claim, developed through a considerably more sophisticated argument, built upon an almost impossibly complex (and sometimes downright contentious) evidence base. And it provides for a devastating critique of the precepts on which conventional notions of economic progress are built. The gist of Offer’s principal argument is that human choice suffers from a particular kind of fallibility. We are not good at all, it runs out, at making consistent choices between jam today and jam tomorrow. Left to our own devices, individual choices tend to be irredeemably myopic. We favour today too much over tomorrow, in ways which, to an economist, appear entirely inexplicable under any rational rate of discounting of the future. Economists call this the problem of ‘hyperbolic’ discounting. It’s not unfamiliar in itself. Offer’s unique contribution is to suggest that this fallibility has (or has in the past had) a social solution. And that that solution is precisely what affluence is in the process of eroding. To prevent ourselves from trading away our long-term well-being for the sake of momentary pleasures, society has invented a whole set of ‘commitment devices’: technologies and institutions which constrain people’s choices in ways which moderate the balance of choice away from the present and in favour of the future. Pension funds, banks, mortgages, marriage, social norms and conventions, informal (soft) and formal (hard) institutions of one kind or another, government itself in some sense: all these can be regarded as examples of commitment technologies. Devices which make it a little easier for us to curtail our voracious appetites for immediate arousal and protect our own future interests, and, indeed – although this is less obvious in Offer’s exposition – the interests of affected others. The eponymous ‘challenge’ is that affluence, characterized as the relentless stream of novelty inherent in technologically driven economic growth, acts to undermine and erode these commitment devices. It is this erosion of ©  The Author(s) Journal Compilation ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ , UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA S P & A, V. , N. , D  commitment devices which unleashes the impatience he speaks of, and the upshot is that we default to myopic positions that ultimately undermine our own future well-being in favour of short-term arousal. Affluence breeds impatience. Impatience undermines well-being. It’s a fascinating, deeply provocative hypothesis. I have to say that I am not entirely convinced that it’s correct – or, to be more precise, that it’s correctly framed. Novelty appears almost as deus ex machina in this analysis, almost accidentally knocking out important commitment technologies. However, I have a suspicion that the erosion of commitment proceeds, in part at least, through social discourses that (semi-intentionally) promote the pursuit of novelty as a means of favouring the interests of production over the interests of consumers. I suspect also that this itself is supported (if not dictated) by structural forces which hold economies away from collapse. Admittedly, I’m a reconstructed neo-Packardian critic of consumerism. So I would say that. But at the very least, an exposition of the mechanisms through which novelty is promoted and commitment is eroded seems to me worth more time than Offer affords it. And the policy implications of such subtle differences might turn out to be very important. None of this is to detract from the book’s merits. In the middle section, Offer chases down his principal argument through a detailed comparative examination of economic and behavioural trends in the UK and the USA in several key areas. Comparative patterns in household appliances and cars represent fairly conventional avenues of exploration in economic history. The differences in appliance uptake and automobile fashions between the USA and the UK show us, according to Offer, how the pattern of erosion of commitment plays out differently at different stages of economic growth. Perhaps even more fascinating are the chapters related to what Offer calls the ‘economy of regard’ and modern patterns of mating and family structure. The critique of modernity as having been the architect for the destruction of family stability, and the consequent ills unleashed on whole generations of children, is particularly devastating. There are points during the middle section when you might be excused for wondering where on earth you are and how you got there: for example, when in chapter  we suddenly find ourselves being asked: where does the intensity of craving for love come from? It is a testament to Offer’s scholarship and eclecticism that he ventures with the same aplomb into neuropsychology as he does into consumer electronics. Quite possibly there are important structural differences between the way the hypothesis plays out in relation to appliances and the way it plays out in relation to sexual intimacy, glossed over in this analysis. And there are times when the simple trade-off between immediate arousal and long-term commitment doesn’t quite capture the complexity of human choice. In some cases, surely, our choices are between different – equally compelling – future commitments? For example, what does the structure of myopic choice have to tell us about the commitment required to produce a book like this and the commitment demanded by one’s employer in undergraduate teaching. Or about Offer’s own declared ‘failure of stamina’ in not providing more in the way of exploration about policy and ‘social choice’?  ©  The Author(s) Journal compilation ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd S P & A, V. , N. , D  None of this really matters, though. This whole middle section of the book is wonderfully rich, full of devastating statistics and fascinating anecdotal material. What Offer sometimes seems to be showing us is a uniquely interesting way of doing economic history. At one level, admittedly not explicit in Offer’s narrative, the book is almost a thesis about economic history. This is how economics ought to be done, Offer appears to intimate, and how economic history should be done in particular. Perhaps it would be easier to recruit students to economics and to history if this were the case. But the meta-narrative is not the point. The central argument is strong, and strongly reiterated from beginning to end. Offer is kind to his readers. He generously provides a two-sentence synopsis, a simple introductory overview and a concluding summary of all his main points. He reiterates the key thesis at various points in the middle as well. You can get a lot from the book just reading the beginning and then the end, and missing the middle altogether – a fact which Offer generously points out at the start. This is also, to its eternal credit, a book with a sense of humour. Don’t go looking for it. It will leap out at you unexpectedly, and delightfully, in the full flood of serious argument. Here is one of my favourites: ‘Sir Martin Rees, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College Cambridge (note the authority cues) gives present human civilisation no more than a % chance of surviving the current century’ (p. ). The experience of reading The Challenge of Affluence is suffused with a pervasive suspicion that this might just be one of the most important books you have read: one which stimulates so many tangential or related trains of thought that it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the main argument, but one which definitely clamours to be heard. It’s a book to make you think, to make you go on thinking, and one we can only hope will make politicians of every colour sit up and reconsider the questionable directions in which modern progress seems to be leading us. Tim Jackson The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany,  –: Social Policies Compared B E. P. H Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, . ISBN ----; price £. (pbk). E. P. Hennock’s profound knowledge of the genesis of social policies in the UK and Germany has already been demonstrated in several publications, and this latest book is another fascinating contribution. Based partly on German archival material which has only recently become available, it is an account of developments leading to the introduction of a range of national social insurance programmes (accident, sickness, invalidity, old-age pensions, health) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Germany and the UK. In contrast to much research on the topic, which tends to ©  The Author(s) Journal compilation ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 