The Phantom Menace

There’s a fantastic article in this month’s E Magazine, "New Lessons from the Old World: The European Model for Falling in Love with Your Hometown”. Written by former Utne Reader Editor Jay Wallsjasper, the piece explores the significant differences between urban growth perspectives in Europe and the U.S.

While reading it, I was struck by an unmentioned, yet pervasive, theme that runs throughout American economic thought – We Yankees put a lot more emphasis on vacuous numbers than do most other societies. Put another way, far too many Americans seem to value numbers over tangible reality.

Under American capitalism, the drive to accumulate money and wealth is paramount. People desire jobs that pay in the 6 figures or more and bank accounts, stocks, treasury notes and bonds that would make Ebenezer Scrooge blush.

The inherent problem with this mad rush toward a form of economic dominance is that, truth be told, money (and the wealth it generates) genuinely doesn’t exist.

Money is nothing more than an agreed obligation between members of a society. In fact, in this day and age, actual bills and coinage don’t even factor into the equation that much. More often, egregious amounts of wealth tend to be represented by numbers with lots of commas and zeroes written or printed on a piece of paper (e.g., bank statements, stock reports, etc.)

Money has no practical application. You can’t hop on a ten dollar bill for a quick jaunt to the Oregon coast and you’d be foolish to whip up a salad of romaine, tomatoes and greenbacks.

Yet, despite the fact that money is nothing more than a conceptual construct, American capitalists honor and desire to possess it more than almost all the tangible elements in our society.

More than anything else, I believe that understanding what drives the American economic model is important when you juxtapose it against the ways other nation work to solve problems that are shared across national boundaries.

Returning to Walljasper's article in E Magazine, it's interesting to note that, while Europeans are working diligently to control and rein in urban sprawl, American developers tend to induce it!

Europeans seem to understand that true wealth – distinguished from make-believe monetary wealth – is best defined by creating healthy and sustainable communities. They more readily accept the notion that clean air and water, reduced traffic, public transportation, adequate green spaces and friendly neighborhoods generate a kind of wealth that will be shared, possessed and cherished by all.