THE COSTS OF LIVING: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life

This broad-brush essay starts from the premise that ""there can be too much freedom in life, and that too much freedom has a serious moral, social, and emotional price."" Schwartz (Psychology/Swarthmore) is concerned with the darker side of the seemingly limitless choices of middle-class American life. Addressing the psychic toll exacted by too fervent a pursuit of money, power, and position, he catalogues many disturbing features of our time: predatory corporations, the status of medicine and law as self-regulating monopolies, the commercialization of professional sports. Ultimately, he concludes that we must sacrifice some individual freedom for community values and ""reform our institutions so that being a good person is less costly."" The author is at his best is when he draws on his psychological expertise to make arguments about human nature, our attitudes toward consumption and status, the components of love, the value of work, and the importance of classroom attitudes that foster lifelong learning. Schwartz's grasp of politics and economics is less solid -- he doesn't mention the communitarian movement, whose critique of individualism and advocacy of a sense of social responsibility would seem to make it a natural ally. Similarly, he offers only sketchy analyses of what's needed to reorient law and medicine, how to revamp college sports or foster model retail outlets such as consumer cooperatives. He offers an absorbing discussion of his own return to Judaism through a congregation rife with conflict over the relation between religion and politics, but he might also have explored whether institutions other than religious ones can help us ""reintroduce the language of responsibility and morality into our public life."" Schwartz's ambitious reach understandably exceeds his grasp. But his effort is worthy, and his conclusions contain much sense.