But it's challenging to examine what we value, what we're moved to buy and how much is enough. Michael F. Maniates, an associate professor of political and environmental science at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., said scholarly research has consistently shown that most Americans think their countrymen over-consume, but don't think they do personally.
Significantly, Maniates said, Americans' ideas about what constitutes a high level of consumption have radically altered over time. Since the last decades of the 20th century, instead of just trying to keep up with the Joneses next door, many of us have been trying to match lifestyles with Wall Street hedge fund managers who summer in the Hamptons, or with the images of Hollywood opulence that relentlessly bombard us -- or with "Sex and the City."
Also, because so many Americans work long, hard hours (U.S. productivity is still among the world's highest) and take fewer vacations than their European counterparts, we may tend to seek more of our pleasures in shopping-mall excursions than in, say, learning to play the guitar or taking up tennis. To fundamentally shift our focus from "acquire more" to "experience more," Maniates said, we need to examine our entire system of work and how we reward it.
"If this is going to stand a chance of any permanence, it needs to go beyond the individual action" and be built into public policy, he said. "We really need to think of ways of making it possible for people to think about working less and getting by on less."
Growing up in Germany when it was still rebuilding from World War II, Hederer had an idea of what it meant to get by on less. Although her family was prosperous, she was aware of the deprivation around her. Her husband, also from Germany, "still knows what hunger is, because he was born in '38," she said.
"He would laugh now if I said I don't spend much money on shopping."
Even though she frequents such stores as Saks, Armani and Zara, and bargain-hunts in Europe during trips to the couple's second home in Switzerland, Hederer doesn't consider herself a hard-core fashionista. She likes to mix high and low labels, doesn't shop seasonally -- "I would hate to spend a fortune for something that is like a fashion for one season, like a pink jacket" -- and said she "would hate to go to a restaurant and spend $200 a couple."
