*The Price of Civilization*

That is the new Jeffrey Sachs book, with the subtitle Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity.  Here is one excerpt:

Though I can’t prove that America’s mass-media culture, ubiquitous advertising, and long hours of daily TV watching are the fundamental causes of its tendency to let markets run rampant over social values, I can show that America represents the unhappy extreme of commercialism among the leading economies.  To do this, I have created a Commercialization Index (CI) that aims to measure the degree to which each national economy is oriented toward private consumption and impatience rather than collective (public) consumption and regard for the future.  My assumption is that the United States and other heavy-TV-watching societies will score high on the CI and that a high CI score will be associated with several of the adverse conditions plaguing American society.

Here is Sachs writing further on TV; here is Steve Johnson on TV.