I guess another way to reconcile it would be that when you live in a culture where the consumption expectations are so high and so expensive, those needs are more difficult to meet. So that may be part of the reconciling.

There's another point worth making which is that it's also the case when it comes to consumption and lifestyle issues, people do hold contradictory attitudes. People who by almost anyone's accounting would be extremely materialistic and have a lavish lifestyle can be very critical of other people's materialism, and fail to see it themselves. There's a lot of inconsistency.

Rosen: There's often a class dynamic to that. Elites tend to think that they way they consume is superior to the mass culture that they see other people partaking in.

Schor: Absolutely! Economically privileged people can be very critical of the materialism of very poor people, because they have a large television or a pair of sneakers.

Rosen: I'd like to go back to the thing you were saying about the generational shifts. There’s been a lot of polling on how Millennials seem to be rejecting some of the more grueling aspects of American economy, and are looking for work that is more meaningful. Is that a cohort effect? What is going on here?

Schor: I'm not sure. You know, I tend to be a little bit skeptical of some of those analyses. I mean there are for sure cohort effects in attitudes to materialism and lifestyle and so forth. The most well known in the academic literature is the impact of the Depression, which had a really lasting effect on the cohorts that had direct experience of it. My sense of some of the more recent attributions about big cohort effects are, that a lot of this stuff won't last through the lifecycle. I don't see them as so durable. One of the things about lifestyle and consumption is that as people form families and have children you see a lot of changes in their spending behavior.

Now, it's also true that you have rising rates of single-headed households, and among certain groups big declines in fertility. But the other thing that's important as we think about the sort of attitudes to work are that people really adjust their expectations, desires, and so forth to the opportunities that they have. So when there is less opportunity for certain types of success, which is one of the things that we see happening—increased competition or shrinking number of really excellent jobs that pay very well and have great career ladders and so forth—it's not surprising that people would adjust, and also that the demands of those jobs would go up, because the employers can do that.

Rosen: A big part of consumption is socially determined. My husband moonlights as a financial coach and many of his clients are young people who are very successful and have a level of wealth that they didn't grow up with and are trying to figure out what to do with it. One of his key pieces of advice for people in that situation is to keep their old friends, because your level of consumption changes so fast if you start hanging out with other similarly high earners, and all of a sudden you don't have much in the way of savings from your big salary. You're just consuming more, and your financial situation is actually not much improved.