Hidden Side of Inflation

Inflation is liberating the suburbs. So argues City University of New York Sociologist David Caplovitz. With residents forming car pools and baby-sitting pools, entertaining more at home and happily exchanging useful junk at garage sales, he says, "keeping up with the Joneses is gone, and a lifeboat camaraderie has taken its place." Fascinated by this development, Caplovitz is applying for a federal grant to study a surprisingly neglected subject--the hidden psychological side of inflation.

Social scientists believe that inflation may be producing deep changes in Americans. Sociologist-Author Richard Sennett (The Hidden Injuries of Class) warns that inflation is feeding a hatred of work in the working class. "The attitude," he says, "is you work more and more and get less and less, so the work becomes meaningless humiliation." He sees the infection spreading to the middle class and showing in rising rates of white-collar absenteeism from work.

Home Fortress. Americans are becoming more cautious, cynical of Government efforts to control inflation, and more home-centered. Despite high costs, people are still spending heavily on home improvement. Since fewer people can afford foreign travel, more are turning to cheaper local diversions--movie attendance is up 20% over 1973. Some sociologists believe that as mobility decreases and the idea of the home as a fortress takes hold, neighborhoods will grow more conservative and more hostile to outsiders--be they blacks bused in to schools or addicts brought into stable communities for treatment. Psychologists predict life in the fortress will produce "intensification"--that is, good marriages will get better, flawed ones will fail.

Inflationary pressure cuts both ways in the demand for psychiatric services. Some clinics say attendance is up; yet individual therapists privately report that many patients are leaving because they cannot pay for sessions. One result of economic stress is that the struggle for survival makes many people forget or ignore emotional troubles. "The harder reality gets," says Cambridge, Mass., Psychiatrist William Appleton, "the easier neuroses get." But more severe disturbances, he warns, can get worse.

Inflation also seems to have played a role in the decline of college enrollments and the shift in interest, as at Harvard, from the humanities to bread-and-butter studies like premedicine and prelaw. Harvard Sociologist David Riesman thinks that the upper middle class will increasingly ignore private colleges and send their children to public universities, thus "shifting the burden of educating one's children to the poor."

Amitai Etzioni, the Columbia University sociologist, believes this turn will be just one necessary expression of a permanently lower standard of living in America. "Things are not going to get back to normal. Either people will refuse to accept the fact that they will have to make do with less, and we will see more conflict among classes and races, or they will return to older, nonmaterialistic American values."

Like Sennett, Etzioni points to evidence that the so-called counterculture of the '60s has eroded faith in a competitive, high-consumption lifestyle. "More and more people may listen to records instead of going to concerts, wear last year's shirts, give up summer homes and foreign travel, and just try to enjoy life without spending a lot of money." He believes that rising inflation could bring an alliance between antimaterialistic young people and conservatives seeking a return to the old values.

Surveys indicate that the big psychological effects of inflation are still to come. For 14 months, the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago monitored attitudes on "financial satisfaction"--how well off people feel--and the figures were just beginning to tilt downward slightly at the end of May, when the project was dropped for lack of funds. Despite economic pressures, figures on "life satisfaction" were actually up. The real impact will hit if the public comes to believe that inflation is not a short-term annoyance, but a hobbling, semipermanent fact of life.

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