Gettin' Housed

The current issue of the Carleton alumni magazine, The Voice, has a long set of articles about American consumerism, including this piece on the modern home. It's a bit overwrought ("the TV room has become part of the kitchen, and family interaction often is reduced to fighting over the remote" - what?), but the somewhat hidden argument is that American homes have grown ostentatiously and impractically large in step with becoming the most paramount indicator of family success.

I was interested to learn, for instance, that according to Clifford Clark, a historian at Carleton, "bigger houses also have led to smaller yards and skinnier trees... Willows are among the most popular landscaping trees today because they don’t require much room." The chart detailing changes in the size of the home and its amenities between 1950 to the present is especially engrossing. Viz.,

• Average size of American household in 1940: 3.67 people
• Average size of American household in 2002: 2.6 people
• Average new home size in 1950: 983 square feet
• Average new home size in 2003: 2,330 square feet

The counterpoint to all this appears a few pages later, when Elizabeth Spelman, a visiting professor of philosophy at Carleton, describes Paul Feyerabend's take on abundance:

He worried that material abundance imposed on conceptual abundance—on our ability to see abundance in the greater world. For example, one begins to think that the only way to have a meaningful life is to own a big house (because that represents material wealth). Feyeraband would call that view an impoverished mind-set because it fails to see the abundance of the greater world, in nature and in human imagination.

That seems like real wisdom.