Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality, and Consumer Society

t is now commonplace to refer to such diverse phenomena as globalization, increases in economic inequality, the decline of class-based societies, the intensification of consumerism, and global cultural homogenization as though they were all part of the same problematic. Indeed, all these elements seem in various ways to characterize our experience of the current era. Yet their connec-tions remain obscure. There is little consensus about how significant the recent increases in income inequality are, and even less over their relationship to glob-alization. Beyond this, those who call attention to growing inequality have a dif-ficult time explaining the absence of organized discontent in the political and cul-tural spheres. Those who associate globalization with a loss of diversity—a deepening massification of Western culture—are at a loss to account for the stunning new variety and rapid change in the outputs of knowledge-based cap-italism. It is difficult to confront these associations in any structured way because the phenomena they refer to remain the preserves of specialized academic fields. Each such field documents a piece of the bigger picture, and as a result we remain unable to account for seemingly contradictory aspects of the contemporary expe-rience. If our standard for the analysis of growing income inequality is limited to the distribution of money income, for example, we will find it difficult to under-stand why, in the real world, people do not seem very upset about it. One way to understand the connections between what economists say about the economy and how the rest of us feel and act in relation to it is provided by the