An Open Letter To America: Let Snobbery Light The Way

With energy costs rising, the American way of life seems in danger. Paul Kiel suggests strategies for coping.

1 minute read

November 9, 2005, 2:00 PM PST

By Abhijeet Chavan @http://twitter.com/legalaidtech


"We find ourselves at a turning point: after swelling for decades, the size of the average home has stopped growing; gas prices led to a 30% drop in SUV sales last month; and this winter an anticipated 40% increase in the cost of natural gas will force even greater austerity.... America is about to start getting smaller....

...The average new American home is 2400 ft². In 1950, it was 983 ft². For years, and particularly during the late 90’s, every new subdivision rose higher, wider, spawned a more intricate range of multi-peaked houses, whose gables seemed to number in the double-digits. But the era of out-gabling your neighbor is over....

What to do? With energy costs pinching your discretionary income, you now face some hard choices. Suddenly, you can build a new deck, or re-landscape the yard, but not both. You can buy a gas-hungry HUMV, or add on to the garage, but not both. Perhaps, in these increasingly apocalyptic times, it will be neither.

Fortunately, there exists a science to resolve these hard choices. In times of old, it was simply called taste; professors prefer to obscure its potency with an ancient term: aesthetics; but for our purposes, in our everyday lives where judgments must rain fast and furious, we’ll be direct and call it snobbery..."

Thanks to Paul Kiel

Friday, November 4, 2005 in PaulKiel.com

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