An Open Letter To America: Let Snobbery Light The Way

"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