Have a good life. Just charge it on your Citibank card.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note From A Worldwatcher

Popular history tells us that the 1980s and 90s became an age of excess (the era of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, dot-com millionaires, booming sales of BMWs, Rolex watches, and trophy houses)--and that that age ended abruptly with the dot-com bust and stock market collapse, followed by the painfully disillusioning corporate scandals, terrorist preoccupations, and culture wars of the new century's opening years. With the shock of such change, we are told, many people have come to a life-changing reconsideration of what's really important to them. Many have pulled back from their relentless drive for material wealth and now say they'd willingly trade off some of their income for more time with their families and friends--for pursuit of more meaningful activities than just making money. In those ubiquitous pop-culture lists you see every New Year's, informing us about what is now "out" and what is "in," lavish consumption is out and meaningful experience is in.

But that purported shift of values may be largely a fiction. Pop-culture commentators tend to measure public attitudes by rather soft and subjective methods: they look at what's currently in fashion, or what gets talked or laughed about on the Letterman show or featured on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, as well as at what other pop-culture commentators are saying. What little research they rely on tends to be along the lines of attitude surveys rather than actual measures of human behavior. Those surveys can be quite inane. For example, a recent poll by the University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) asked Americans this question:

"As a general rule, do countries have the right to overthrow the government of another country if it is building weapons of mass destruction, supporting terrorists, or violating the rights of its citizens?"

Logically, anyone who simply answered this question "yes" or "no" either didn't see significant differences among the three listed offenses lumped together, or didn't notice how they were lumped. Should we infer that those who answered "yes" believe that, say, Pakistan or France has a right to overthrow the government of the United States, since the United States is by far the world's largest builder of weapons of mass destruction?

The trouble with surveys of this sort is that they are highly vulnerable to becoming self-fulfilling or solipsistic. If a few influential pop-culture commentators have the impression...