Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal yesterday declared the era of "bland affluence" over, because America is on its way back to 1970.  Noonan predicts a New York City so emptied by people with the desire to move to quieter, simpler towns that "By 2010 the mayor, in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one's here and nobody cares."

She goes on to predict the death (figuratively) of all the fanciest stuff: tea-cup poodles, face-lifts, pristine storefronts, personal trainers, and single-family dwellings are about to be replaced with mainstream religion, multiple generations living in one home, slower living, gardening, "thicker and softer" bodies, and frayed carpet.

I am all for the death of personal trainers (which I mean figuratively, except in one case, and he knows who he is), but I think Noonan is taking this a little far.  She's trying to argue that America will go back to a time of reasonable consumption, but she's picked a representative decade that's a very poor model.  In fact, it would be hard to pick a decade since the 1930s in which conspicuous consumption wasn't a big part of the American M.O.

Noonan's nostalgia is not just for a time that doesn't exist, but for a place that doesn't exist.  Her piece was inspired by an article she read about a family who had moved onto a small farm (very small: 1/6th the size of my own family's small farm) in order to spend more time together and less time working just to pay the cable bills.  She also says she has a friend who has recently taken to searching the Internet for "small and farm-towns in which to live."  This, she says, represents a trend in Manhattan toward people seeking out simpler, more natural, slower -- read: country -- lifestyles.

Newsflash: It is not 1970 in Kansas.

The assumption that life is ever-so-much simpler and charming out in a farm town is a distinctly urban phenomenon.  People in small towns pay through the nose for high speed Internet and buy big, flat-screen TVs at about the same rate as those in the cities.  Costs of living are lower, but salaries are lower, too, and there's a travel cost -- an opportunity cost -- added to just about everything.  Maybe that would force a simplification of life for some; for most, it just means more driving -- which is where the "slower life" part of the equation would actually come in.

Past even that, I'm not sure what universe Noonan lives in -- though I suspect it has five burroughs -- where people in small towns are less conscious of "money, status, power" as markers of class than are people in cities.  Bland affluence and conspicous consumption struck the middle of the country just as hard and fast as it struck the Coasts¹.  And we're about as likely to shake it off by moving to the big city as Noonan's crowd is to migrate out West.

It's irresponsible to be encouraging the idea that the complexities of our current financial problems as a country can be escaped by travelling (figuratively) back in time or (literally) out to the farm.  Deflation, which is everyone's worst nightmare right now, would happen a lot faster if everyone decided to try life off the city block for a while -- and then when they figured out what an enormous mistake they'd made, there would be no city to come back to, or at least no jobs there.

Everyone has problems.  It's troubling that Peggy Noonan thinks they have geographic solutions.

¹_{In fact, none of my New York relatives get or want cable, whereas everyone I know in Kansas has at least one and usually three TVs and around 400 channels; even my grandparents have WiFi.  See, I can draw conclusions from tiny samples, too.}