Is the American Dream Killing You?: How ''The Market'' Rules Our Lives

From Publishers Weekly In this slapdash but passionate and provocative treatise, former Wall Streeter Stiles (_Riding the Bull: My Year in the Madness at Merrill Lynch_) argues that go-go, unfettered American capitalism "has become the driving force of American decline." The "Market," he writes, now functions like "a financial version of The Matrix, an ethereal boundary that undergirds society" and manipulates social structures to optimize commercial productivity. Thus, the market is to blame for America's ever more demanding cycle of work-buy-work and its attendant cultural problems, from road rage to divorce, "Inhibited Sexual Desire," latchkey kids and an overall decline in spiritual and moral values. To his credit, Stiles reinforces his argument with statistical data that document increasing levels of stress, depression and consumer debt, as well as with examples from his own life. And the book's most original sections outline how the language of patriotism, business and spirituality, including the word "moral," have been manipulated in the media to suit the market's needs. But Stiles's selection of numbers and his delineation of cause-and-effect relationships is often conveniently loose, and his tendency to anthropomorphize the market (as in, "The Market ponders the situation like a general analyzing his battle plans") tends to obscure that real people are the ones choosing to make decisions in favor of financial, rather than social, interests. Nonetheless, this barbaric yawp stimulates and illuminates, if only because it shows how many social ills usually viewed as discrete can be traced back to one underlying principle. Not since Thomas Frank's One Market Under God has there been such an ardent portrayal of the dark side of the free market. (Oct.) Correction: The author of Lennon Revealed (Reviews, Aug. 29) was misidentifed. Larry Kane is American. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review "(A) passionate outcry against the ravages that the pace and pressure of the market can wreak upon life and society." -- No Source "(A) passionate outcry against the ravages that the...pressure of the market can wreak upon life and society." -- The New York Times "Stiles is a talented writer who can craft a precise metaphor, recreate dialogue, and communicate subtlety and emotion." -- BusinessWeek

The "market" is the collective name for every act of buying and selling we participate in. It governs our economy and our lives, determining our values, our goals, and our accomplishments. We make it—and are made by it.

In Is the American Dream Killing You? Paul Stiles shows how the pressures of the market are causing undue stress in all our lives. He explains why there is so little trust in companies, why it seems harder to feel secure, and why we never seem to be able to rest anymore. In this stunningly well-researched and elegantly argued book, Stiles shows that the harried, anxious lives we lead have one common pressure—the market.

An impassioned argument about the pervasive consequences of an unrestrained free market on the mental, physical, and spiritual health of everyday people explains how market-driven aspects of society may be negatively influencing virtually every element of American life. 25,000 first printing. Presents an argument about the pervasive consequences of an unrestrained free market, explaining how the market-driven aspects of society may be negatively influencing the mental, physical, and spiritual health of everyday people. For over a decade now the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Harvard School of Public Health have engaged in a landmark study of disease throughout the world involving over a hundred researchers.