Fortune challenges us in this gift-giving season with the charge: “we are Paris Hilton.”
Geoffrey Colvin writes (excerpt):
Maybe you remember Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s famous prediction in the late 1960s that by now America would be so near starvation that we’d have food riots. The reality is exactly the opposite. We have shopping riots. Instead of panicking as the ultimate necessity of life grows so expensive that no one can afford it, Americans flip out because a product absolutely no one needs is available at a price so low that even a year ago no one would have believed it possible. Food, if anyone still cares, takes a lower proportion of our income than ever before.
By odd coincidence, just as the season of peak acquisitive madness grips the nation, we’re being treated to a glut of TV programs about some of America’s most revoltingly excessive consumers, our hyperwealthy kids. Rich Girls (MTV) follows a couple of heiresses who embark on buying orgies with the immortal cry “Let’s do some damage.” In Born Rich (HBO), we meet 21-year-olds who know they need never work a day in their life, and we learn of the wrenching conflicts they face, such as what one girl might have done with the $800 that she dropped in a bar the other night (“I could have bought a dress!”). The Simple Life (Fox) places Paris Hilton (hotel money) and Nicole Richie (daughter of former pop star Lionel Richie) in a tiny Arkansas town so that we can marvel at their cluelessness about real life; Richie, for example, had never pumped gas “because my guard usually does that.”
What’s your reaction? Laughing? Loathing? Fine—but be careful. Because the truth is, if average Americans of even 30 to 40 years ago could see us today, they’d think we were all spoiled just as rotten as any young Trump, Newhouse, or Bloomberg.
You know it’s true. How many televisions do you have? Do you even know? How many channels do you get? Do your kids refuse to watch black-and-white programs? No one had a VCR in 1970. Now 240 million of us do, but VCRs are history now that Wal-Mart is selling DVD players for $29.
If anyone had told you in 1980 that today you’d use a cellphone the size of a cigarette pack to call someone else’s cellphone in Sao Paulo—and would complain about the connection—would you have believed him?
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We have been watching Paris Hilton’s BFF. Where do they get hold of these people? They are from another world!