Money Changes Everything: How Global Prosperity Is Reshaping Our Needs, Values, and Lifestyles

Chapter 1. Living Large in the New Millennium

	We are the first stage since the dawn of civilization in which people dared to think it is practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race.
	--Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975)

At first glance, the new millennium has brought us more of the strife and uncertainty that haunted the 20^th Century. This perspective, unfortunately, has been shaped largely by gut-wrenching headlines: roller-coaster financial markets, corporate bankruptcies and malfeasance, international political and economic crises, sporadic terrorism, and environmental degradation, to name a few. For many, our liberal free-market system feels seriously broken. Yet behind the daily media assaults, monumental, positive ...