1. George Katona, Burkhart Strumpel, and Ernest Zahn, Aspirations and Affluence: Comparative Studies in the United States and Western Europe (New York, 1971), 3.
2. On “passive indebtedness” as a leading cause for bankruptcy in the United States, see, for example, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (New York, 2003), which criticizes the overconsumption thesis.
3. For a critique of the triumphalist narrative of credit as the great “democratizer,” see Lendol Calder, “The Evolution of Credit in the United States,” in The Impact of Public Policy on Consumer Credit, ed. Thomas Durkin and Michael Staten (Boston, MA, 2002), 23–34. Calder similarly rejects cultural jeremiads that decry the expansion of consumer credit as a decline in thrift; instead he emphasizes the social disciplining nature of increased credit obligations.
4. On transatlantic differences in the significance of private and public consumption, see Jan Logemann, “Is It in the Interest of the Consumer to Pay Taxes? Transatlantic Differences in Postwar Approaches to Public Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Culture 11 (2011): 339–65.
5. For historical context on the broader transatlantic contrast in social models, see, for example, Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford, UK, 2006);