a209  1113  20 Oct 89
PM-Business Mirror, Adv 23,0667
$adv23
For Release PMs Monday, Oct. 23
Wariness About The Future
By JOHN CUNNIFF
AP Business Analyst
    NEW YORK (AP) - The world's first mass-consumption society emerged
in the United States in the 20th century, greatly raised the material
standard of living and reinforced the people's innate optimism.
    Studying the phenomenon, some behavioral scientists found that
Americans could be distinguished from their European cousins simply
by their level of optimism. Americans expected things to get better;
others weren't sure.
    Into the 1970s, studies showed Americans usually expected to be
better off financially in the future and to have more material
comforts. They expected to do better than their parents, and their
children to do better than them.
    Why not? In the years after World War II many millions of jobs were
created, real incomes rose, people could afford cars and houses and
invest in stocks and bonds. They earned pension rights. They had
medical insurance.
    But something also may have happened to that optimism.
    In a survey whose intent was to examine hopes and fears for the
1990s, hundreds of Americans revealed a persistent strain of wariness
or realism that has become mixed with the traditional high hopes and
confidence.
    ''The 1990s will be a decade in which the American public is not
without optimism, but neither are they without pessimism,'' said
Frank A. Bennack Jr., in announcing the results.
    ''We have discovered that, overall, people have what I believe must
be characterized as a somber view of the 1990s,'' he said.
    Bennack is president and chief executive officer of The Hearst
Corporation, which for the past six years has commissioned studies of
American attitudes on major issues. By its nature, this one looked
into the future, a gray one.
    The largest percentage of those surveyed, some 38 percent, expressed
the opinion that the American standard of living will stay the same;
29 percent said it would decline. A minority, 31 percent, said it
would improve.
    The same doubts appeared elsewhere in the survey. Forty-one percent
said their personal life would be better than now in the year 2000,
but 31 percent said it would be about the same and 23 percent
expected it to be worse.
    Thirty-eight percent said they felt the financial standard of living
for all Americans would stay about the same in the 1990s, 29 percent
said it would decline and only 31 percent said they expected
improvement.
    The survey itself revealed some of the economic reasons for
apprehension. The national deficit was cited by 30 percent as the
single greatest threat to the economy. Others named the trade
imbalance. Few named recession.
    Forty-six percent of the respondents held the view that prices of
single-family houses will be much higher 10 years from now, a fear
that contrasts with professional opinion that housing demand will
ease after the mid-1990s.
    Asked their opinion of the emerging European Economic Community,
scheduled to become effective in 1992, about three in five said it
would create trade and economic problems for the United States.
Problems? Not opportunities?
    Other areas of the survey suggested more reasons for the mixed views
about the future. Based on the survey, Bennack said more than half
the American public expects terrorism will become a major problem
within the United States.
    A roughly similar percentage agreed that the 1990s would be ''a
decade of peace interrupted occasionally by regional military
conflict.''
    Bennack summed it up this way:
    ''(People) feel relatively confident about their own lives but
confidence about 'the big picture' eludes them; there's an element of
uncertainty, even pessimism, concerning our society's future.''
    Affluence, it seems, has made people concerned about assets and
greater education has made them aware of the frail fabric of society.
They want more than goods. A mass consumption society solves problems
- and creates them too.
    End Adv PMs Monday, Oct. 23.
    
 
AP-NY-10-20-89 1358EDT
***************