Coolest paragraph I read all week.

This comes from McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues:

...if you adopt an Aristotelian criterion, then most people after capitalism are more fulfilled as humans. They have more lives available. The anthropologist Grant McCracken has written of the "plentitude" that the modern world has brought. He half-seriously instances fifteen ways of being a teenager in North America in 1990: rocker, surfer-skater, b-girls, Goths, punk, hippies, student government, jocks, and on and on. By now the options are even wider. "In the 1950s," he notes, there were only two categories. "You could be mainstream or James Dean. That was it." I was there in the 1950, and agree--though in places like California, richer and fresher than Ontario or Massachusetts in the 1950s, the options were richer, too. The plentitude has come from free people sifting through the cornucopia, making themselves in their music and their clothing (ibid., p. 26).