NEW RULES
SEARCHING FOR SELF-FULFILLMENT IN A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
(New York: Random House, 1981)

by Daniel Yankelovich

Traditionally, most Americans have been a thrifty and productive people, enjoying and helping to create an abundant and expanding economy. But in the past two decades and especially in the last half-dozen years, this way of life has undergone a great reversal, what Daniel Yankelovich calls a "world turned upside down." For as the great majority of Americans have loosened their attachment to the ethic of self-denial and deferred gratification, the American economy has also reversed its course and become relatively less abundant. In New Rules, Daniel Yankelovich, one of America's leading analysts of changing social values, shows the turbulent effect that these sharply changed circumstances have had -- not only on individual Americans but on America itself. New Rules is about that 80 percent of Americans now committed to one degree or another to the search for self-fulfillment, at the expense of the older, self-denying ethic of earlier years -- those millions of Americans who cherish the lifestyle choices they made in America's affluent years, who refuse to give them up, who question the traditional morality of self-denial, but who also recognize -- some more clearly than others -- that the decade ahead will be a time of harsh economic limits. By brilliantly combining life histories and findings from his and other polls, Yankelovich draws a compelling portrait of Americans conducting risky experiments in living as they seek, in addition to material well-being, such intangibles as creativity, autonomy, adventure and tender loving care in their lives, while facing an ever more hazardous economic environment. As the American economy now enters a newer, more stringent phase, Yankelovich's investigations reveal no return to the traditional ethic of self-denial. But Yankelovich concludes that we are now leaving behind the excesses of the "me decade" for what he calls a new "ethic of commitment" -- new rules of living that support self-fulfillment through deeper personal relationships and more enduring commitments to the world of work and the business of common survival. Perceptive, original, encouraging, New Rules is an indispensable guide to our future, a seminal work that will take its place alongside such national portraits as The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man.