"The highly unequal, competitive, materialistic and individualistic cultures of neo-liberal economies produce emotional distress; they cultivate the insecurities which drive hyper consumerism … and thus they make us ill. In the most telling analogy of the book, James argues that materialism is to ill-being what smoking is to lung cancer."

Madeleine Bunting, reviewing Oliver James’s The Selfish Capitalist: The Origins of Affluenza