THE PROGRESS PARADOX
How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
By Gregg Easterbrook. Random House. 376 pp. $24.95
We're rich! But we're miserable! This timeless puzzle would be no revelation to readers of any number of novels, from Jackie Collins's to Charles Dickens's. But Gregg Easterbrook treats it as a mystery in his new book, The Progress Paradox.
Easterbrook, a senior editor at the New Republic, has a knack for bringing to light little-considered facts and collating them toward sometimes surprising conclusions. He wields that talent through the first third of this book, in which he lays out all the ways in which almost everyone in America and Europe is fabulously, unprecedentedly well off in world-historical terms.
The list of good news is long and nearly all-encompassing: Our houses are bigger, our incomes are growing, most things (including fuel) are getting cheaper in terms of how much labor time it takes to earn them (college and health care being the major exceptions), health is improving, crime rates are plummeting, the environment is getting cleaner, the arms race is in reverse, world military spending is trending down, as are some common measures of what Easterbrook labels virtue -- like divorce, teen pregnancy, drug use, abortion.
The middle third of the book chews over why all that good news apparently isn't making us happy. He leans on the notion that we've seen a ten-fold increase in unipolar depression in the West since World War II, then later as an aside grants that it might be only a two- or three-fold increase. There are infinite possible aggravations in life; when the big ones, like starvation and disease, abandon us, we elevate SUVs, traffic jams, genetically modified foods and the rising medical costs that come with brand-new medical treatments to the status of depressing crises.
So long as they have unsatisfied wants, people can nurse a sense of grievance toward the universe, even in their multi-thousand-square-foot, air-conditioned houses, with a hot tub in the back and an all-terrain vehicle to zip off in when the large-screen plasma TV (in every room) palls. That our society is wealthy enough to support bright people like Easterbrook in his professional musings about why mere gold and gewgaws cannot buy happiness is in itself a more vivid signal of our almost ridiculous well-being than any of his colorful examples.
When Easterbrook goes beyond the good news into speculations about how psychology and public policy might deliver happiness where wealth has not, he starts to sound like the brightest sophomore in the quad, addressing huge controversies without a 10th of the seriousness they deserve. He breezes past most objections to his pronouncements or their implications.
He believes we could raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour without worrying about unemployment. He's says that anyone who suggests foreign aid hasn't been a marvelous success is just dead wrong. He's sure that universal health care could be effortlessly and effectively instituted in the United States.The facts Easterbrook gathers about Western prosperity are important and not understood widely enough. I daresay this book's greatest potential for buoying public happiness lies not in its ability to convince us to raise the minimum wage to $10 but in its promulgation of good news to more people.
Polls he cites attest that, in 1997, 66 percent of Americans believed the lot of the average person was getting worse. I suspect that the only way people could believe this is that they have no understanding of how and why market economies in the West deliver as they do, and why there is no reason to expect them to stop now.
Which leads to this book's most serious lack. When assessing the prospects for the human weal, it is as important to wonder why we are rich as it is to wonder why we aren't happy. Being rich doesn't necessarily make you happy, but relief from physical deprivation can be a good thing in and of itself. If you had only this book as a guide, you wouldn't necessarily realize that the amazing wealth of the West was anything other than some sort of automatic miracle, cruelly denied others by fickle fate. (I don't think Easterbrook believes this, but his book doesn't stress otherwise.) Many Americans do have that attitude, and it is easy to be discomfited by a seemingly mysterious providence that could depart as swiftly as it came, or, worse, one based on evil motives, or that is actively destroying the planet -- widespread beliefs regarding modern capitalism.
Ultimately there's no solution to Easterbrook's titular paradox, because it's less paradox than fact. As grandmother said, money can't buy happiness. There is no reason we should expect it to. So there's no special reason to be perplexed when prosperity fails to satisfy all human longings, or to expect that public policy can bring the twain -- both important in their separate spheres -- together. •
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason magazine. His book on the Burning Man festival will be published this summer.
