Are you happy now?
Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Progress Paradox” raises a provocative question: In a time when more people have more of everything, why do we not have more happiness?
The opening chapters describe a way of life that Easterbrook says would seem downright utopian to our great-great-grandparents. We live in an age of “astonishing progress,” he writes, a time when “almost everything about American and European life is getting better for almost everyone.”
Easterbrook, an author and an editor for the New Republic, knows it is unfashionable in intellectual circles to celebrate modern life so enthusiastically, so he doesn’t skimp on the facts. The average life span in America at 1900 was 41; today it is 77. The rich lead lives of luxury, as always, but the great story is the rise in living standards for the middle class. More people have second homes and second cars. Americans spent $25 billion in 2001 on recreational watercraft, more than the gross domestic product of many nations. The typical person now makes a living without physical toil and has more leisure time. Ninety-five percent of homes have central heat; 78% have air conditioning. Education levels are higher; refrigerators are full, ambulances are on call. Strawberries are available in March.
About 63 million Americans are in the upper middle class (with household incomes above $75,000), according to census figures. Almost 70% own their homes, compared with about 20% a century ago. “Today’s intellectual snobs who scorn the suburban existence led by most Americans have forgotten that Progressive Era thinkers initially proposed the suburb, [and] longed for exactly this form of housing in order to bring dignity, and some tranquility, into the lives of the working class,” Easterbrook writes.
Taking the long view of 100 years or so, it is easy to see dramatic advances. Easterbrook intensifies his point by cataloging the positive social trends of the 1990s: American cities saw “the longest-ever drop in crime.” Despite fears of toxins and pollutants, life spans have increased. “Public health in the United States and the European Union has never been better,” he says. Except for the increase in greenhouse gases, environmental indicators are uniformly positive. Los Angeles had four consecutive years with no “stage one” ozone alerts until last summer. “The ability of Los Angeles to make fantastic strides against pollution, even during a period when population was shooting up and California car use was increasing, is a remarkable success story,” he writes.
As Easterbrook makes his exhaustive case for progress, it’s impossible not to notice how out of step he is with today’s progressives. Still he concedes that some progress is unsettling. Take modern agriculture. We are better able to feed the world, yet we depend on high amounts of pesticides and fertilizers. And he notes that the United States and the European Union “spend almost $1 billion a day to subsidize agriculture.” Or consider the automobile. Highway safety has improved, and Americans love their cars as much as ever. But while the U.S. population has grown 40% over the last 30 years, the number of registered vehicles is up by nearly 100% and traffic is worse. He especially deplores the proliferation of “Godzilla-sized” sport utility vehicles.
But what really bothers Easterbrook is that most people in modern society don’t seem to appreciate what they have, and some are misled by the media into thinking things are worse than they are. Many, he says, “simply can’t resist the descent into grievance.” He offers several explanations: Perhaps things have gotten so good that most can’t imagine further material improvement; perhaps there is a “collapse anxiety” afoot -- a suspicion that the United States is heading for a fall. Activist political organizations, he notes, depend on the sense that things are falling apart because it justifies their crusades.
While levels of contentment are not as easily quantified as increases in material standards of living, a growing field of researchers is studying happiness. Citing Yale political scientist Robert Lane, author of “Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies,” Easterbrook reports that about 60% of Americans described themselves as happy in 1950; the figure is about the same today. But there are 10 times as many people in the Western nations who report general depression, a more or less constant melancholia without specific cause.
In his chapters on happiness, Easterbrook’s tone is that of a spiritual advisor. He tells the unhappy legions that they need to start thinking positively again, to look on the bright side. (“Optimism can be instilled, partly by training yourself to think positively.”) He wants us to be more grateful, more forgiving and more upbeat. He presents evidence that people live longer and are healthier when cultivating a spirit of forgiveness and gratefulness. It’s sound advice, though not much different than that found in an untold number of bestselling self-help books.
But in Easterbrook’s final chapters, we hear the voice of a trenchant social critic warning that “deep, structural faults exist in Western countries, especially in the United States.” He decries poverty and the lack of universal health insurance, and contends that about 48 million Americans, 1 in 6, are poor -- “a shocking indictment of American society. It is America’s current condition.” He advocates helping those at the bottom of the economic heap with new “living wage” laws. The middle and upper classes would have to pay more in prices, but “society would become more just.”
There’s even a ripsnorting denunciation of “greed at the top” of the U.S. business world, where Easterbrook finds a “lack of character” among corporate executives who have been paid “preposterous sums” and have engaged in widespread “stealing” from shareholders and employees. Take John W. Snow, the former head of CSX who became Treasury secretary. “When he left the company in 2002 to join the George W. Bush administration, Snow awarded himself $2.5 million annually for life as a pension, even as CSX was cutting pension benefits for working-class retirees.”
Easterbrook ends with an equally passionate plea for wealthy Western nations to do more for the developing world, noting that 1.2 billion people live on a dollar a day or less. Doing more could mean creating more favorable trade conditions for poor countries (raising prices slightly for Westerners) or giving foreign aid outright. A commitment from the United States of about $48 billion a year, less than what was recently allocated to tax cuts for the wealthy, would go a long way, he writes. “Ending despair in the developing world is not a blue-sky dream. It is something this generation can do, starting right now.”
Noble sentiments. And they are likely to be as discordant to conservative readers as his opening celebrations of material progress are to progressive social critics. Indeed, this is a book meant to challenge left and right -- to keep both sides off balance.
That’s a welcome antidote to the demagoguery so prevalent in political discussion today. But in veering off into homiletics about happiness, Easterbrook missed the chance to say something important about how we think about progress. He concedes that the general attainment of happiness “will probably always be unrelated to whether life is getting better.” So the quandary he puts at the center of his book is not really a quandary. Meanwhile, there are questions about the idea of progress, and the politics of progress, that are left hanging.
Where does progress come from? What is the point of it if not to make people happier? Is invoking progress even the best way to inspire us to make a better society? Christopher Lasch in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven,” made the useful distinction between hopefulness and the more conventional attitude known as optimism and suggested that hope serves us better than the idea of progress. “Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.”
Easterbrook invokes hope and justice too and concludes with a call to “change the world.” But he skirts a crucial question: Has the idea of progress lost its power to inspire?