Here's a conundrum: how is it that the quality of life in the U.S. has been improving for about a century, but opinion polls show that many people believe their parents had it better, and their children will have it worse? Why don't people see how good things are? The average life span has nearly doubled since the beginning of the twentieth century; many once-fatal diseases have been eradicated or conquered. Technology has replaced a lot of backbreaking physical labor. So why has the percentage of people who describe themselves as "happy" not risen since the 1950s? The author offers a number of suggestions. He proposes something called "abundance denial," whereby millions of people "construct elaborate mental rationales for considering themselves materially deprived," and he isolates something else called "auto-grumbling," a kind of perpetual complaining process in which people, no matter how good things are, still grouse that they could be better. This is an important, timely, and well-reasoned book that is sure to have people talking. (But could it have been even better?) David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Praise for Gregg Easterbrook
“Easterbrook . . . is a serious author with serious points to make.”
--The New York Times
“Easterbrook . . . writes nothing that is not brilliant.”
--Chicago Tribune
“Easterbrook is perhaps the finest general science writer in the country.”
--Forbes
“Easterbrook invests the timeless questions of life’s meaning with distinctly contemporary pertinence.”
--GEORGE WILL
From the Inside Flap
aIn <b>The Progress Paradox</b>, Gregg Easterbrook draws upon three decades of wide-ranging research and thinking to make the persuasive assertion that almost all aspects of Western life have vastly improved in the past century--and yet today, most men and women feel less happy than in previous generations. Why this is so and what we should do about it is the subject of this book.<br><br>Between contemporary emphasis on grievances and the fears engendered by 9/11, today it is common to hear it said that life has started downhill, or that our parents had it better. But objectively, almost everyone in today’s United States or European Union lives better than his or her parents did.<br><br>Still, studies show that the percentage of the population that is happy has not increased in fifty years, while depression and stress have become ever more prevalent. The Progress Paradox explores why ever-higher living standards don’t seem to make us any happier. Detailing the emerging science of “positive psychology,” which seeks to understand what causes a person’s sense of well-being, Easterbrook offers an alternative to our culture of crisis and complaint. He makes a Compelling case that optimism, gratitude, and acts of forgiveness not only make modern life more fulfilling but are actually in our self-interest. <br><br>Seemingly insoluble problems of the past, such as crime in New York City and smog in Los Angeles, have proved more tractable than they were thought to be. Likewise, today’s “impossible” problems, such as global warming and Islamic terrorism, can be tackled too.<br><br>Like <b>The Tipping Point</b>, this book offers an affirming and constructive way of seeing the world anew. <b>The Progress Paradox </b>will change the way you think about your place in the world, and about our collective ability to make it better.
From the Back Cover
Praise for Gregg Easterbrook
“Easterbrook . . . is a serious author with serious points to make.”
--The New York Times
“Easterbrook . . . writes nothing that is not brilliant.”
--Chicago Tribune
“Easterbrook is perhaps the finest general science writer in the country.”
--Forbes
“Easterbrook invests the timeless questions of life’s meaning with distinctly contemporary pertinence.”
--GEORGE WILL
About the Author
GREGG EASTERBROOK is a senior editor of The New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a visiting fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution, and a columnist for ESPN.com. He is the author of six books, including A Moment on the Earth, a New York Times and American Library Association Notable Book. He has also been a contributing editor at Newsweek and an editor of The Washington Monthly. He lives in Maryland and can be reached via the Internet at www.greggeasterbrook.com.
From The Washington Post
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.
Reviewed by Brian Doherty
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The Great Story of Our Era: Average People Better Off
Though the airfield does not appear on many charts, its existence is whispered of among pilots. The approach requires skill and timing, and there have been accidents; but when the mission is important, some risks must be accepted. Fliers who have data-pulse receivers of the extraordinarily accurate Global Positioning System satellite network use these devices when inbound, as the runway is only 2,350 feet long—short by the standards of such things—which places a premium on putting the wheels down precisely at the beginning of the field so as not to run out of runway at the end. Pilots exhale with relief when the landing is complete. Once on the ground, planes are directed to taxi to a secluded ramp, where crew and passengers quickly debark to swing into action—because there might be a wait for tables.
The aircraft are not military transports full of commandos but small private planes full of diners landing at McGehee’s Catfish House in Marietta, Oklahoma, one of the increasing number of “fly-in” restaurants in the United States. The runway belongs to McGehee’s and serves it exclusively. The field is lit for night landings, since the kitchen is open late. Guidance beacons with the aviator’s designation Loran T40 can be used to find McGehee’s, this being the international locator signal not of an airport or classified facility but a restaurant. At McGehee’s, you walk from your airplane to the hostess station. Much of the dinner trade arrives from Dallas, about forty air minutes away, though diners fly in from as far as hundreds of miles distant to savor a menu highlighted by fresh farm-raised catfish, pickled tomatoes, and turtle cheesecake.
Nearly a thousand fly-in restaurants are open for business in America today, according to an organization called Hundred-Dollar Hamburger. (Small private planes cost around $100 an hour to operate.) Most are simply eateries adjacent to general-aviation airports, but an increasing number, like McGehee’s, have become fly-in in the complete sense. The advent of such restaurants is exciting to the owners of small planes, many of whom learned to fly as a challenge, or in response to the romance of the air, then discovered that they crave destinations for the kind of one-hour hops that make for recreational aviation. Just imagine trying to explain to the indigent of the developing world that one problem experienced by Americans is finding something to do with their personal aircraft!
So far, fly-in restaurants offer no fly-through windows for takeout; that may only be a matter of time. Regardless of whether the fly-in restaurant is a breakthrough or an absurdity, what is telling is that the aircraft landing at McGehee’s are not private jets of the super-rich. Rather, they are one- and two- engine propeller planes of farmers, oil-field workers, mid-career professionals, and others from the middle class: men and women who are scarcely oligarchs, but who can afford to own an airplane and to drop $100 on a whim for a platter of fresh catfish. Today in the United States thousands of private aircraft are owned for personal use by people who are not rich, just as millions of not-rich Americans own two homes or four cars plus a boat, or know other extravagances once reserved for the topmost fraction of the elite.
Fly-in communities have sprung up as well—entire housing developments built around runways for small planes. Spruce Creek, near Daytona Beach, Florida, is a fly-in subdivision which boasts about 1,200 homes and fourteen miles of aircraft taxiway connecting houses with the runway. Pecan Plantation, completed at the turn of the twenty-first century near Fort Worth, Texas, has 125 homes, all served by taxiways. Planes can land, taxi home to the owner’s house, and be parked in the drive. Teen pilots can bring airplanes to the front door to pick up their dates. The occupants of Pecan Plantation are well-off but not millionaires. Many houses in the subdivision have hangars rather than garages, a popular option being 4,500-square-foot hangars—sized for two cars and two airplanes.
If fly-in dining and runway-based homes aren’t your cup of tea, how about golf-course living? Today in the United States there are at least two hundred housing developments built around fairways. At these communities, one sees golf carts scooting along side streets: Many residents own their own carts, park them in the garage, and ride directly from the back porch door to the clubhouse. Golf-course living, with club membership typically included in the home purchase price, has grown so much in popularity that developments are now found not just near big-money cities but in states such as Missouri and Wyoming. Powder Horn, a golf community in Sheridan, Wyoming, looks out on the majestic Bighorn Mountains and offers a well-reviewed eighteen-hole course reached from the porch door via personal cart. The development’s realty brochure gives this advice regarding lots: “Select a site on the fairway, one with a river or lake view, nestled in the hillside, close to the clubhouse or walking distance to the practice range.” Beautiful, well-appointed homes at Powder Horn cost from about $285,000 to about $425,000—not cheap but not inordinate, within the means of tens of millions of Americans.
Prefer the lake to ducking aircraft or dodging golf carts? In 2000, fully 13 percent of American home purchases were of second homes, mostly in vacation areas of woodland, mountain, or shore. Second-home sales have boomed so much that in many popular rustic retreats—such as the San Juan Islands north of Seattle, Washington, or Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, in the Alleghenies, equidistant from Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.—vacation homes by the thousands line the desirable riparian acreage, with land parcels growing scarce.
A century ago the very notion of a second home, owned not as a principal dwelling but a place of relaxation, could be contemplated strictly by a minuscule super-elite; now there are millions with a weekend place, and the number keeps rising. Today a leading problem with your dream house by the water is that so many other people also own vacation homes and own powerboats or jet skis—in 2001, Americans spent $25 billion, more than the GDP of North Korea, on recreational watercraft1—that the tranquility may be shattered by piston roar. At present many lakeside communities are wrapped up in campaigns to restrict noise from private motor vessels, and the politics of the mat- ter are delicate, because often the factions favoring stillness are arrayed in opposition to boat owners and jet skiers who are working-class women and men, and who feel their privileges are being trampled.
But imagine; the boat owners are working-class. Merely the concept of the “pleasure” boat possessed by an average individual rather than by a duke or an industrialist is new to our moment. Now so many average people own pleasure boats that docking space is short in many areas, while marinas have become the “marina industry”—complete with its own lobby group, the International Marina Institute, and with several trade publications, among them Marina Dock Age and Marina and Boatyard Today. In other battles regarding the great outdoors, such as in the national-monument areas of the California desert or at Yellowstone National Park, the offending machines may be snowmobiles or single-seat all-terrain vehicles, costing $5,000 each or more, owned by average people and opposed by those who dislike the noise. Since 1995, Americans have purchased more than 3 million all-terrain vehicles, which are used almost exclusively for recreation, and continue to snap them up at a rate of about 750,000 per year. But imagine—average people own expensive specialized vehicles just for weekend recreation. And so many of these vehicles exist that they have become a political issue!
Fly-in restaurants, golf-course communities, rustic lakes ringed by second homes, pleasure boats, huge SUVs with heated leather seats and built-in video, custom-painted snowmobiles with GPS: These and many other big-ticket items are now marketed not to the top but to the middle of American society, and increasingly to the middle of European society, too. They serve as well as any examples might to illustrate one of the most fundamental trends in the postwar Western world: namely, the grand increase in living standards for people who aren’t rich.
Poverty persists in the United States, at lower levels each decade, but its persistence nonetheless is a national outrage; millions live from paycheck to paycheck under nerve-racking financial pressure; millions lack health insurance; runaway materialism simultaneously makes us shallow and fails to give satisfaction; mass culture (the movies, television, pop music) grows stupider by the minute; inequality means some have far more than they could ever need while others have only resentment; global forces cause many to fear job loss. All these are important objections to trends in contemporary American life.
But in the main, Americans are steadily better off, and while the rich are richer, the bulk of the gains in living standards—the gains that really matter—have occurred below the plateau of wealth. Almost every person in the United States and the European Union today lives better than did his or her parents. In the United States and Western Europe, almost everything is getting better for almost everybody: This has been the case for years, and is likely to remain the case.
Consider a few statistics, derived from the 2000 United States Census. Almost 23 percent of households in the United States today have an income of at least $75,000, which equates to some sixty-three million people existing at the material standard of the upper middle class. Sixty-three million people—more than the total population of the United States i...
