Examples of its better points include:
* "Many figures in philosophy, religion, politics, and other fields have recommended that others pay no heed to material concerns, while being obsessed with the same things themselves" (p 145). Excellent point, and for a very engaging expansion of that point, read Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals."
* "On its face, existential despair appears self-canceling: If life really is pointless, why bother to get upset about that? Wouldn't getting upset be pointless?" (p 253).
* Positive psychology provides more help for people than earlier, negative methods.
* By and large, things are getting better, not worse.
But the book's failures are also many and glaring:
* at its core, the book is contradictory. Easterbrook appropriately harps on the fact in the first 150 pages that astounding progress has been made in an absolute sense. For example, a car made today emits only 2% of the pollutants of a car made in 1970. But particularly at the end of the book, Easterbrook throws this all away and begins berating us for problems that exist in a relative sense, something he spends the first part of the book shredding. He then begins rolling out typical old-time liberalism: mandated universal health insurance (pp 255-7); elimination of SUVs (pp 92,93); increase in the minimum wage to a "living wage" whatever that is (pp 260-3); Bush-favors-the-rich bashing (p 247); CEO bashing (p 266-77); subsidized housing for drug addicts (p 259); more foreign aid (309). And when he says that in the U.S. "millions of people not only have more than they need, but have, in many ways, more than is good for them" (p 258), then you should, as Robert J. Ringer would say, "Hold on to your chips," 'cuz he's coming after them.
* "Until the day when everyone is released from basic want, a sword will hang over Western abundance" (p 68). This from the guy that complains about "amplified anxiety" (p 111). Who will wield this sword anyway? And exactly who is going to "release" the whole world from basic want, and how are they going to get the money to do it?
* "A reason Western economies keep performing better may be that capitalism has been supplanted by market economies" (p 67). In response to that non sequitur, I would only ask, What kind of economy existed during capitalism then?
* SUVs are unsafe because an SUV is "more likely to harm the passengers in a car it collides with" (p 93). To *that* non sequitur, I'll only ask: What vehicle do *you* want to be in when you get into an accident?
* "But the mid-1990s rise of road rage coincided with the onset of SUV mania" (p 94). Ahem! Having lived in L.A. in the late 1980s, I can definitively refute that asinine comment.
* In the 1990s culture wars, "the right claimed the left was...opposed to reading of the classics" (p 103). Yeah -- that's absolutely correct. For instance, anyone remember the $20 million Bass Grant controversy with Yale? Hmm?
* "Each of the three Die hard movies...depicted dozens of police officers being gunned down" (p 115). Now this is a supposed fact that we can easily verify for accuracy. Let's see: counting the two special agent Johnsons, the helicopter pilot and two cops in the armored vehicle ("What do we have here...it seems the police have themselves an RV"), that comes to a grand total of five police officers killed. Add in the two rent-a-cops in the beginning of the movie just to be generous, and you're talking seven. Not exactly "dozens" is it? How can Easterbrook expect to have us take him seriously on the big facts when he can't get the small ones right?
* "...luck is simply part of life, but [we] should acknowledge this means that those who experience good luck acquire significant obligations to those who do not" (p 154). That sounds too much like a Dick Gephardt "lucky in life's lottery" line, which is a set-up for a soak-the-rich line. Easterbrook casually tosses this out without a discussion of premises (how exactly does one "acquire" an obligation to another person whom you have never met and who lives thousands of miles away?) as well as its practice (who is to distinguish luck from unequal effort?).
* "When free-market conservatives begin to suppose that something beyond the free market is necessary for human happiness, a threshold has come into view" (p 250). First off, is there such a thing as a free-market liberal? I can't think of one. Second off, I know a straw man when I see one. Conservatives, by definition, are the group that understands the importance of religion and culture, and not just free trade.
* When the U.S. based troops in Saudi Arabia, we were "asserting suzerainty over much of Islam's oil wealth"; American agents picked the current Saudi ruling family "with oil interests in mind" (p 297). Uh HUH. I guess that's why oil is so cheap right now, right? And invasion of one Moslem country by another had nothing to do with it. As for who got picked and why, I encourage Easterbrook to brush up on his post WW I history with a little Bernard Lewis.
* Mohammedan terrorists are compared to Timothy McVeigh: "the Christian ethos spawned its share of hideous killers, among them the terrorist Timothy McVeigh" (p 299). Unlike Easterbrook, apparently, I was alive and awake after 9/11, and the silence of the imams in America was deafening. Does Easterbrook think we don't know the difference between a nutjob like McVeigh and a current of religious thinking with tens of millions of adherents? Besides, when exactly did McVeigh say that Jesus told him kill all those people? Superficial, glib and sophomoric comparisons just make you look like a hack, an apologist or an idiot.
Overall, I have to give the book three stars because it gores so many of the left's sacred cows. You just don't find that in mainstream books, and it has to be recognized. But this achievement is marred by careless and inconsistent writing, and even occasionally by knee-jerk liberal cliches.
Mr. Easterbrook offers a bracing reminder of what is too often forgotten but difficult to deny: In the West in the past 50 years, life has gotten steadily better. The evidence is overwhelming. In the U.S. alone real income has more than doubled since 1960. It is true that the rich have gotten richer, but the real story, Mr. Easterbrook notes, is "the rise in well-being for the typical person."
Some 70% of Americans now own the place they live, as opposed to fewer than 20% a century ago. Their homes and apartments are larger and more comfortable, too, with once rare or unheard of amenities like central heat and air conditioning. Whereas undernourishment was common until recently, today our biggest problem with food is that we eat too much of it -- and for much longer: Average life expectancy has nearly doubled since 1900, and it keeps rising.
Remember when flying was a privilege of the "jet set"? Well, 200 million Americans boarded a plane in the past five years, one example among many that former luxuries are now a part of everyday life. If the Western world has ever known a Golden Age, Mr. Easterbrook claims, "it is right here, right now."
He tells this story with the lively wit and contrarian insight that is a regular feature of his articles in the New Republic, where he serves as a senior editor. But if the evidence for a revolution in living standards is really so overwhelming -- and it is -- then why aren't people happier? This is the "paradox" of our recent progress, and it is one that Mr. Easterbrook sets out to explain and even resolve.
It is an ambitious undertaking, if not new. Since at least the middle of the 18th century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the progress of civilization added "nothing to our genuine felicity," social observers have attempted to find a gauge of human happiness. The British reformer Jeremy Bentham called this "felicific calculus." Sociologists today prefer the term "subjective well-being," asking people in extensive questionnaires how they feel about their lives.
Mr. Easterbrook cites this data to show that the number of people in America who describe themselves as "very happy" has decreased slightly since 1950 (to 6% from 7.5%) and that the percentage of those who consider themselves "happy" has remained at 60%. Meanwhile, the incidence of depression seems to have increased sharply, which leads Mr. Easterbrook to the paradox referred to in his title: Life gets better; people feel worse.
The conclusion is questionable. As Mr. Easterbrook acknowledges, the data on subjective well-being is, well, subjective, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions about levels of happiness across the ages. Mr. Easterbrook himself retreats from this claim after the title page, presenting the problem slightly differently: Despite material progress, people don't seem to be getting happier.
He suggests a number of causes: from the media's myopic focus on disaster to the stress of modern living to what he calls "collapse anxiety," the fear that our hard-won gains may come crashing down. More boldly, he draws on the tenets of a new discipline known as Positive Psychology -- the study of what makes people happy, not sad -- to offer suggestions for improving the way we feel.
Citing the positive effects on mood of gratitude and forgiveness, he argues that there is indeed power in positive thinking, and in moral and spiritual endeavor. To make ourselves feel better, he says, we might begin by making the world better. For him that means working to eradicate domestic poverty, bring about universal health care and reduce global underdevelopment. Everyone will have his own list.
This is commendable advice. But there is a darker consideration that Mr. Easterbrook overlooks. Recent research suggests that our capacity for happiness has a strong genetic component and that beyond a certain "set point" of mood, which varies from person to person, there may not be much that we can do to alter the way we feel, at least permanently.
For some, advances in biotechnology and psychopharmacology may hold out hope. But as Leon Kass and the other members of the President's Council on Bioethics recently warned, the temptation to use these technologies "beyond therapy" should give us pause. We will never completely resolve the paradoxes of progress by altering our genes or controlling their effects. As the pressure to do so mounts, it may be worth recalling an older paradox: Paradise was not enough to satisfy Adam and Eve.