Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Interesting article from Nat'l Review:

The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook

Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic, chronicles in entertaining detail the multitude of ways in which life in America gets better all the time. Americans today have better health, more wealth, greater safety (even in the new age of terrorism), better nutrition, more leisure time, cleaner air and water, and just more stuff to play with and keep them entertained than any earlier generation. In fact, there are an estimated 80 billion people who have ever lived on this earth, and Easterbrook calculates that even poor Americans have a better material living standard than 99.4 percent of them. To have been born here and now is to have truly won the lottery of life.

In the book's second half, Easterbrook discusses the economists' conundrum of whether getting richer makes us happier. There isn't much evidence that Americans are more satisfied with their lives today than in the 1950s, an era when our parents didn't have VCRs, $800 designer teapots, treatments for cancer and heart disease, cleaner air to breathe, and so on. (Although our parents and grandparents may have been just as happy as we are, the evidence does show they were more bored. Our ancestors slept a lot more than we did, because there was nothing else to do at night.) To defend this idea that money doesn't buy happiness, Easterbrook points to data showing that chronic depression is a bigger problem in our society than ever before.

Easterbrook rightly sneers at the crass and preposterous things our consumer-driven society sometimes spends money on, but he has more contempt for the crisis-mongers in media, academia, and government who chronically complain about American life. He ridicules the daily, sensationalized news reports of "poison in the water," lost forests, the health crisis, or whatever the calamity du jour happens to be. Our latest societal affliction is "choice anxiety": so many things to choose from and so little time. --STEPHEN MOORE