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The
Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg
Easterbrook Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Discontent Gregg
Easterbrook explores an interesting thesis in his new book, The
Progress Paradox. By all measurable means, life has improved for most Americans
over the past 50 years. However, some studies show that the percentage of the
population that claims to be happy remained unchanged. Also, reported
depression and stress seem to have increased. If we’re so much better off,
why aren’t we happy? In under 400 pages, Easterbrook
tries to answer the question and provide some tangible advice: be more
grateful about what we have. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5, “More of
Everything Except Happiness,” pp. 163-166: If you sat down with a pencil and graph
paper to chart the trends of American and European life since the end of
World War II, you’d do a lot of drawing that was pointed up. Per-capita
income, “real” income, longevity, home size, cars per driver, phone calls
made annually, trips taken annually, highest degree earned, IQ scores, just
about every objective indicator of social welfare has trended upward on a
pretty much uninterrupted basis for two generations. Many subjective graphs
would also show steady upward trends: personal freedom, women’s freedom,
reduction of bias against minority groups. But your graphs would lose their
skyward direction when the topics turned to the inner self. The trend line
for happiness has been flat for fifty years. The trend line is negative for
the number of People who consider themselves “very happy,” that percentage
gradually declining since the 1940s. And the trend line would cascade
downward like water over a falls on the topic of avoiding depression.
Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western
nations today suffer from “unipolar” depression,
or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century
ago. Americans and Europeans have ever more of everything except happiness. Drawn to this paradox of progress, in
recent years a number of researchers have begun to study happiness or
“subjective well-being,” in the ten-dollar term that researchers prefer. They
join the About 25 percent of Americans
and Europeans now experience at least one bout of depression in their
lives—clinical in the sense of sustained or debilitating, not just a few days
of being in a bad mood. A study by Ronald Kessler of Incidence of bipolar or “manic”
depression, the condition in which a person alternates between bouts of
animated glee and immobilizing gloom, has not increased during the postwar
era; this illness is now thought to be mainly chemical in origin, and is
treated with drugs. Unipolar depression, on the
other hand, just keeps rising in incidence, with no end in sight. Unipolar depression is thought not to be a physical
disease; something within our society, or within our own minds, causes it.
And though the rising rate of Western depression may relate to some extent to
better diagnosis and the loss of taboo associated with this topic—often the
depressed of previous centuries were quietly kept in darkened rooms and not
discussed—a tenfold increase in two generations is far too great to be an
artifact of improved diagnosis alone. From the standpoint of happiness math,
it should be reiterated that it is far better there be millions of free,
prosperous people who have the time and leisure in which to become
depressed—many undergoing their depressions in nice houses and attempting to
distract themselves with nice vacations or nice dinners out—than numerous
possible alternatives. Unipolar depression has not
risen in the developing world, probably because so many people there are focused
on simply staying alive that they have no time or leisure in which to
experience depressed frames of mind. Many of our ancestors might also have
been so engaged in constant exertion, and so dependent on each day’s work
outcome for sustenance, as to have had no time for depressing moods. Our
ancestors might also have had few expectations beyond daily exertion, and
thus been less prone to suffering depression in response to setbacks. The Yet unhappiness is a genuine concern.
Unhappy people are not merely feeling sorry for themselves or guilty of
descent into solipsism, although of course there are examples of both. (We
all know people who trudge around acting theatrically disconsolate, to the
point at which there is temptation to shove the person against the wall and
holler, “You idiot, snap out of it!”) Most men and women who suffer
depression are experiencing a condition they would like to escape, one that
detracts from the quality of their lives. Millions of others are not
clinically depressed but feel the sort of unfocused unease that prevents
their one chance at life from conferring the satisfaction it should. This,
too, is a genuine concern. Sadness should not be the default human
condition. Happiness, in turn, is a worthwhile and
important goal. To be happy is not an exercise in self-indulgence, rather, one
of the primary objectives of life. Aristotle called happiness “the highest
good” and said that an enlightened society would be ordered with the goal of
helping its citizens become happy. The framers of American democracy did not
laud “the pursuit of happiness” because they considered this self-indulgence.
Rather, they knew that happiness both ought to be a goal of life, and makes
for better citizens. Dennis Prager has devoted an
entertaining, quirky book, Happiness Is a Serious Problem, to
the notion that people have a duty to become happy, because happiness is the
wellspring of altruism. Higher up the scale of literature, a century ago the
poet Robert Browning wrote, “Make us happy and you make us good”;
twenty-three centuries before that, Aristotle said, “Living well and doing
well are the same as being happy.” In Aristotelian usage, “doing well” meant
exercising virtue. Aristotle and Browning both anticipated current research,
by sociologist David Myers of I
expect that other researchers would look at the same data Easterbrook used to
support his premises, and come to different conclusions. Until then, get a
little melancholy about the sad utopia in which we live as you read The
Progress Paradox. Steve
Hopkins, March 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Progress Paradox.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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