Gregg Easterbrook's: The Progress Paradox

Subtitle: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse

Highly Skimmable. The best four lines in the book that kind of say it all: “Portable carpeted dog steps” – These are the things that make us unhappy – the blur of needs and wants caused by rampant materialism.

The major causes of WHY people feel worse while life gets better:

1.The unsettled, nonlinear character of progress: while things do get better, there are stops and starts. While healthcare is improving, we still have the AIDS epidemics, etc.

2.Fundraising only happens at the extremes. Politicians couldn’t get very much money out of you if they represented inevitable progress. When right-wing personalities claim that Democrats are ruining the world, and vice versa, they’re doing so as a means to coax funding from your wallet.

3.Crises raise the self-importance of the elite (and boost ratings) - and thus, the elite generate their own crises.

The one thing I didn’t like about this book was the lack of solutions or constructive thinking about how to reverse the trend. The one theme that seems to recur in all of these happiness tomes (I’ve read quite a few) is referent anxiety (i.e. keeping up with the Jones’s). There’s a great deal of debate about referent anxiety and costs and benefits to society. For example, there is less referent anxiety in a stagnant economy – but one would argue this isn’t necessarily advantageous to a country’s citizens. Easterbrook’s main example was that of Scandinavian countries, whose “socialism-lite governments have moved everyone to middle class – something vaguely like a society in which everyone has a 3BR and a Honda accord”. Sign me up?