Choice anxiety, abundance denial and other comforts of the modern age

The Progress Paradox: how Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
by Gregg Easterbrook
Random House, 2003, 377 pages.
Reviewed by Frank Conte

It was the great columnist, the sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, who wrote “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” While Mencken’s searing wit skews to hyperbole, his insight has proved timeless. Uncertainty about the economic future and the fear of change is one of the dubious rationales for the aggrandizement of State power. The consequences have been severe to say the least.

One could easily modify Mencken’s insight by adding those nattering nabobs of negativism who dominate the media thereby adding fuel to the fiery notion, from both Left and Right, that the world is going to hell in hand-basket – one probably woven in a sweatshop in some god-forsaken part of the world. To be sure there are real threats to Western civilization, post September 11. These are not imaginary and serve as a grave summoning to a re-ordering of public life in America. But that is not the whole story, in fact the bad news has overextended its stay — crowding out the steady but silent march of civilization.

Gregg Easterbrook has made it his job to chronicle this glorious march and along the way he’s found the gumption to disregard the endless pixel-driven, high-decibel hobgoblins of the nightly news. Easterbrook is a man with much-needed perspective. That he may whistle Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” on his way to work would not be a surprise.

Notwithstanding the horrors of war and famine (which in the rearview mirror of history are calamities that often could be avoided), life is getting better for the average person. A gifted magazine writer, Easterbrook, is courageous enough to tread the borders of heresy in his new book, The Paradox of Progress. Not since the late Julian Simon has an optimist surged onto the public stage with such brilliance. To the war of light and darkness, Easterbrook comes armed with facts to tell the great story of our era.

• In 1956, for example, the typical American had to work 16 weeks for each 100 square feet of home purchased; today, 100 square feet of new home costs the typical person 14 weeks of work. Overcrowding is down to three percent; houses without plumbing are less than one percent for the first time in history. Today, almost 70% of Americans own their homes compared to 20% a century ago.
• Inflation adjusted per-capita American income has more than doubled since 1960 meaning that the typical person now commands twice the buying power of his father or mother in the year 1960. The 50% real dollar gain for average households comes during a period of open immigration, no small feat. During the 1950s, a cheeseburger at McDonald’s cost the typical person half an hour of wages; now the typical American can buy a McDonald’s cheeseburger for the price of three minutes of wages.
• According to the most recent U.S. Census data, almost 23% of households today have an income of at least $75,000, which “equates to some 63 million people – more than the U.S. population in 1890 – existing at the material standard of the upper middle class.”
• The U.S. is on the “short path to becoming the first society in history with more adults who are college graduates than are not.”
• Today, Americans own both land and stock, an accrual of wealth unimagined by their grandparents. U.S. families hold about $12 trillion in equities, a figure representing more than a year’s GDP for the U.S.
• Cancer, once a death sentence, is treatable with miraculous drugs and other therapies. Cancer mortality has been declining at the annual rate of about one percent since 1993.
• Despite a slight recent increase, crime overall is down and so is gun use. It would have been difficult to imagine that in 2002 the murder rate in New York City would be less than in most rural states. The distorting lenses of Hollywood and the media create other impressions. In 1981 the quintessential actor Paul Newman made the movie Fort Apache: The Bronx a depressing tale of one the most ruthless crime-ridden corners of the globe. Today the 42nd precinct, upon which the movie was based, has so thoroughly triumphed over crime that police officers now take up their time with community outreach programs. A sequel to Ft. Apache and its success escapes the limited blood and guts storyboards of Hollywood films.

Easterbrook’s inventory of well-being doesn’t stop. Reduced mortality rates, longevity thanks to advances in medicine, less air pollution, the ability to fly anywhere at a moment’s notice, the ability to call anyone anywhere for a fraction of the cost of long distance rates once only affordable to the upper classes are all examples of the average person enjoying a higher standard of living. The fact that the typical person today has the economic means to pay someone else to prepare his or her meals is an astounding economic development.

Virtually no other issue embodies the culture of complaint as does the cost of prescription drugs. While seniors spend more on alcohol, tobacco, and entertainment than prescription drugs, few admit the benefits they bestow. “One reason so many American senior citizens are upset about the costs of drugs is that those drugs have kept them alive long enough so that they need more drugs.” In fact, as Easterbrook points out, most of the increase in health care spending “stems not from the prices of medical goods and services but increased utilitzation.” This is a good sign in so far that high-tech medicine should be available to everyone. This makes people, even the poor, better off. But of course the bad news drives out the good.

One of the most compelling arguments in the book tackles the issue of growing inequality. Easterbrook is clearly prepared to meet the egalitarian challenge. Social democrats have long sought to make growing inequality the United States a wedge issue, hoping that concerns about income disparities will engender a revolt of the masses. Has inequality expanded significantly? Not really, replies Easterbrook, if one takes a closer look at the numbers.

The slow growth in median incomes coincides with the second great wave of immigration, still underway. From 1979 to 1999, notes Easterbrook, five million immigrant households below the poverty line were added to the U.S. However the number of native born Americans living in poverty has actually declined. “Factor out immigration and the rise in American inequality disappears; median income trends (particularly among African-Americans) become quite healthy.”

About 11% of the U.S. population is foreign born. This is America at its best not its worst. Immigration can be a great revitalizing force and this is certainly no indictment. But to close the “inequality gap” would require highly restrictive immigration policies which no one could rationally support, not even labor unions. “Unless you favor the closing of the borders, don’t complain that the top is pulling away from the middle in income terms.”

The noble story about immigration is worth telling. In absence of direct foreign aid to developing nations, the U.S., through its immigration policy, the most liberal in the world, offers more than a fleeting hope to millions escaping poverty. For each of the last 20 years, the U.S. has welcomed and absorbed a million legal immigrants a year – more than all other nations combined.

This sunny side of life does little to lighten the heavy minds of self-absorbed Western intellectuals, a class sustained by a steady stream of ponderous gloomy commentary. The angst that has been fodder for the chattering classes is made possible paradoxically because of economic growth. As material goods have become cheaper, available and abundant and their marginal value has diminished, they are no longer life-long pursuits but rather goods readily attainable for consumption today. This allows us to make other choices. Since the demand for basic needs are fulfilled, we now move on to make other choices such as demands for cleaner air or other “quality of life” goods and, even as Easterbrook portends, a demand for making the world a better place.

The obsession of the protean self with the crisis of capitalism and other leisure pursuits obscures the fact that we ought to be grateful for our economic way of life. Easterbrook does well to quote Adam Smith to whom he turns for a lesson on gratitude. The father of free trade and the author of Theory of Moral Sentiments believed that people who were ungrateful were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life.

In the end, the rest of the world would love to make the kind of agonizing choices before us every day.

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