The Progress Paradox

Book Review by: The Lyne's man

The Progress Paradox: "How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse"

By Gregg Easterbrook

Random House, 2003

According to author Gregg Easterbrook, people are living better . . . and enjoying it less.

In the first third of The Progress Paradox, Easterbrook argues convincingly that living standards in the United States and Europe have steadily increased over the last fifty years. He offers solid, objective evidence for his claim based upon: a decrease in crime, a cleaner environment, improvement in the quality of healthcare, improving societal virtue, greater brainpower, gender and ethnic equality, and increasing economics both domestic and global. I, for one, was amazed. I had bought into the prevailing notion that the overall quality of life in western society is in decline.

Easterbrook’s question: “If most things are getting better for most people, why don’t Americans behave as though they believe this?” (p. 80). His theories about the overall attitude of pessimism include:

• The Revolution of Satisfied Expectations - “Most people judge their well-being not by where they stand but rather based on whether they think their circumstances will improve in coming years” and “now [that] we have so much it’s hard to look forward to having more” (p. 32-33)

• Collapse Anxiety – “Anxiety about a coming downturn (economy, natural resources, military) makes the mostly favorable present hard to appreciate” (p. 34). Now that we have it, we are afraid that we are going to lose it.

• The Tyranny of the Small Picture – “The lesser negative within the greater positive” (p. 99). As a society, we tend to focus only on current smaller problems instead of seeing the larger picture of overall progress.

• Complaint Proficiency – “Human beings as a group are really good at complaining” (p. 118). Complaining naturally reinforces a negative outlook.

• Abundance Denial – “Surveys show that the majority of Americans think only the rich are ‘well-off,’ despite the fact that most Americans live quite well compared to more than 99 percent of the human beings that have ever existed” (p. 119).

• Choice Anxiety – “No matter how carefully one compares products, a buyer can never be sure that he or she chose the right thing, so buyers experience anxiety before purchases, disappointment after” (p. 132-133).

Easterbrook’s theories are thought-provoking and somewhat convincing. As a result, I was looking forward to reading of his recommendations for overcoming the prevailing pessimism of our day.

Disappointment followed. His advice, based primarily on positive psychology, is that we ought simply to be more forgiving of others, more grateful for what we have, and more optimistic about the future. These rather vague proposals lack the depth of insight displayed early in the book.

Easterbrook missed a real opportunity. A passing observation made early in the Introduction reads:

“Society is undergoing a fundamental shift from “material want” to “meaning want,” with ever larger numbers of people reasonably secure in terms of living standards, but feeling that they lack significance in their lives. . . . This is a conundrum, as meaning is much more difficult to acquire than material possessions” (p. xix).

He is absolutely right! Yet, he treats this insightful observation only superficially (p. 210-212). This is an idea worth pursuing!

As I read the first chapters of The Progress Paradox, I thought to myself, “I am going to recommend this book to everyone I know.” His data is good. His conclusions are relatively satisfying, if debatable. Yet, his recommendations are vague and simplistic. Still, I’d recommend the book -– the information contained in the early chapters is paradigm-changing.

Your Lyne'sman

editor /informer

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