Book review: The Progress Paradox

Recently I joined Shelfari, a social networking/book club thing, because I clearly was not wasting enough time blogging or surfing the web. At any rate, it has helped me remember the books I promised myself to read and I've decided to write reviews of the nonfiction I read to both share something of my interests with y'all and to help me remember what I've read.

So here's the latest: The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook. It's a part of my "read the books you get as gifts" program - this one's from Dad.

I'd call the book 1/3 excellent and 2/3 overdone. The first third of the book focuses on the litany of ways the Western world has improved: environment, health, longevity. More people than ever have sufficient food, shelter, and material goods. Things are better than they ever have been, says Easterbrook. That this litany takes so long is probably the point, but by page 20 I was pretty done with hearing how great life is. I believe it, but that's not the "paradox," so let's get to it, eh?

The paradox is that despite all this material progress, happiness in Western countries hit a plateau in the 1950s. In fact, while portion of people saying they are happy has leveled off, the number reporting being "very happy" has declined and the number of depressed has increased. Why, amidst all this abundance, would that be?

Easterbrook initially fingers a number of social pressures. The news has a penchant for the negative, highlighting what's wrong instead of what's right. People seem configured to complain, to find the pieces of their life that are going wrong instead of right. Commercials help cram people into the role of victims. He even wonders if complaint was perhaps an evolutionary tactic to encourage people to continue to pursue progress.

But these are universal social pressures and wouldn't explain some of the deviations. For example, the disabled and chronically ill generally report being happier than the population at large. Happiness generally increases with age. And while lacking money makes a person unhappy, having it does not make someone happy.

And this is where The Progress Paradox gets interesting. Easterbrook examines some of the psychology behind our life of abundance and wonders if we have "woken up from the American Dream." In other words, we've achieved the material objectives of the Dream, and no longer have something to look forward to. Material wants and needs are met, so there's nothing to aspire to. He offers a tantalizing illustration: most people would be happier with an income of $50,000 that would increase by $5000 a year than with a flat annual income of $250,000. Happiness is a sense of progress, not achievement.

He also examines two components of modern Western life that may exacerbate any sense of unhappiness: privacy and freedom. He notes that for people living in crowded space, falling over family members and villagers, the private space accorded the typical Westerner would seem wonderful. Houses with twice as many rooms as occupants! On the other hand, this privacy and space leaves us with less context for our personal failings - who do we rely on when we fail? How do we see the big picture of the community when we are isolated from it?

The freedom accorded to individuals may also affect happiness. When we fail or are rejected, we can't explain it to ourselves as a class bias or caste system. Instead, rejection is much more personal. Easterbrook says this is particularly hard for women, for whom roles were much more prescribed in earlier days.

The one piece Easterbrook dismisses is the idea that we are more stressed. He notes that the subsistence farmer of the 19th century had his and his entire family's livelihood on the line with each season and that the idea we are more stressed is laughable. But he concedes that we are given more to stress about thanks to 24-hour disaster coverage from the news. Furthermore, our chronic sleep shortage (2-3 hours less per night than our forbears) causes a buildup of more stress-related chemicals. The human brain is also remarkably efficient at creating mental pathways for stress and fear, and the constant repetition of fears via the media can make us more fearful of minimal threats.

The solution, according to Easterbrook, is pretty much "doing good." First, he notes that feeling good about the world is completely natural. Darwin, for example, thought that emotional states were also evolutionary and that good emotions (such as cooperation and love) served an evolutionary purpose. Although the feelings may be innate, Easterbrook notes that they take work - you have to train yourself to think positively. But it works. "Quadriplegics, as a group, have a higher sense of well-being than lottery winners." It probably wasn't innate.

There's also a selfish reason to do good - it makes you happier. "Men and women should forgive most of the wrongs and offenses they experience in life...for the self-interested reason that people who let go of their grievances are better off as a result."

Easterbrook should have ended the book there, but I think he felt obligated to note that there are many challenges in the world and that they are solvable. So you end up being dragged away from his main premise into "here's how we might save the world" chapter before you finally hit the endnotes. But I think the take-away is still worth the read: do well unto others because it will do well unto you.

Book review: Deep Economy

I recently finished reading Deep Economy by Bill McKibben and it was an excellent book. The overall theme is that Americans have come to be obsessed with more. More economic growth, more material goods, bigger! better! McKibben begins his analysis by noting that for most Americans, wealth and material goods are not related to happiness and that we need to refocus on a "deeper" economy.

First, the main point. McKibben notes that once a country's per capita income exceeds $10,000, there is not a commensurate increase in the happiness of the population. Once basic needs of food and shelter are met, little happiness (if any) is gained from additional wealth. Economists call this the diminishing marginal utility of income (pdf).

One of the other main issues McKibben addresses is the issue of agriculture, health and the environment. Modern food systems generally involve large monocultures (a single plant covering thousands of acres), massive processing and packaging, and long-distance shipping. Thus every visit to the supermarket can offer local vegetables or exotic fruits, in any season. And it also serves up a healthy dose of pesticides, herbicides, and a massive carbon footprint.

McKibben notes that both our health (in terms of nutrition) and our land's productivity suffer. First, health suffers because when modern agriculture comes to the developing world, it tends to displace sufficiency farming. The former involves large monocropping of corns or soybeans or other commodities for export, the latter a mix of vegetables and grains to serve local nutritional needs. Modern agriculture actually reduces the self-sufficiency of the developing world and increases malnutrition.

Modern science has helped combat this with discoveries such as golden rice (infused with vitamin A) that replaces the vitamin A lost when other vegetables are not longer planted alongside rice. It's ironic, though, that it is really just a fix to another solution of modern times, the green revolution.

Even more intriguing, organic small-scale farming is actually more productive per acre and per unit of energy. That's right, you get more food for your land and inputs farming in a more traditional style, where corn can be planted in the same field as beans, instead of lined up for mechanical harvesting. And that is the tradeoff, of course. This more natural style of farming is labor-intensive and more expensive in dollars per pound of food, but more productive per acre of land.

The other big issue McKibben addresses as part of his exploration of happiness is community. Americans have a society committed to maximizing individual time: houses with more bedrooms than people, cable TV instead of movie theaters, cars instead of mass transit. The tradeoff is that people feel more alone and depressed than their parents.

McKibben suggests that community is a balancing act. Too much feels repressive, like having your parents or neighbors constantly at your door or in your space. To little leaves people vulnerable to anxiety and other products of social isolation.

Overall, I thought his book an interesting look at how to re-envision the modern economy to better respect the environment and the sense of human community. Highly recommended.

Was this weekend safer?

A study by British researchers found that when the fifth and sixth Harry Potter books came out, the release weekends featured far fewer emergency room visits by children as usual.

I devoured the book in a day and a half after my lovely wife spent an hour in line Friday morning to get us our "entry pass" to the nearest bookstore. Best book of the series, in my opinion.

Helpdesk, circa 1200 AD