I once belonged to a millenialist religion. The second coming ,we believed ,was just around the corner and soon Christ Himself would rule on Earth. This wasn't some whacky fringe group either. We weren't looking for spaceships or comets to carry us to the promised land ,or living in an isolated desert compound purifying ourselves in preparation for the coming rapture. There was a widespread belief that the world was rotten and getting rottener. That idea is a common thread in all millennialist cults , religious and secular. If life wasn't getting worse, if the world wasn't descending into ever greater depravity and suffering, then why pin your hopes on its sudden culmination and speedy redemption? I had a few problems with the doctrines of that church , this was one of them. For whatever reason, I tended to think of the world as a pretty wonderful place and improving all the time. It turns out that my uninformed ,overly positive impression was right all along. I may have been naive but I wasn't deceived.
The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook adds further confirmation to my sunny outlook. It's his contention that life in the United States has improved tremendously over the last sixty years. It's been on the same trajectory since colonial times, with occasional hiccups here and there, but always trending upwards. The air is cleaner, rivers and streams are less polluted. The rich have become richer, but then so have every other class. Those in the middle, for instance, have experienced a doubling in income over the last sixty years in inflation adjusted dollars. Not only that but the goods and services available to them far surpass what the nineteen sixties had to offer in quality, convenience, and life enhancement. The author is amazed that the good news isn't getting out there, and so am I. It's not in the interest of politicians or the news media to broadcast it. Power for the political class depends on our believing otherwise, and that's the message the mainstream media is pleased to pass on and amplify. False narratives about the decline of the middle class are inescapable. It's not surprising that many of us believe it.
What about income inequality? Haven't the rich seen their incomes and buying power increase far faster than the middle class? Easterbrook points out that there are two significant factors at play skewing median household income statistics that need to be taken into account. Immigration accounts for most of the income growth disparity. The United States, from around 1980 until today, has taken in over a million immigrants annually. For most of those years that's been about equal to the rest of the world's nations combined. Most of those immigrants are poor. For many of them the climb out of poverty is a slow process while coping with a strange culture and a difficult language to master. Add in the millions of immigrants who have crossed the border illegally , many of whome are largely uneducated, and you begin to see the situation more clearly. While immigration is a positive phenomenon, and one of America's greatest sources of strength, in the short term it detracts from the median wealth statistical profile. According to Easterbrook and the studies he sites ,the gap between haves and have-nots is actually shrinking, not growing, once you factor out the non-native born. Another factor is the shrinking size of the American family. While the typical household today contains about 2.6 people, twenty-five years ago the average was 4. Household income may have grown only slightly over that period ( factoring in the drag on that statistic due to high numbers of new immigrants), but remember that wealth is spread out over far fewer people per household today. Taking smaller households into account the rise in wealth per person since 1990 on average is fifty percent.
My former religion didn't actually teach that shrinking paychecks were a sign of the coming apocalypse. They looked for societal collapse in other forms. There was even some finger pointing at increasing prosperity as a cause of increasing sin. Here they were on to something. Prosperity is at least a mixed blessing. Even as we have gained in wealth and in other measures of a satisfying and comfortable life we've been losing ground on the happiness index. Suicides are up, drug use and alcohol addiction are rampant, more and more of us suffer bouts of depression. That is the "paradox" that appears in the title of Easterbrook's book. It explores the subject and offers solutions.
The question comes up, would you rather be rich or do you prefer to be happy? My answer is always, yes.
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