Figure 17-6: Leisure time, US, 1965–2015
Sources: 1965–2003: Aguiar & Hurst 2007, table III, Leisure Measure 1. 2015: American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016c, summing Leisure and Sports, Lawn and Garden Care, and Volunteering for commensurability with Aguiar & Hurst’s Measure 1.
Electronic media are commonly cited as a threat to human relationships, and certainly Facebook friends are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact with flesh-and-blood companions.28 Yet overall, electronic technology has been a priceless gift to human closeness. A century ago, if family members moved to a distant city, one might never hear their voices or see their faces again. Grandchildren grew up without their grandparents laying eyes on them. Couples separated by study, work, or war would reread a letter dozens of times and tumble into despair if the next one was late, not knowing whether the postal service had lost it or whether the lover was angry, faithless, or dead (an agony recounted in songs like the Marvelettes’ and Beatles’ “Please Mr. Postman” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Why Don’t You Write Me?”). Even when long-distance telephony allowed people to reach out and touch someone, the exorbitant cost put a strain on intimacy. People of my generation remember the awkwardness of speed-talking on a pay phone while feeding it quarters between bongs, or the breakneck sprint when called to the family phone (“IT’S LONG DISTANCE!!!”), or the sinking feeling of the rent money evaporating as a pleasant conversation unfolded. “Only connect,” advised E. M. Forster, and electronic technology is allowing us to connect as never before. Today, almost half of the world’s population has Internet access, and three-quarters have access to a mobile phone. The marginal cost of a long-distance conversation is essentially zero, and the conversants can now see as well as hear each other.
And speaking of seeing, the plunging cost of photography is another gift to the richness of experience. In past eras people had only a mental image to remind them of a family member, living or dead. Today, like billions of others, I get a wave of gratitude for my blessings several times a day as my eyes alight on a photo of my loved ones. Affordable photography also allows the high points of life to be lived many times, not just once: the precious occasions, the stunning sights, the long-gone cityscapes, the elderly in their prime, the grown-ups as children, the children as babies.
Even in the future, when we have 3-D holographic surround-sound virtual reality with haptic exoskeleton gloves, we will still want to be within touching distance of the people we love, so the shrinking cost of transportation is another boon to humanity. Trains, buses, and cars have multiplied the opportunities for us to get together, and the remarkable democratization of plane travel has removed the barriers of distance and oceans. The term jet set for chic celebrities is an anachronism from the 1960s, when no more than a fifth of Americans had ever flown in a plane. Despite soaring fuel costs, the real price of plane travel in the United States has fallen by more than half since the late 1970s, when the airlines were deregulated (figure 17-7). In 1974, it cost $1,442 (in 2011 dollars) to fly from New York to Los Angeles; today it can be done for less than $300. As prices fell, more people flew: in 2000 more than half of Americans took at least one round-trip flight. You might have to spread-eagle while a guard slides a wand up your crotch, you may have an elbow in your ribs and a seatback in your chin, but long-distance lovers get to see each other, and if your mother gets sick you can be there the next day.
Figure 17-7: Cost of air travel, US, 1979–2015
Source: Thompson 2013, updated with data from Airlines for America, http://airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/. Domestic travel, excluding checked baggage fees (which would raise the average cost for baggage-checking passengers by about a half-cent per mile since 2008).
Affordable transportation does more than reunite people. It also allows them to sample the phantasmagoria of Planet Earth. This is the pastime that we exalt as “travel” when we do it and revile as “tourism” when someone else does it, but it surely has to count as one of the things that make life worth living. To see the Grand Canyon, New York, the Aurora Borealis, Jerusalem—these are not just sensuous pleasures but experiences that widen the scope of our consciousness, allowing us to take in the vastness of space, time, nature, and human initiative. Though we bristle at the motor coaches and tour guides, the selfie-shooting throngs in their tacky shorts, we must concede that life is better when people can expand their awareness of our planet and species rather than being imprisoned within walking distance of their place of birth. With the rise of disposable income and the declining cost of plane travel, more people have been exploring the world, as we see in figure 17-8.
And no, the travelers aren’t just lining up for wax museums and rides at Disney World. The number of areas in the world that are protected from development and economic exploitation exceeds 160,000 and increases daily. As we saw in figure 10-6, far more of the natural world is being set aside in nature preserves.
Figure 17-8: International tourism, 1995–2015
Source: World Bank 2016e, based on data from the World Tourism Organization, Yearbook of Tourism Statistics.
Another way in which the scope of our aesthetic experience has been magnified is food. The late 19th-century American diet consisted mainly of pork and starch.29 Before refrigeration and motorized transport, most fruits and vegetables would have spoiled before they reached a consumer, so farmers grew nonperishables like turnips, beans, and potatoes. Apples were the only fruit, most of which went into cider. (As recently as the 1970s, Florida souvenir shops sold bags of oranges for tourists to take home as gifts.) The American diet was called “white bread” and “meat-and-potatoes” for good reason. Adventurous cooks might whip up some Spam fritters, mock apple pie made from Ritz crackers, or “Perfection Salad” (coleslaw in lemon Jell-O). New cuisines introduced by immigrants were so exotic that they became the butt of jokes, including Italian (“Mamma mia, that’s a spicy meatball!”), Mexican (“Solves the gas shortage”), Chinese (“An hour later and you’re hungry again”), and Japanese (“Bait, not food”). Today, even small towns and shopping mall food courts offer a cosmopolitan menu, sometimes with all these cuisines plus Greek, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern. Grocers have broadened their offerings as well, from a few hundred items in the 1920s to 2,200 in the 1950s, 17,500 in the 1980s, and 39,500 in 2015.30
Last but not least, access to the finest products of the human mind has been fabulously broadened and democratized. It’s hard for us to reconstruct the gnawing boredom of the isolated rural households of yesteryear.31 In the late 19th century there was not only no Internet but no radio, television, movies, or musical recordings, and for the majority of households not even a book or newspaper. For entertainment, men would go to the saloon to drink.32 The writer and editor William Dean Howells (1837–1920) entertained himself as a boy by rereading the pages of an old newspaper which his father had used to wallpaper their Ohio cabin.
A country-dweller today can choose from among hundreds of television channels and half a billion Web sites, embracing every newspaper and magazine in the world (including their archives going back more than a century), every great work of literature that is out of copyright, an encyclopedia more than seventy times the size of Britannica with about the same level of accuracy, and every classic work of art and music.33 He could fact-check rumors on Snopes, teach himself math and science at Khan Academy, build his word power with the American Heritage Dictionary, enlighten himself with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and watch lectures by the world’s great scholars, writers, and critics, many long dead. Today an impoverished Hillel would not have to pass out from cold while eavesdropping on lessons through the skylight of a schoolhouse.
Even for wealthy Western urbanites, who always had the run of the palaces of culture, access to arts and letters has expanded tremendously. When I was a student, a movie buff had to wait years for a classic film to be s
hown at a local repertory theater or on late-night television, if it was shown at all; today it can be streamed on demand. I can listen to any of thousands of songs while jogging, washing the dishes, or waiting in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. With a few keystrokes, I could lose myself in the complete works of Caravaggio, the original trailer for Rashomon, Dylan Thomas reciting “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” Eleanor Roosevelt reading aloud the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Maria Callas singing “O mio babbino caro,” Billie Holiday singing “My Man Don’t Love Me,” and Solomon Linda singing “Mbube”—experiences I could not have had for love or money just a few years ago. Cheap hi-fi headphones and, soon, cardboard virtual-reality glasses enhance the aesthetic experience well beyond the tinny speakers and muddy black-and-white reproductions of my youth. And those who like paper can buy a used copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, or Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood for a dollar apiece.
A combination of Internet technology and crowdsourcing from thousands of volunteers has led to flabbergasting access to the great works of humankind. There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow. The answer does not depend on invidious comparisons of the quality of the works of today and those of the past (which we are in no position to make, just as many of the great works of the past were not appreciated in their time). It follows from our ceaseless creativity and our fantastically cumulative cultural memory. We have, at our fingertips, virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time, whereas the people who lived before our time had neither. Better still, the world’s cultural patrimony is now available not just to the rich and well-located but to anyone who is connected to the vast web of knowledge, which means most of humanity and soon all of it.
CHAPTER 18
HAPPINESS
But are we any happier? If we have a shred of cosmic gratitude, we ought to be. An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure. He or she can spend that leisure time reading on the Web, listening to music on a smartphone, streaming movies on high-definition TV, Skyping with friends and relatives, or dining on Thai food instead of Spam fritters.
But if popular impressions are a guide, today’s Americans are not one and a half times happier (as they would be if happiness tracked income), or a third happier (if it tracked education), or even an eighth happier (if it tracked longevity). People seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp, and kvetch as much as ever, and the proportion of Americans who tell pollsters that they are happy has remained steady for decades. Popular culture has noticed the ingratitude in the Internet meme and Twitter hashtag #first worldproblems and in a monologue by the comedian Louis C.K. known as “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy”:
When I read things like, “The foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . ’Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. . . . Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. . . . They’re like, “It was the worst day of my life. . . . We get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” . . . Oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they fuckin’ put air in them? . . . You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now! . . . People say there’s delays? . . . Air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking. . . . The Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.1
Writing in 1999, John Mueller summed up the common understanding of modernity at the time: “People seem simply to have taken the remarkable economic improvement in stride and have deftly found new concerns to get upset about. In an important sense, then, things never get better.”2 The understanding was based on more than just impressions of American malaise. In 1973 the economist Richard Easterlin identified a paradox that has since been named for him.3 Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer.
The Easterlin paradox was explained with two theories from psychology. According to the theory of the hedonic treadmill, people adapt to changes in their fortunes, like eyes adapting to light or darkness, and quickly return to a genetically determined baseline.4 According to the theory of social comparison (or reference groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation, which we examined in chapter 9), people’s happiness is determined by how well they think they are doing relative to their compatriots, so as the country as a whole gets richer, no one feels happier—indeed, if their country becomes more unequal, then even if they get richer they may feel worse.5
If, in this sense, things never get better, one can wonder whether all that economic, medical, and technological so-called progress was worth it. Many argue that it was not. We have been spiritually impoverished, they say, by the rise of individualism, materialism, consumerism, and decadent wealth, and by the erosion of traditional communities with their hearty social bonds and their sense of meaning and purpose bestowed by religion. That is why, one often reads, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide have been soaring, and why Sweden, that secular paradise, has a famously high rate of suicide. In 2016 the activist George Monbiot prosecuted the cultural pessimist’s time-honored campaign against modernity in an op-ed entitled “Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness. That’s What’s Wrenching Society Apart.” The tag line was, “Epidemics of mental illness are crushing the minds and bodies of millions. It’s time to ask where we are heading and why.” The article itself warned, “The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.”6
If all those extra years of life and health, all that additional knowledge and leisure and breadth of experience, all those advances in peace and safety and democracy and rights, have really left us no happier but just lonelier and more suicidal, it would be history’s greatest joke on humanity. But before we start walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides, we had better take a closer look at the facts about human happiness.
* * *
At least since the Axial Age, thinkers have deliberated about what makes for a good life, and today happiness has become a major topic in social science.7 Some intellectuals are incredulous, even offended, that happiness has become a subject for economists rather than just poets, essayists, and philosophers. But the approaches are not opposed. Social scientists often begin their studies of happiness with ideas that were first conceived by artists and philosophers, and they can pose questions about historical and global patterns that cannot be answered by solitary reflection, no matter how insightful. That is especially true for the question of whether progress has left people happier. To answer it, we must first assuage the critics’ incredulity over the possibility that happiness can even be measured.
Artists, philosophers, and social scientists agree that well-being is not a single dimension. People can be better off in some ways and worse off in others. Let’s distinguish the major ones.
We can begin with objective aspects of well
-being: the gifts we deem intrinsically worthwhile whether or not their possessors appreciate them. At the top of that list is life itself; also on it are health, education, freedom, and leisure. That is the mindset behind Louis C.K.’s social criticism and, in part, behind Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s conceptions of fundamental human capabilities.8 In this sense we can say that people who live long, healthy, and stimulating lives are truly better off even if they have a morose temperament or are in a bad mood or are spoiled idiots and fail to count their blessings. One rationale for this apparent paternalism is that life, health, and freedom are prerequisites to everything else, including the very act of pondering what is worthwhile in life, and so they are worthy by their very nature. Another is that the people who have the luxury of failing to appreciate their good fortune make up a biased sample of lucky survivors. If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits. These dimensions of well-being have been the topics of the preceding chapters, and the verdict on whether they have improved over time is in.
Enlightenment Now Page 32