|
|
Title: The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
Purchase
Item
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $8.41
|
|
| Customer Reviews: |
| The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Random House Trade Paperbacks Too Many Exagerated Statistics to Prove His Arguement | The fact that so many endorse "The Progress Paradox" is nothing short of tragic. I am disappointed that the best reviewers got as far into the book as they did without noticing that the author spun many of the statistics to prove his point. He downplays the reality of poverty with false statistics. Recalling from memory, very close to the beginning of the book, Easterbrook states that the elderly no longer have to worry about being cared for. Perhaps he should have read Susan Sheehan's article in The New Yorker, "Not Poor Enough" which tells the true story about how the elderly are doing in this country. Has the author been to a state subsidized nursing home? He also strolled right over the problem of poverty with a completely false statistic about the number of children in the U.S. living under the poverty line. The list goes on and on. I was so impressed with the number of fallacies used to make his argument I started highlighting. My copy looks like Key West Christmas tree. How did the manuscript ever make it past the editor?
I think this book is written to help the 1% at the top of the pyramid feel better about themselves. Let them eat cake? Coincidently, the book was given to us by the wealthiest people we know who also happen to live in one of the premier independent living centers in the NE.
This book should be read as an example of fallacy in argument, and nothing more. | | The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Random House Trade Paperbacks Makes you reflect on what happiness really is | | What is progress? Gregg Easterbrook looks at that question, showing that while we have "progressed" a great deal in a very short time; most of us are feeling worse about our lives. Read this book and recognize that happiness isn't found in luxury. | | The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Random House Trade Paperbacks Can't pull off the "happy liberal" act | Liberals are dour and gloomy by nature. You know the routine: the earth is heating up like a Toast-R-Oven; a hundred million children don't have health insurance; the fundies are taking over the school system; we're bombing every third-world country except Darfur; no one likes us.
Then Easterbrook comes out with this book, and for a moment you think: "Wow! A liberal can be an optimist!" But then you read a little further, and discover that's not the case.
First the optimism. This first part of this book is a welcome antidote for the Paul Erlich-esque hand-wringing, doom-and-gloomism constantly being showered on us. Some of the book's better points include:
* "Many figures in philosophy, religion, politics, and other fields have recommended that others pay no heed to material concerns, while being obsessed with the same things themselves" (p 145). Excellent point, and for a very engaging expansion of that point, read Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals."
* "On its face, existential despair appears self-canceling: If life really is pointless, why bother to get upset about that? Wouldn't getting upset be pointless?" (p 253).
* By and large, things are getting better, not worse. We live longer, are richer, healthier and have more comfortable lifestyles than our ancestors.
However, the liberal's trademark pessimism, distortions, fear-mongering, political correctness, nanny-state policy preferences and plain old errors of fact then return -- with a vengeance.
* At its core, the book is contradictory, and exposes the problem liberals have with optimism. Easterbrook appropriately harps on the fact in the first 150 pages that astounding progress has been made in an absolute sense. For example, a car made today emits only 2% of the pollutants of a car made in 1970. But particularly at the end of the book, Easterbrook throws this all away and begins berating us for problems that exist in a relative sense, something he spends the first part of the quite correctly scoffing at. Easterbrook then reverts to type, producing a glaring series of unchecked, unabashed, big government, we-know-what's-best-for-you liberalism: mandated universal health insurance (pp 255-257); elimination of SUVs (pp 92-93); increase in the minimum wage to a "living wage" whatever that is (pp 260-263); Bush-favors-the-rich bashing (p 247); CEO bashing (pp 266-277); subsidized housing for drug addicts (p 259); more foreign aid (p 309). And when he says that in the U.S. "millions of people not only have more than they need, but have, in many ways, more than is good for them" (p 258), then you should, as Robert J. Ringer would say, "Hold on to your chips," because he's coming after them with a vengeance.
* "Until the day when everyone is released from basic want, a sword will hang over Western abundance" (p 68). This from the guy that complains about "amplified anxiety" (p 111). Who will wield this sword anyway? And exactly who is going to "release" the whole world from basic want, how are they going to get the money to do it, and how are they going to force the leaders of other countries who may not be too concerned about releasing their citizens from want? This sounds like the basis for Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem. Also: is freedom from want all that's causing a sword to be held of Western civilization's head? Was Mohammed Atta poor?
* "A reason Western economies keep performing better may be that capitalism has been supplanted by market economies" (p 67). In response to that non sequitur, I would only ask, What kind of economy existed during capitalism then?
* SUVs are unsafe because an SUV is "more likely to harm the passengers in a car it collides with" (p 93). To *that* non sequitur, I'll only ask: What vehicle do *you* want to be in when you get into an accident?
* "But the mid-1990s rise of road rage coincided with the onset of SUV mania" (p 94). No. Having lived in L.A. in the late 1980s, I can definitively refute that asinine comment.
* In the 1990s culture wars, "the right claimed the left was...opposed to reading of the classics" (p 103). Yes, that's absolutely correct. The Right *was* saying that and it *was* happening. For instance, anyone remember the $20 million Bass Grant controversy with Yale? Hmm?
* "Each of the three Die Hard movies...depicted dozens of police officers being gunned down" (p 115). Now this is a supposed fact that we can easily verify for accuracy. Let's see: counting the two special agent Johnsons, the helicopter pilot and two cops in the armored vehicle ("What do we have here...it seems the police have themselves an RV"), and three SWAT team members, that comes to a grand total of eight police officers killed. Add in the two rent-a-cops in the beginning of the movie just to be generous, and you're talking ten. Not exactly "dozens" is it? How can Easterbrook expect to have us take him seriously on the big facts when he can't get the small ones right?
* "...luck is simply part of life, but [we] should acknowledge this means that those who experience good luck acquire significant obligations to those who do not" (p 154). Uh-oh. That sounds too much like a Dick Gephardt "lucky in life's lottery" line, which is a set-up for a soak-the-rich line. Easterbrook casually tosses this out without a discussion of premises (how exactly does one "acquire" an obligation to another person whom you have never met and who lives thousands of miles away?) as well as its practice (who is to distinguish luck from unequal effort?).
* "When free-market conservatives begin to suppose that something beyond the free market is necessary for human happiness, a threshold has come into view" (p 250). First off, is there such a thing as a free-market liberal? I can't think of one. Second off, I know a straw man when I see one. Conservatives, by definition, constitute the group that understands the importance of religion and culture, and not just free trade.
* When the U.S. based troops in Saudi Arabia, we were "asserting suzerainty over much of Islam's oil wealth" (p 297). Does a religion have oil? Doesn't it belong to the state, or the people living in that country? If we were asserting suzerainty (power, authority) over Saudi Arabia's oil, how come we were buying it instead of expropriating it? How do a bunch of troops stationed far out in the desert, away from everyone, assert power over a country bigger than the size of Alaska? Is oil cheap now? If not, then why not, if we control Saudi Arabia? Didn't we station troops in Saudi Arabia because one Mohammedan country attacked two others, including Saudi Arabia?
* American agents picked the current Saudi ruling family "with oil interests in mind" (p 297). As for who got picked and why, I encourage Easterbrook to brush up on his pre- and post-WW I history. America didn't pick them (the House of Saud has been prominent for over 250 years) and hadn't been discovered when Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud finally consolidated his power in 1932. Easterbrook literally couldn't be more wrong.
* Mohammedan terrorists are compared to Timothy McVeigh: "the Christian ethos spawned its share of hideous killers, among them the terrorist Timothy McVeigh" (p 299). Unlike Easterbrook, apparently, I was alive and awake after 9/11, and the silence of the imams in America was deafening. Does Easterbrook think we don't know the difference between a nutjob like McVeigh and a current of religious thinking with tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of adherents? Besides, when exactly did McVeigh say that Jesus told him kill all those people? Superficial, glib and sophomoric comparisons just make you look like a hack, an apologist or an fool.
Overall, I have to give the book three stars because it gores so many of the left's sacred cows. You just don't find that in mainstream books, and it has to be recognized. But this achievement is marred by careless, counterfactual and inconsistent writing, and by a steady stream of liberal clichés. Easterbrook's no happy liberal warrior. | | The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Random House Trade Paperbacks Fact filled, but bring a big dictionary | | The author does a great job at making his point, showing statistically how things have changed over many generations, but yet life has not necessarily improved. My big nit with this book though is that the author couldn't possible write like he talks; if he did, few would understand him. I find too often that non-fiction writers go for the gusto when trying to flower up their work with words requiring a dictionary to understand; this author did just that. I felt the author could have used a lighter and more humorous prose to get his points across, but instead made the book a klunky read. In all though, this book serves as a great wake-up call to those caught on life's treadmill, wondering what in the heck they're running toward. | | The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Random House Trade Paperbacks The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse | | One of the best books I have ever read. Would recommend it to everyone. | | The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Random House Trade Paperbacks Product Description | In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook draws upon three decades of wide-ranging research and thinking to make the persuasive assertion that almost all aspects of Western life have vastly improved in the past century–and yet today, most men and women feel less happy than in previous generations.
Detailing the emerging science of “positive psychology,” which seeks to understand what causes a person’s sense of well-being, Easterbrook offers an alternative to our culture of crisis and complaint. He makes a compelling case that optimism, gratitude, and acts of forgiveness not only make modern life more fulfilling but are actually in our self-interest. An affirming and constructive way of seeing life anew, The Progress Paradox will change the way you think about your place in the world–and about our collective ability to make it better. | | The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Random House Trade Paperbacks Amazon.com | | Ordinary middle-class Americans have often tried to assuage their jealousy of the rich by repeating the axiom "money can't buy happiness" to themselves. But according to New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbrook, "the rich" are, in fact, those same ordinary middle-class Americans and no, they're not happy at all. Wages have soared over the past fifty years and regular citizens own large homes, new cars, and luxuries aplenty. Better still, the environment, with a few exceptions, is getting cleaner, crime is on the decline, and diseases are being wiped out as life span increases. So why do people report a sense that things are getting steadily worse and that catastrophe is imminent? Easterbrook presents a few psychological rationales, including "choice anxiety," where the vastness of society's options is a burden, and "abundance denial," where people somehow manage to convince themselves that they are deprived of material comforts. The sooner we accept how good we have it, the better off the whole world will be, he says, because if we would just realize that we have this wealth, we could be using it to alleviate hunger, provide health care for the millions who lack it, and otherwise address the ills that actually do exist. While at times the book's attempts to make the world a better place seem a bit of a stretch, it's admirable that Easterbrook is willing to make that stretch and not suggest people simply light up cigars and bask in their newly discovered joys. One might look a bit askance at some of Easterbrook's sunny perspectives on our societal fortunes--he celebrates rampant consumerism while skating past the rampant consumer debt that lies beneath it, for instance--but it's hard to deny that the pessimistic viewpoint is much more widely stated than that of optimists. Is the glass really half empty or should we, as Easterbrook indicates, enjoy the wonderful world in which we secretly live? --John Moe |
| |
