The Great Story of Our Era: Average People Better Off : Part 2

The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
By Gregg Easterbrook

(Page 2 of 2)

A century ago the very notion of a second home, owned not as a principal dwelling but a place of relaxation, could be contemplated strictly by a minuscule super-elite; now there are millions with a weekend place, and the number keeps rising. Today a leading problem with your dream house by the water is that so many other people also own vacation homes and own powerboats or jet skis - in 2001, Americans spent $25 billion, more than the GDP of North Korea, on recreational watercraft1 - that the tranquility may be shattered by piston roar. At present many lakeside communities are wrapped up in campaigns to restrict noise from private motor vessels, and the politics of the mat- ter are delicate, because often the factions favoring stillness are arrayed in opposition to boat owners and jet skiers who are working-class women and men, and who feel their privileges are being trampled.

But imagine; the boat owners are working-class. Merely the concept of the "pleasure" boat possessed by an average individual rather than by a duke or an industrialist is new to our moment. Now so many average people own pleasure boats that docking space is short in many areas, while marinas have become the "marina industry" - complete with its own lobby group, the International Marina Institute, and with several trade publications, among them Marina Dock Age and Marina and Boatyard Today. In other battles regarding the great outdoors, such as in the national-monument areas of the California desert or at Yellowstone National Park, the offending machines may be snowmobiles or single-seat all-terrain vehicles, costing $5,000 each or more, owned by average people and opposed by those who dislike the noise. Since 1995, Americans have purchased more than 3 million all-terrain vehicles, which are used almost exclusively for recreation, and continue to snap them up at a rate of about 750,000 per year. But imagine - average people own expensive specialized vehicles just for weekend recreation. And so many of these vehicles exist that they have become a political issue!

Fly-in restaurants, golf-course communities, rustic lakes ringed by second homes, pleasure boats, huge SUVs with heated leather seats and built-in video, custom-painted snowmobiles with GPS: These and many other big-ticket items are now marketed not to the top but to the middle of American society, and increasingly to the middle of European society, too. They serve as well as any examples might to illustrate one of the most fundamental trends in the postwar Western world: namely, the grand increase in living standards for people who aren't rich.

Poverty persists in the United States, at lower levels each decade, but its persistence nonetheless is a national outrage; millions live from paycheck to paycheck under nerve-racking financial pressure; millions lack health insurance; runaway materialism simultaneously makes us shallow and fails to give satisfaction; mass culture (the movies, television, pop music) grows stupider by the minute; inequality means some have far more than they could ever need while others have only resentment; global forces cause many to fear job loss. All these are important objections to trends in contemporary American life.

But in the main, Americans are steadily better off, and while the rich are richer, the bulk of the gains in living standards - the gains that really matter - have occurred below the plateau of wealth. Almost every person in the United States and the European Union today lives better than did his or her parents. In the United States and Western Europe, almost everything is getting better for almost everybody: This has been the case for years, and is likely to remain the case.

Consider a few statistics, derived from the 2000 United States Census. Almost 23 percent of households in the United States today have an income of at least $75,000, which equates to some sixty-three million people existing at the material standard of the upper middle class. Sixty-three million people - more than the total population of the United States in the year 1890 - now live an "upper" existence in material terms. An upper-or-above life situation hardly ensures happiness, as large numbers of materially favored people today nevertheless feel miserable, a topic this book will explore in some depth. But the notion of sixty-three million people being very well off represents an astonishingly positive trend in standards of living. In 1890, less than 1 percent of American households earned the equivalent of $75,000 in today's dollars; now nearly a quarter of households are at that favored point.

Copyright © 2003 by Gregg Easterbrook.

About the Author

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of The New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a visiting fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution, and a columnist for ESPN.com. He is the author of six books, including A Moment on the Earth, a New York Times and American Library Association Notable Book. He has also been a contributing editor at Newsweek and an editor of The Washington Monthly. He lives in Maryland.