PROGRESS PARADOX
When I agreed to review Gregg Easterbrook's new book, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, I expected to mostly like the book. I was wrong. It's a mess. Here's the review. Since I had only 750 words to work with, the review couldn't cover everything I would have liked to address, including the questionable use of data discussed below.
Many, though by no means all, of the book's problems stem from its lack of concern with "how life gets better," as opposed to the mere fact that life gets better. There are lots of statistics, but very little connection to specific human enterprise, experiments, or experience. The few anecdotes are memorable, because they're so rare. The Progress Paradox represents an old strain of progressive optimism, which imagines social and economic systems as far simpler than they are. It's reminiscent of the technocratic works that dominated "progressive" thinking through the 1960s. Easterbrook's approach to, say, universal health insurance amounts to the "if we can put a man on the moon" argument, with no acknowledgement whatsoever of all the feedback effects that people who think seriously about health policy--regardless of their prescriptions--routinely address. He essentially takes a Nike attitude: Just do it! The result is a glib work, but not a very good one.