First, let me point out a great new blog on the blogroll, The Social Affairs Unit.
Anthony Daniels, who writes as Theodore Dalrymple, blogs on this site. That's good enough for me.
Yesterday, this post caught my eye. I am very fond of spouting economic statistics that show how great things are. I don't yearn for the Willa Cather life. I like prosperity and modernity.
But I think everybody has a nagging wonder about what Lincoln Allison calls "The Costs of Prosperity"
The British - and especially the middle classes - are much richer today than they were 25 years ago. But have there been costs to this greater wealth? Lincoln Allison argues that Britain has gained in wealth but become less rich in culture; it has become a less happy place.
There are two different theses about economic growth lurking in my comparison. The first is sceptical: it suggests that economic growth is an uninteresting measurement, leaving out far important things than it includes and perhaps including things which are of no real value at all. Fred Hirsch in The Social Limits to Growth would join Scitovsky in this. The second is pessimistic, allowing (perhaps) that economic growth is a real increment to happiness, but that it is often cancelled out (and worse) by its side-effects. This argument is prominent, for example, in J.K.Galbraith's The Affluent Society and in E.J.Mishan's The Costs of Economic Growth.
I see nothing new here JK. This is the same woeful lament over the side effects of modernity we've been hearing from the left since the seventies. The argument goes that if we were "truly advanced" we would be able to have the benefits of modernity with no negative consequences. This is analogous to the 'alternative energy' myth also emanating from the left - when, and if, it is possible, it will happen. No amount of political will or government meddling will change the reality of the science.
But there's another important element in this argument. Allison charges that reduced happiness and cultural fulfilment also result from modernity (hence from prosperity.) This is simply a non-sequitur. There is no cause and effect relationship, and Allison passively acknowledges this: "In some cases the instrumental connection to 'prosperity' is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. In other cases the reason for the loss seems more subtle and more spiritual." So we either don't need to mention it or can't describe it. Nice job wiggling out of the scientific method there, Linc.
There are other reasons for decline in happiness in the modern (hint: post-modern) world that I'll try to address in a future blog post I've been mentally composing for a few days now.
Posted by: johngalt at August 25, 2004 11:34 AM