Former presidents aren’t supposed to pass judgment on their successors. But after sitting in the rain listening to Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, with its talk of “American carnage,” George W. Bush spoke for a good chunk of Americans with his timeless aside: “That was some weird s—.”
At the time, the weirdness seemed to come down to a breach of etiquette. The duty of presidents is to be solemn and uplifting at their inaugurations, not to channel the Revelation of St. John the Divine. But a year and a half on, we can see the weirdness as part of Trump’s strange gift for blunderbussing his way toward uncomfortable truths. America’s economy is thriving, but not for all Americans. Crime at a national level continues to fall. But gun violence in Chicago is higher than it has been in 20 years. Between 2000 and 2014, the rate of deaths from suicide in the United States rose from 1 in 9,500 to 1 in 7,700. And specifically among white Americans, over the same period the rate of deaths from suicide and drug and alcohol overdoses combined rose from 1 in 4,400 to 1 in 1,800.
Still, for all the genuine bad news—not to mention the nonstop miserabilism of cable news and social media—it’s worth remembering that our air is cleaner than it used to be, our lifespans longer, our food cheaper and better, and our cars impossibly splendid. Yet all we can do is rend our garments and wail.
Gregg Easterbrook took a first hack at this conundrum in his 2003 book The Progress Paradox and takes another swing in his latest, It’s Better Than It Looks. “As life gets better, people feel worse,” he writes. “By ‘life gets better’ I surely do not mean all aspects of life are better, nor that life is better for every individual. By ‘life gets better’ I mean that in the contemporary world most people are better off in most ways when compared to any prior generation.”
Easterbrook sets out to disabuse readers of any casual pessimism and equip them with enough facts and arguments to silence dinner parties from now till kingdom come. In successive chapters he sets out to show that “granaries are not empty,” “resources are not exhausted,” “there are no runaway plagues,” “Western nations are not choking on pollution,” “the economy drives everyone crazy but keeps functioning,” “crime and war are not getting worse,” and “the dictators aren’t winning.”
In the second part of the book, he ponders the rise of “declinism” and the dangers of inequality. He ends with a call for us to shake off the gloom and see change as opportunity, not impending calamity.
Every page overflows with facts, statistics, and summaries of academic research. A century ago, 80 percent of people around the globe were illiterate; today, it’s around 15 percent. The United States has 21 percent less land under cultivation than it did in 1880, but that land produces six times as much food and fiber. On the first day of the 20th century, “the typical American household spent 59 percent of funds on food and clothing”; by the first day of this century, “that share had shrunk to 21 percent, mainly because the real-dollar price of food and clothes had declined, even as the quality of both increased.” In 1929, before the Wall Street crash, the top 5 percent of Americans made 30 percent of the country’s pretax income; in 2015, they made 35 percent. Levels of satisfaction vary between America’s prosperous coasts and its rusting innards.
Easterbrook is evenhanded in apportioning blame for the dissonance in our public discourse. In his section on climate change, he reports that in 2015 President Obama said he became convinced of the need for global warming regulation because carbon dioxide emissions had caused his daughter Malia to suffer asthma in childhood. The problem is, Easterbrook reports, it’s sulfur dioxide that’s linked to asthma, not carbon dioxide. And airborne sulfur dioxide, in the years since Malia Obama’s birth, has fallen by more than 60 percent. Using the example of his daughter, Obama was trying to nudge along Democratic plans to link carbon dioxide emissions to health issues, which would bring the entire fossil-fuel industry under the regulatory supervisors of the Clean Air Act. Malia’s asthma was a canard.
Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of exaggeration and elisions of fact. In 2016, Easterbrook writes, Trump exploited voters’ psychological biases. People base their feelings about their economic situations not on the present but on an anticipated future. “Trump’s subliminal message about the economy was, You can’t be sure the future will be good, therefore the present is awful. This is nonsense, but 63 million voters believed it.”
Campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, the former attorney general, warned of a new “Jim Crow” in America. What was the looming threat that had Holder worried? North Carolina’s reduction of the early voting period, used by a higher proportion of African Americans than of the general population, from 17 days to 10. “A generation ago, no one in North Carolina could vote early; now a partial reduction in preferential treatment is said to be as horrible as turning police dogs on demonstrators.”
In a section on inequality, Easterbrook takes aim at corporations that use words like “sustainability” and “responsibility” but do nothing to live up to them. In 2017, Nike began a major advertising campaign centered on the word “equality.” But, Easterbrook writes,
There is the occasional misfire, unsurprising in a book so rich in detail and observation. On the relationship between Trump’s victory and the U.K. Brexit vote, Easterbrook writes that many of those who voted for each were also net recipients of government support. The “2016 instances of American and British areas voting against the sources of their subsidies reflected a desire to have it both ways—people sought to receive money from government while at the same time shaking their fists regarding handouts.” It is also possible, however, that rather than simply being confused, these voters would prefer a system in which fewer people, themselves included, require government support. The fact that you receive subsidies doesn’t mean you wouldn’t prefer a society in which it were easier to stand on your own two feet.
While Easterbrook is unsparing with his tongue-lashings, he is generous with his optimism. If you are worried about the future of driverless cars, he refers us to chess champion Garry Kasparov’s observation that people once refused to get into elevators that didn’t have operators. Even as the earth warms and populations grow, we are innovating our way to solutions that will make life not just tolerable but better in measurable ways, as we derive energy from new sources and extract more from the resources at our disposal.
Pay attention to history and the reality of our present, Easterbrook writes, and you will see that the world, in its incredible and yet quite ordinary way, “keeps refusing to end.”
