For this week's lit review, I'm going to give you a review of the book that I just finished reading earlier this week, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Easterbrook, who you may or may not recognize as ESPN.com's Tuesday Morning Quarterback. (He also happens to be one of the editors of the New Republic.)
The basic premise of the book is that life continues to improve in most measurable ways: people live longer, have more resources, crime is down, democracy is up around the world, etc; meanwhile, people are not any happier, and in some cases are more unhappy.
In a sense, the book discusses the meaning of life and what things really make us happy, which sounds like a fairly religious topic, but the book manages to thoroughly discuss this theme in a fairly scientific/statistical manner, with only a few theological references.
A few reasons Easterbrook gives for people feeling worse is that much of today's media is geared around calling everything a "crisis" and focusing on the negative trends rather than the positive. Politicians also have a vested interested in pointing out problems that need solving. Also, our material wealth has gone way past satisfying needs, but wants unfortunately can almost never been satisfied.
But beyond these external influences, he also talks about how recent studies have shown that gratitude and forgiveness, in addition to be acts of graciousness, also tend to make people happier. And people who are happier tend to live longer, healthier lives and make more money. So even if you don't like other people, its in your own interest to forgive and give thanks. :)
Another point he made that I liked was that we see a lot of problems in society today that seem intractable, insolvable even; but we should realize that many problems that we have solved as a society (polio, smallpox, the cold war) were once viewed the same way. That we should trust in the ingenuity of man to solve problems that may seem unsolvable. We just haven't started working on solutions to those problems yet.
I found a lot of stuff here that were in accordance with my own personal beliefs and it was good to see an optimistic look at the present and the future, as opposed to all the doom and gloom that's out there right now.
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