Gregg Easterbrook -- It's better than it looks
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The message of "It's better than it looks" is that things are
getting better and that they are likely to continue to do so.

With respect to much of what Easterbrook has to say, it depends on
who you are, what your situation is, your perspective, etc.
Absolutely, we do *not* want to go back to "the good old days",
because they were terrible for lots of us.  But, things have not
gotten evenly better for all of us, and some of us are very upset
about it, rightly or wrongly, whether we're justified in being so.  

And, Easterbrook is not the only one with this positive and upbeat
message.  There are other books with a similar optimistic message,
for example, "The better angels of our nature" and "Enlightenment
now", by Steven Pinker and "The rational optimist", by Matt Ridley.
All of these carry the message that for most of us over time our
lives are getting.  That improvement is uneven in the sense that
some lives have improved more than others.  And, that improvement is
not monotonic: there are downs as well as ups over time.  But, in
lots of ways (prosperity, safety, health, entertainment,
conveniences, and much more) our lives have gotten better.  You can
look at any of these books for details.  They seem to be saying:
Forget this nostalgia illusion; the past was very grim, brutal,
impoverished, and unpleasant in ways that you do not even want to
think about.

Besides describing many of the ways our lives have improved,
Easterbrook also tries to explain why many of us feel that our lives
are worse.  So, we get some advice and warnings that we should not
read and watch so much news.  And, especially, that we should be a
bit discriminating about where we read the news: do not read the
news on social media; do not get your news from a slanted Web site;
etc.  Some of these sources understand that positive news does not
attract eyeballs.  And, since some of these sources and sites have
to attract a large number of viewers, you will find an emphasis on
bad news.

We are all writers and news sources and we can all write a blog.
But, there is very little fact checking; there is very little
editing and critical review, no peer review, no editors to help us
with quality.  (We'd need too many fact checkers and editors in
order to do that.) Therefore, the Internet has enabled a system that
is very good at producing huge volumes of content, but very poor at
checking and improving the *quality* of that content.  One lesson
that we need to learn: we need to do more critical thinking; we need
to be more critical and analytic about what we read.  And, it would
not hurt to be a bit more careful about what we write, too.

Even if, as Easterbrook claims, we are living in prosperous times,
it is still true that there are many who are not benefiting from
this prosperity, and, even worse, are suffering.  There are those
who have been made unemployable by technology, those who even
advanced medicine has not been able to help, those who have lost
their savings through no fault of their own.  Easterbrook emphasizes
with them, be he also seems to say that there are things they can do
to help themselves: they can retrain for a different kind of work;
they can move to a different city where their skills are needed;
etc.  That's either good advice or blaming the victim; I'm not sure
which.  Whatever, I suspect that we need some of both.  Some of
those suffering likely could help themselves.  But not all.   With
respect to moving to where the jobs are, it seems a bit unreasonable
to expect everyone to be willing to give up family and friends and
home whenever industry makes that individual redundant.

And, what makes this even more worrying are the projections that I
keep reading to the effect that advances in technology and
automation are going to become even more impressive, impressive in
part because of the number of jobs they eliminate.

By the way, there is an interesting analysis in "The Box: How the
Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy
Bigger", by Marc Levinson, where Levinson describes how (he claims)
in the case of port workers, because of negotiations between
employers and labor, some of the savings from the use of new
technologies and the use of container shipping especially that might
have gone to employers were shared with labor (workers).  That
experience, he says, is a rare one.  It's especially rare (unheard
of, really) in our U.S.  economy where so much influence is wielded
by industry and corporations.

If Easterbrook and Ridley and Pinker are right, if things are
getting better, and especially, if we have been and will be moving
into times of increasing prosperity, then we need to ask: What can
be done to help and enable more of us to benefit from that
prosperity?  Here are a few suggestions, some of which Easterbrook
discusses: (1) better education, more affordable education, better
access to education; (2) improved ability and assistance with
relocation to where work is available; (3) better access to jobs,
more economic opportunities, improved abilities to start and run
businesses; (4) better access to tools and materials needed to
prepare for and perform in a new job.  We have to begin asking
ourselves questions like the following: Is our society and our
government doing enough of the above?  And, are the corporations in
our country avoiding their responsibility to do them, after all, our
society, our taxes, our government are enabling them to make the
profits that they do, so shouldn't we members of society expect some
pay-back?

And, in an advanced capitalist society, not everyone can win.  We
may have to face up to the idea that, unless we want many to suffer,
some sort of assistance in the way a government provided minimal
level of income might be necessary (what he calls a Universal Basic
Income).  Easterbrook discusses and argues for this this.  He claims
that it has had support among both liberals and conservatives in
theU.S.A., though perhaps not among the radical kind of
"conservatives" that we have now (in 2018).  He cautions that we
will need to improve the debt level of our national government in
order to make this possible.  I take that to mean that we, our
government, should be spending more money on what Easterbrook thinks
is important rather than what some others think should have priority
(sigh; a political road block, again).

A significant portion of "It's better than it looks" is spent
arguing against what Easterbrook calls "declinism".  Why is that
important.  Hopefully, after reading this book, we feel better and
more cheerful and more optimistic.  But, in addition to that, there
are political consequences.  Donald Trump is a declinist.  He won
the U.S. presidential election while campaigning on a theme of how
bad things are in the U.S. and how bad things are for those of us
who live in the U.S.A.  Perhaps if more of us felt better about our
situation and our lives, if we felt more hopeful and just a little
grateful, we would not have gone with that negative campaigning, and
more of us would have voted for Trump.  As a consequence, we might
not now have a president who bases many of his messages and actions
on such negative feelings.

Easterbrook may have unintentionally uncovered a contradiction in
our economic system, or at least an irony.  Our economic system
seems to work best when there is no or at least very little central
control; that is apparently how we obtained much of the prosperity
that Easterbrook describes.  But, when there is so little central
control, when the economy is mostly left to itself, there will not
be good outcomes for everyone.  If we do not want to use some kind
of federal, central control to nudge the economy in a direction that
is more equitable and helpful for all of us, **and** we do not want
to give handouts for everyone who needs help (which seems to be a
common Republican, conservative position), then we're stuck with
leaving quite a few, perhaps many, people to suffer.

There is a further conundrum: a competitive, capitalist economy like
ours almost guarantees that some people will be unemployed.  This
kind of economy works best when there is a surplus of labor.  So, an
inevitable outcome is that the economy does not produce or enable
good outcomes for all of us.  There is no way around this, logically
or politically, especially given the contradiction and conflict that
I described in the previous paragraph.

We can talk, and even *do* whatever we want in the way of education
to help people prepare for jobs or even new careers, and still there
will be surplus workers.  And, that does not even take into account
that not all people *can* be trained for new jobs and that there is
no way to predict which jobs will be available and, thus, which
skill sets will be needed.

However, there is a qualification here -- According to Easterbrook,
the economy in the U.S.A. is becoming *more* equitable, not less.
Am I being overly negative to argue that there will *still* be those
who need help and who suffer without that help?  Easterbrook cites
studies to show that more people in the U.S.A., but also in the
European Union, are moving *up* in economic status than are moving
down.  In fact, he claims that the reason that the middle class is
shrinking (or seems to be) is that people are moving out of it in an
*upward* direction.  (see p. 83)

It is not just that Easterbrook is positive about the present; he is
also upbeat about the future.  In fact, he often presents things
that can be done, given a specific problem, to make things better
than they are now, or at least to help ensure that they do not get
worse.  He does this with respect to the economy and the
environment.

One of Easterbrook's approaches is to look at conditions from a more
long term perspective.  Your life may or may not be better than it
was two or five or even ten years ago.  But it is certainly better
than the lives of most of those living 100 years ago, or even 50
years ago.  And, he gives examples and specifics to prove it.  Of
course, Easterbrook is talking about and has to talk about averages.
Any individual or even a small portion of the population can have
outcomes different and worse that the improvements that Easterbrook
describes.  So, we have to ask: can that be taken as a criticism of
the system as a whole.

So, in summary, if you're feeling down and depressed and believe
that you could benefit from a new perspective, then take a look at
"It's better than it looks".  Easterbrook gives us a healthy
antidote to the nostalgia and gloomy attitudes that might make us
feel that we're all "going to hell in a handcart".


08/09/2018

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