41: The Progress Paradox with Gregg Easterbrook

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Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am so excited today to be talking to Greg Easterbrook. Greg is the author of 10 books, including the Progress Paradox, which is the topic of today's show, and his latest, the Game's not over in Defensive Football. Greg is also a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the Washington Monthly, and writes the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for the New York Times. He's a Distinguished Fellow of the Fulbright Foundation, a visiting fellow of the Brookings Institution, and as far as Greg's career Pivots. In his past lives, he's been a bartender, a bus driver, a used car salesman, and an outside linebacker. Greg, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Jenny.

I was riveted by the Progress Paradox, which is interesting because he wrote it in 2003 and yet so much of it is Relevant to today. There was one part that particularly jumped out where you. You cite the statistic that someone estimated that 80 billion Homo sapiens sapiens, that's us, have walked the earth, which means that men and women of middle class standards now live better than 99.4% of human beings who have ever existed, including most royalty. And yet happiness has remained flat, if not declined. People have. We've made so much progress, and yet the paradox is that we still seem to be so unhappy. What's up with that?

Well, that is what I call the progress paradox. The signs of higher living standards are all around us. In the United States, certainly in the European Union, and in many other countries. Obviously not everywhere. There are parts of the world that are deeply troubled, especially Africa. But in the United States, living standards keep rising. Longevity continues to rise, Education levels are rising. Meanwhile, pollution is declining, disease rates are declining, crime is declining, discrimination is declining. Practically everything that's materialistic that you can measure about our lives has been on a positive arc for at least for years and in most cases for many decades. And yet by the same time, our sense of emotional well being has gone down. If anything, the studies find that incidents of unipolar depression, the kind of depression where a person just feels badly all the time for no clear reason, has increased more than tenfold in the last two generations. Now, of course, it would be much better for a person to be living at a secure material standard with a roof over his or her head and healthcare and whatever you need materially, and yet feeling bad about it than it would be to be living in great privation. So I suppose we've made progress in that respect, but we've done a lot better in increasing living standards than we have in increasing the sense of life satisfaction.

One thing you talk about in the book is choice anxiety, which I find particularly interesting given that I study career change. And you say that especially with the Internet and how much it has exploded, that people feel anxiety now almost because we have so many choices and you even talk about now in our careers, we expect to have meaning and purpose, that we keep asking for more even as we make progress.

In the material sense, yes, choice anxiety has a small level and a major level, a small level is you go into the grocery store and there are 79 brands of breakfast cereal. How do you know which one is best for you? But the major level of. And we see that all across consumer products there are far too many choices. But the major level is our choices in life, what we try to accomplish, who we want to Be with simple things like where we want to live. If you think back only a couple of generations in the past, most men and women had very proscribed life choices. They had really little option about where they wanted to live or what they wanted to do. In some cases, especially for women, they had almost no option in terms of friends or romances. Very few.

Now, the possibilities are endless, and that's good. But it creates the expectation that we should always choose something that's amazingly fulfilling. And anxiety, leads, flows, I suppose, is a better verb from that.

It's so funny you bring up relationships because Tinder came out since you wrote this book and in a way that creates choice anxiety where people are swiping a million times and I know I'm not on there, but people call complain. Like, I've tried it in the past where, oh, I go on a date and it seems like the other person, I'm so replaceable. They know that if it doesn't go well, okay, then the next person can be lined up within 24 hours.

Yes, I've been happily married for 30 years. I'm glad I met my wife before the electronic dating year. I'm sure I would have used it compulsively. And yet the possibility of electronic dating and if you don't like the girl you're out with a few clicks and you find somebody else would prevent you from giving your full focus on the person that you're actually with at that moment. And so the very thing that creates the sense of unlimited possibilities also diminishes the moment that you're in in the here and now.

I didn't mention this in the intro, but for all of you listeners, I said to Greg before we hit record that his book is so thorough and incredibly well researched and prescient, very ahead of its times, and yet riveting at every page. So, Greg, first I have to say thank you for the depth that you cover in this book. One really interesting section. You cite Edward Dehner's research on money and happiness and the correlation between the two. And you share his finding that lacking money causes unhappiness, but having money does not cause happiness. And I'm also aware of Kahneman's research on over a certain salary. People don't experience much more happiness, even millionaires. It's a pretty marginal increase. And I find that really interesting. So it seems like we attach some amount of happiness to material wealth, and yet for most people, especially those listening to this call, they're already pretty much there. The rest of the happiness is to be found within.

Exactly. There's the old vaudeville comedian Henny Youngman said what good is happ? It can't buy money. And actually the research tends to support that. All psychological research on life satisfaction shows that being impoverished makes a person miserable. It's exactly what you think, how could it be any other way? But once you escape from impoverishment and reach a decent material standard, which if you have, we convert everything to money in the United States, if you have to convert that standard into Money, it's about $20,000 per year per person. And in today's money at that point, money and happiness decouple and cease to have anything to do with each other. Whether your income goes up or down is completely unrelated to whether you feel happy in life. And if you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense. The things we don't want to be impoverished, we need a roof over our heads. But once you escape from poverty, the things that really matter to you, fulfillment, friendship, family, love, the sense that what you're doing matters in and especially the sense that your own life has meaning. Those are things you can't buy in a store. It doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't purchase those things. You have to attain them in other ways.

You say that it's actually in our best interest to be optimistic.

Yes, there's a lot of. I'm a big fan of the positive psychology movements and you just cited Kahneman and Dean are two of its many proponents in academia. The quick version for your listeners is that traditionally psychology studied neurosis. What causes people's brains to malfunction? The positive psychology movement's big question is what causes people to be sane? What do you do if you want your brain to work properly and you want to be happy in life? So a lot of positive psychology supports the things that your grandmother was telling you and that you thought, oh come on grandma. She would tell you should be optimistic, you should be grateful, you should be forgiving. Positive psychology says that you should actually do these things for self selfish reasons, not to be altruistic, although that's a nice bonus. But being grateful, optimistic and forgiving improves your own experience of life.

I love you say in the book. Trying to think positively is common sense, if for no other reason than you can be sure that thinking negatively will accomplish nothing.

It's true. It's really true. If you think about what philosophers, much more profound than I will ever be have pointed out that if you feel bitterness, what have you accomplished? You've only made yourself unhappy. You haven't changed anything around you. You've only made yourself. Why do you want to make yourself unhappy? It does require some effort to make yourself feel satisfied in life. Being optimistic or forgiving for many people is a challenge, but if you can achieve those qualities, you will be happier. Jenny we were talking about the title of my upcoming book just before the podcast started. I like good titles. I've often been tempted to write a book titled Selfish Reasons to Become a better.

Showing that you should be optimistic and forgiving and kind to other people entirely for selfish reasons. Because you'll enjoy your own life better. And if it makes the world a better place, then that's your bonus.

That's fantastic. I vote for that book as well. It reminds me of the I think it's Buddha's quote, and I'm paraphrasing that staying angry or harboring resentment is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.

Yes, that's an excellent line.

You cite research on forgiveness, even saying that forgiveness is selfishly a good thing to do. It's better for our own health in the long run.

Yes, you certainly find this thought in religion, but the thought is phrased in religion typically, is that you should forgive for altruistic reasons that have to do with kind of the structure of the universe and what's ethically correct. And while I think all that is true, you should also forgive for selfish reasons. If you harbor resentment, you only harm yourself. If you forgive the person who's wronged you in some way, you set yourself.

Free from bitterness so profound and so true and of course, sometimes hard to do.

Even still, of course, it's not easy, right?

I want to return to material wants for a moment because it's such a big theme, and I'm still scratching my head at the figure $20,000. Maybe it's because I live in New York City.

I wonder if other listeners are feeling incredulous. Like, really, if I had an extra 30,000 a year, I'd be pretty happy. But one thing you say is that our standards keep escalating and so we keep inventing new wants to want. Can you say more about that?

Sure, of course. And $20,000 is the average for the whole country, so you would not buy as much in New York or San Francisco. I have three kids. My oldest lives in downtown Manhattan. He couldn't live on $20,000 there either. But a lot of parts of the country you would not have any physical complaints at that level of so.

As our living standards rise because, and again, to psychological research, we often compare ourselves to other people. We tend not to ask, is my income or are my material things enough to satisfy my wants? We tend to ask, am I getting more than the other guy? We're familiar with keeping up with the Joneses phenomenon. And in the progress paradox, I twist that around a little bit and call the current phenomenon, call and raise the Joneses. You can't just keep up with your neighbors. You have to be living better than them or you don't feel good about it. And I think that's part of the sense of disquiet and anger that we see in the country today. Everyone thinks, well, I should live better than the person who lives next door. I should have a nicer apartment than the woman who lives next door. When I meet someone at parties, I should be better dressed and have a more interesting career.

It's human nature that we think that way, but if you think that way, you'll never be happy. And I think the fact that we're surrounded by images of great wealth and celebrity. Of course, a generation ago or a century ago, everyone knew that there were a small number of rich people off somewhere in the distance. Now, with not just our televisions, but our computers and our phones, we constantly see images of people who live at a much higher material standard, who are better looking than we are and better dressed and flying in private jets to exciting places in Colorado or California, we think, well, why am I not doing that? And you have to really fight this urge, because even if you were a billionaire, there would always be someone who had more money than you. And if you compare yourself to someone who has more than you do, because there's always going to be that person, you won't be happy if you learn to accept what you are. As long as you have a reasonable material standard, that's the path to satisfaction in life.

It's wild to think about how much social media has even exploded since you wrote this book in the last 13 years. Because social media is just the ultimate fuel on this fire.

It is. And social media, it has some advantages. Like I say, three kids and they're all college age. And I occasionally say in passing them, well, I wish I could find this or that friend from my college days. And they just look at me and say, if I'm trying to look up a friend, it takes me 15 seconds using my phone. So there are some advantages. But the key thing to remember about social media is that it, it overstates complaints and anger. I think one reason the presidential Campaign that we're suffering through is so incredibly negative is that it's the first presidential campaign being conducted largely on social media, and the focus is entirely on overstating anger. It makes the country seem much more angry than the country actually is.

Well, you also cite that news media does that, which, as a little kid, I had to stop watching the news. It gave me nightmares. It was scarier to me than any horror movie that I could be taken to in the theater because it was real. And you say now even the news does that, where they pick out a clip of a kidnapping and immediately broadcast it all around the country, if not the world. And that there's such a negative bias.

Sure. In a world of we're now approaching 7 billion people in the world, in a world of 7 billion people, there will always be something that's burning or exploding or a place where there are sirens or people crying. And if you focus exclusively on those things the news media, especially cable news, does, it creates the impression that everything is burning or exploding, when actually the main story behind the events is all the things that aren't happening. War is declining. War is not getting worse. It's going down. The frequency and intensity of global combat has been in decline for 25 years. Global poverty is declining really fast in the presidential campaign. Everyone's upset about the loss of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest from global trade. That loss is real. And if you and I were a manufacturing worker in Indiana or Wisconsin, we'd be upset about it. But we don't talk about the other effect of global trade, which is a very dramatic reduction in poverty and malnutrition.

Person on person. Crime is declining everywhere. Most diseases are declining everywhere. Because those are tragedies that are not happening. We don't hear about them. We only see the pictures of whatever is on fire, and it creates the illusion that everything's on fire.

I wonder if this is why so many people are disillusioned with politics in general. But it seems that elections are the perfect illustration of the progress paradox in that in order to get elected, these candidates feel that they need to paint a picture of how bad things are going in our country. I wonder if you kind of study that every four years as we get into presidential elections.

Well, if you think of the current presidential field, with the exception of Hillary Clinton, all the other candidates, Republican and Democrat, have been competing with each other to see how bad they can make the United States sound. And yes, the country has many problems, but.

Fundamentally, things are good for most people. And if a political candidate stood up and said, well, fundamentally things are pretty good for most people, but I think we need some policy tweaks here and there. And these are the policy suggestions that I make. The cable and social media worlds would both yawn and move on. But when Trump says the country is going to hell, or when Bernie Sanders says the economy has been destroyed, that's what gets converted into to a tweet. And it makes politics really depressing, doesn't it?

It does, yes. Another. Maybe it's unrelated, I'm not sure. Another concept in the book you talk about is the conservation of anxiety that now that all of our first world needs are. Yeah. Our most basic needs are essentially met. We're kind of focusing on what people now would call first world problems. And you use the term nature's revenge outcome. I'm wondering if you can explain that because I find that a very fascinating concept.

Well, conservation of anxiety is a concept that I admit I cannot prove scientifically, but I'll explain it by way of prefacing. There's a fascinating study by a researcher at Rockefeller University in New York, where you are named Jesse Ausubel, showing that over the last 500 years, human beings have spent on average, almost the exact amount of time per day moving from one place to another. And it's 70 minutes. Whether you were living in a walled city in the middle ages, spent 70 minutes a day moving around that city. Today we spend 70 minutes a day commuting, in the New York example, on the subway or in cabs. Presumably 500 years from now, we'll spend 70 minutes a day commuting on hyperloop trains that travel faster than that exceed the sound barrier. There seems to be something about conservation of basic.

Themes in how we live our daily life. And I think one of those is anxiety. I think there's a certain amount of anxiety that human beings experience on a daily basis. And if you could study it, you would find that it roughly averages over history by the centuries. In the past, that anxiety was about life and death issues. Will I starve? Will my child die? Will my village be attacked by people with spears and arrows? Today we're anxious about smaller and smaller issues. Is my cell phone era radiating something into my brain? I think it's good that we care about smaller and smaller and smaller concerns. I think, for example, the notion of microaggression has been mocked in the mainstream media. I think it's good that we care about microaggression because it shows that macro aggression is in decline. But I also think that we learned that we're going to experience roughly the same amount of anxiety whether our lives are horrible or good. And it may be Jenny, that that's going to be that way as long as human beings exist.

It's interesting to think about because in your book and others it kind of cites that in some ways we have evolved to have a level of anxiety, that that's what kept us vigilant and free from predators. And that you even say in the book that a lot of type A people who are stressed out are pretty successful. So it doesn't mean that success equals happiness, but certainly that some amount of even OCD does help people be successful in some weird way. That tends to work, at least in American society to a point.

My line in the progress paradox is that stress is nature's plan. We're descended from ancestors who were stressed in the physiological sense of the word, that is that the hormone called cortisol was moving in their systems. It made them more keenly aware of their surroundings, more likely to notice predators and so on. We must have had happy go lucky ancestors, but they stopped to smell the flowers and got eaten by something. The people who survived were the ones who were always warily scanning the horizon. So who are we from an evolutionary standpoint? We warily scan the horizon assuming that everything approaching us is a threat. Now our genetic structure is only one aspect of what makes us who we are. Genes are not destiny. But our genes do incline us towards stress. And studies show that cortisol, the stress hormone, is present in our bodies in higher levels than it was in the bodies of our grandparents generation.

Can you also address the nature's revenge outcomes? What does that mean? It's kind of like the paradox of we evolve for certain things. And as I was rereading this morning, I remember I had flagged to ask you about that.

Yes, nature in a sense takes revenge on us by making us so wary and stressed out. Because you would think that human society is on a path toward. We certainly haven't achieved it today, but we're certainly on a path toward a pretty benign way of existence where there will be relatively little war and violence, relatively few unwanted unmet physical needs. And it's not going to happen in my lifetime. But it's not out of the question that eventually we'll have a post scarcity economy where the whole nature of work and money will be transformed compared today. And if that happens, I think nature will take its revenge on us by making us still feel anxious and dissatisfied and unhappy even about living in paradise.

Yeah, it's an interesting concept because I wonder what that's about. You know, it almost sounds Taoist, like everything sort of regresses to the mean or to the lowest. Like all rivers flow to the lowest possible point. And that is that kind of the. The idea that do you think nature sort of tries to maintain a certain equilibrium somehow?

Well, I think it's just how we evolve now. As I say, genes are not destiny. They're just one factor in our lives. And it's not out of the question that eventually human society would move beyond the sense of constant tension and anger at everyone around us and that we could live in a more blissful way. It's not going to happen in my lifetime. It probably won't happen in my children's lifetime. It's not out of the question. I think that's possible. But that's something that you and I can only speculate about.

Right. Later in the book, you talk about very interesting principle called Pareto efficiency, which I'm quoting you, you say the free market concept that holds that it is fine for one person to become very rich while others do not, so long as that one person does not harm anyone else in the process of acquiring wealth. And again, you wrote this in 2003 and you were saying that the sins of CEOs matter. And I couldn't help but reflect on the big economic crash of 2008, 2009, and everything that happened with Wall street. And you must have just been. That's like you called it five years prior. And so I'm wondering if you could speak about Pareto efficiency a little bit and how it relates to the progress paradox.

Sure. Obviously, inequality is a big factor in the current presidential debate. It's a factor in many of the countries of the world today. If you think about the past and compare it to the present, or just go back a couple of generations to our parents generation. The people at the very top of the United States earn far more income if you adjust to current dollars than the very top earned, say, 50 years ago. People in the middle of the United States earn somewhat more. So the question is, have the people who earn somewhat more been harmed by the people at the very who are earning a huge amount? The people at the very top are often really repulsive people. Donald Trump is only just one of them. The fact that the typical public company CEO now earns 320 times as much, and that's the real figure as the typical worker for his or her company is a very offensive figure. But the key thing to ask yourself is has the person in the middle been harmed in the process? And I think probably not.

The big example, the most important case here is one that we don't see because we live in the United States, is China. In the last 25 years, China has gotten 800 million people from extreme poverty to a moderate living standard. 800 million people, more than twice the population of the United States have been lifted up out of poverty. You could argue that it's the greatest single achievement in the history of humanity. And in the process, a tiny number of Chinese have become obscenely rich. So does the fact that it's. And they're really obscene. If you go to Vancouver and see all these recent Chinese expats driving around in Lamborghinis, which is what's actually happening in Vancouver, B.C. right now, you find it incredibly offensive. But has anyone been wronged by this? 800 million people out of poverty. Wouldn't you rather have that happen, even if you had to accept the fact that there's a few obscenely wealthy people than have poverty not reduced in that way? And the same in the United States? I don't like the overpaid CEOs any more than you do. And as you know, I've written quite a bit about overpay of people at the top of corporations. But the key question is how is the average person doing? And the average person in the United States does steadily better.

That's so fascinating, what you shared about China. Have you seen any happiness studies among the Chinese population? I'm wondering, wondering if their happiness also stayed flat during that time or if it increased.

The researcher who does this is a woman named Carol Graham at the University of Maryland. She studied happiness in other countries, not in the United States. And her basic finding is that when people are leaving poverty and headed toward the middle class, that makes them feel really good. So happiness has been rising all throughout Asia.

In other parts of the world. When people reach the middle class and fear that they will fall out of it, that causes them to become very unhappy, even if they haven't actually fallen out of it yet. And Carol Graham's work in that regard is focused mainly in South. She's Peruvian by birth. Her work is focused mainly in South America, which has had a really turbulent economic 20 or 30 years. But I think you could say that the same applies to the United States. The total number of people who live in middle class circumstances in the United States is very high. It's a great number. But a lot of them fear that they will fall out of the middle class and that leads to unhappiness, even if it hasn't actually happened to you yet.

That reminds me of what you call collapse anxiety, which is that the more successful we are, the more we fear some impending calamity like terrorism or resource exhaustion.

Yeah. I think collapse anxiety is a huge factor in American social psychology, and that it was a huge factor long before the physical collapse of the World Trade Center Towers made it palpable. Things seem to be going. I mean, if you set aside cable news and social media, basically, things seem to be going really well. Affluence is rising, longevity is increasing, education levels are rising, pollution is declining, crime is declining. Things seem to be going really well. But we all worry that it's not going to continue, that it's going to collapse somehow, that our way of life can't be sustained. I don't think our way of life is going to collapse. I admit I can't prove that maybe it will. But I think the fear of this is very keenly felt by a large number of Americans.

And I know you're currently studying some of this for your next book.

Yes.

I don't know how much you can or are willing to say at this point because it's still early, but if there's anything you're willing to share, the.

Next book, I hope, will be in bookstores, which still exist, by the way. You don't just have to over Amazon, will be in bookstores in 2018. The book is titled why the World Refuses to End. I had to write that book because I like that title so much. And the first half of the book is showing why the disasters that we expect don't happen. Why don't people starve? Malnutrition has been declining even as the human population has been growing. Everybody thought that was impossible, but we're not starving. Why doesn't Ebola run wild?

Why don't natural resources run out? First half of the book is showing why these calamities don't occur. And then the second half is saying, in what reforms do we need in the 21st century to address our current problems of climate change, inequality, racial tension, and so on?

It's so great. I love the title, too. I can't wait.

I want to circle back to this notion of meaning want. That first of all, one thing you say is we should be glad we have the leisure and prosperity that allows people by the millions to feel depressed, that actually this is a sign of progress. But there's also this shift toward meaning want. And it's something that my book Pivot. I talk about meaning and purpose in careers, and sometimes I wonder if. Well, it's the critique we give to. We ascribe to millennials. Oh, they're so entitled. They actually want meaning in their. Curious about your take. Do you think that it's harmful to us to pursue meaning, or is that the next logical thing that we should be doing in our careers?

Oh, I definitely think we should. I feel we don't have any way to know this, but I feel confident that human beings have longed for meaning for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Way back in the dim, distant past, people wondered, why am I here? What is my purpose? If you spend almost all of your time in subsistence farming or working in some noisy, dusty factory trying to take care of your material wants, you have very little time to reflect on your meaning wants. Now, today that most of us work in white collar professions. We're up to the United States being 63% white collar employment, which is a big achievement, but it's eventually 100%.

Now most people have time and leisure hours available to reflect on what does my life mean? And it creates this condition that I call the replacement of material want with meaning want. I can tell you that psychological studies show that it's really good for you to wonder if your life has meaning in this sense, that people who are intensely concerned with the question of meaning in life and meaning can be derived either from religious philosophy or from ethical philosophy. Either way one works, people who pursue the question of whether their life has meaning have all the objective barometers that we want. They have fewer heart attacks, they live longer, they have fewer strokes, they have less high blood pressure. They tend to have longer marriages. And marriage isn't perfect for everybody, but it's statistically associated with happier lives. People who think about meaning and want their lives to have meaning again, regardless of whether it's religious meaning or ethical meaning in general, achieve higher life satisfaction. So I think it's great that people are concerned with the meaning question.

That makes a lot of sense. You say in the book, too, I found this very interesting that the reason that possessions and their attendant stress are so alluring is that acquiring possessions is a simpler challenge than a fulfilling philosophy on life.

Oh, absolutely. If you've had a bad day and you stop at some store and you buy some gleaming item and bring it home, and it gives you a good feel, feeling, it's a lot easier to buy something than it is to develop a philosophy of life.

And I worry that too many of us default to just Buying material possessions and not spending enough time on the philosophy of life question.

It's great to hear. I didn't know there was research that showed that it's good for us to focus on meaning and what's our philosophy and whether it's religious or spiritual or career or otherwise, that there's a health benefit to that. Again, that's for your selfish book that can go in there.

Well.

There'S a famous, though somewhat chilling study done by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who's part of the positive psychology movement, studied the causes of suicide in the military, which has been a big concern in the post Iraq invasion era. Lots of psychologists are trying to combat the rising prevalence of suicide in the military.

Anyway, went back and looked at the psychological profiles of soldiers who did and did not commit suicide. And the bright line that was found was the ones who in the past, before enduring some sort of personal psychological crisis, who had said they believed their life had meaning, were far less likely to commit suicide than the ones who said their lives lacked meaning. And again, it had nothing to do with whether it was religious or ethical meaning.

Wow. It's interesting because when you talk about meaning and creativity, you also mentioned that in the past, maybe 100 or 200 years ago, society couldn't really support very many artists or intellectuals. And now they're springing up everywhere. You know, now people can make a living online as this even new term thought leader has emerged. Emerged. Whereas in the past that was a very select few in society who could earn a living that way.

Yeah, I think that's great. Not just in past centuries, but even as recently as our parents generation, only a handful of people could really make a living being a serious artist, whether a visual artist or performing artist, or writing serious books or writing poetry or writing philosophy or being. And there are only a relative handful of people who are college professors now. With each passing year, there's more and more artists. And if there are any artists, which I think is great, if there are any artists among your listeners, they may be grumbling by saying, yeah, art doesn't pay very well. Well, that's supply and demand. The more of it that there is, the less it's gonna. The less it will sell for. But the fact that society is being flooded with art and thinking and expression, I think that's wonderful.

There's been a common desire in our society for, you know, parents to say, I want my kids to be better off than I was. And in the last 13 years since you wrote this book, we have seen, and again, Maybe this is just all in the media. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts. But things like the crash of 2008, then the student debt crisis, then let's say younger people issuing material things and even traditional career ladders and busting out on their own and that I was having a conversation the other day where the person said, I, I don't actually think my kids will be financially, at least financially better off than I was given the careers that they've chosen. So I'm curious, 13 years after writing this book, what do you think? Was there an inflection point in the last decade where it may no longer be true that the current generation is better off, or are we still on a steady increase? We just like to complain anyway.

Well, we certainly like to complain. And I do too. I think one reason we see so much anger in politics right now is that Americans very broadly think my children are not going to live better than I will. And I think, A, that's true, and B, it's not anything to be upset about. That's the misdirection here. United States for five, ten generations. It depends. Back where in the 19th century you would want to locate your starting point. Each generation's children has lived better than the previous generations by anything we can measure. Higher adjusted per capita income, become more living space.

Houses get steadily bigger. Having your own bedroom, which once was a dream for a princess, now is a standard for almost everyone. Having access to a car. Everything material that we can measure has gotten better generation by generation by generation. Right now, it's basically fine. The average new house built in the United states today is 2600 square feet and has three occupants. 2600 square feet is plenty of space. Space for three occupants. And I realize you live in Manhattan. 2600 square feet sounds like the circumference of the Crab Nebula or some gigantic figure.

I know it's like seven times the size of my place.

I'm not sure exactly, but I'm talking the average for the country.

But I love my place.

That's what I've risen to the point that most of us have what we need. The question isn't will our children have more. The question is will our children be able to. To sustain the living level that we've created? I think that's the real question.

And it's so interesting you bring this up because, for example, I live in a 300, possibly 350 square foot apartment. Some would even call that a micro apartment. It's a studio. But I love it so much. It has plenty of room for me. I actually don't want to be living in a bigger house. Okay. If someone handed me like a New York loft that was huge and had a great view, I wouldn't complain. But I don't feel the need to be living in a 2,500 square foot mansion somewhere. I love it here. So while one could look and say, oh, I'm not living in as big a place as previous generations, I don't care. I don't desire that.

Exactly. And I hope we could get this thought into American politics. Like I said, I have three kids. My wife and I live at a very comfortable material standard. We live in Bethesda, Maryland, which is a wonderful suburb. Great public schools that my kids went to. We have a nice comfortable house. We've got a couple of cars. Cars. We've got good health care coverage. Anybody would say that we're living well. I don't think that my kids have to live better than that for their lives to be successful. My hope is that my kids will be able to achieve and sustain the same standard of material existence that I and my wife had. And I think if people adjusted their thinking all across the country that they would be more appreciative of what they have.

What about the coming of the robots? Now this is another trend that I think as you talked about the collapse anxiety, people are fearing, how many jobs is it going to take? Take away automation, outsourcing and increasing artificial intelligence. What's your take on that?

Well, I've said including in progress paradox. Just because the Luddites were wrong 200 years ago doesn't mean they won't eventually be proved to be correct. I think you should worry about automation of practically anything. If you think about factory workers in the Midwest, a huge factor in presidential campaign now, most of the reduction in manufacturing employment in the United States has not been caused by jobs being lost to China because manufacturing employment is declining in China. Also, those jobs are being lost to automation, not to foreign competition. Now, to a certain extent, this was always inevitable. If it happened to your family, you would feel terrible about it. But automation coming to the factory was always inevitable. And if you look in the past, you look a hundred years into the past, one century ago, 85% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today 2% of Americans do. So if you and I were doing a podcast in the year a century ago ago, you would say, but, but, but 85% of Americans working. If those jobs vanish, what will people do? And it's turned out that there's plenty for people to do. I am reasonably hopeful that even as production is increasingly automated and eventually almost entirely automated, that there will be more jobs for people to do. Teaching, coaching, healthcare. There are certain sorts things that we don't ever want robots to be able to do. They have to be done person to person. So I'm reasonably hopeful that it's going to work out that there'll job opportunities for each job a robot takes. But I'm aware you got to be wary of this. It's possible that things could go badly wrong, especially with artificial intelligence.

Yes. Or that there's at least a very uncomfortable transition period. That there's also not a guarantee that everyone can figure out. People, I think have to be willing to be a bit of a futurist and spot what skills might be able to help them make that transition if they're in a line of work that can be easily automated, which not everyone wants to do. And it also reminds me of a part in your book you were maybe in conversation with someone else saying. And he said I don't know why just the talented people get our respect and support in society. Not to say that someone in manufacturing or farming is not talented, they absolutely are. But I thought that was another conversation point in the book, which is that our society tends to reward.

Talent and success and we give respect and accolades and that how do we support people that you know everyone else and not make things feel unequal? In a non monetary sense, yes.

People don't just work for money, although that's the main reason everybody has to be able to pay the rent. People work because work conveys dignity and it gives you a sense of purpose in the world. And there's exactly the same amount of dignity conveyed by working in an auto assembly plant in Michigan as there is for being a creative artist in New York City. And our society has long tended to devalue the sort of work that doesn't require a tremendous amount of education or talent. I don't think we should. And I think that's one of the factors that's going on in the sense of discontent with the country to.

Yeah, it was a really touching part of the book. Thank you so much, Greg. This has been incredibly fascinating. I have to read how you end the book because it just made me laugh. You say it is ours to decide what the future will hold and if we decide, well, the future may hold an even better life about which our descendants will complain.

Complain, right. Yeah, exactly.

So great. I cannot recommend this book highly enough and Greg, just because your most recent book came out in December, can you give us the one main nugget I about the game's not over in defensive football?

Oh, that's just a short essay on saying that football is actually a terrific sport. It needs to be reformed, but it's a fine sport, but it doesn't have any larger meaning like the book the Progress Paradox does.

Well, I absolutely loved Progress Paradox. All of you listening, you can't see, but my book has dog eared marks pretty much every other page. I highly recommend it. And Greg, I will definitely be anxiously awaiting your follow up book right up until 2018. So thank you for all the incredible work that you do and for being here on the show.

Thank you for having me, Jenny.

Yeah, and last, where can people find you if they want to keep in touch with you and your work?

I have a website, it's just gregasterbrook.com no punctuation. My name, Greg is spelled with two GS and really all you have to do is google my name to locate me.

Great. And I'll put all the show notes from Today's episode at JennyBlake Me Podcast.

Thanks again Greg and thank you everyone for listening.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot Lists, a curated twice month newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

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