Letters

From the March 1996 issue

Unhappy Days?

"The Good Old Days Are Now" by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm (December) is the best retort to the ignorance of the doomsdayers seen in a long time. You are to be congratulated and thanked. Much more of what you have done is needed.

Donald R. Marsh
Seattle, WA

I do agree with Cox and Alm's essay on the need for meaningful data to counterbalance economic mythologies, but see no references to support the data quoted by the authors. The putative "improvements" quoted to support the notion of greater well-being are mainly trivial (pagers, video games, electric knives, etc.). What has been happening is that high-tech gadgets are replacing human contact resulting in a poorer, more alienated social environment. This has happened because the cost of such technology is so much lower now whether the wage rates have declined or per capita income has increased.

I have serious doubts regarding the validity of the data relating to extra leisure and the shorter work week. In the computer industry long hours on the job are the norm, and are not recorded and thus never reported. Vacations are apparently more generous but can only be taken in full at the expense of losing a job.

David Brown
Fairfax, CA

W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm state, "The first test of national well-being, the one that makes the most common sense, should be the material facts of life." They try to support that hypothesis with a virtual whirlwind of facts and figures. If that statement is true, then we should all be as happy as proverbial clams. Unfortunately, most folks are not all that happy. Either everyone is just too dense to realize how good they've got it or that "test of national well-being" touted by Cox and Alm is off the mark. I suspect the latter. The material facts of life are neither the first test of national well-being nor the one that makes the most sense. It is just the only one that the current version of America has to sell.

The material facts of life pertain only to survival and, as any first-year psychology student knows, it is difficult for any person to attain true happiness until he or she moves beyond that point. Once we reach a certain level of comfort it is time to pursue other things. Bigger houses and more toys are just higher levels of survival. We really don't even need them. The American myth has simply convinced us that we must have them. I think that is why there is a certain amount of nostalgia for the 1950s and early '60s. As a country, that was the first time we had achieved stability as far as daily survival was concerned. As a people, we were poised to move on to bigger and better things.

But we didn't. Instead, we built bigger houses and invented neater toys. We became infatuated with those material facts of life. And we paid a monstrous price for them: Shattered and scattered families. World record crime statistics. Loss of personal freedom to bloated and intrusive government. And general unhappiness.

Perhaps we feel that we should be handling all of this bounty just a little bit better. Perhaps it is just too obvious that any society that uses increased levels of consumption as its standard of excellence cannot possibly come to a good ending in a world of limited resources. Perhaps we are uncomfortable with the fact that for every one of us who succeeds in carving out a larger piece of the pie than we really need, there is another one or two who are forced below the level of subsistence. (The high rate of poverty in our country is neatly done away with by the fancy averages of Mr. Cox and Mr. Alm.) Perhaps we question that wonderful quality of life we are told we have. We lead the world in expensive drugs and high-tech surgery but can't keep our babies alive and continue to slip behind older, more established countries in day-in-day-out health care. We give additional years to our elderly by extraordinary means only to let them die alone in nursing homes and hospitals.

I don't buy the material facts argument and, if the general mood of the country is any indication, I suspect that a lot of other people do not either. If a person departs this world having left some mark--whether it results in a Nobel Prize or just the lasting admiration of a child--then that person will have lived and died well. But if all a person manages to do in this life is accumulate material things and avoid death a little longer than normal--than that is a life wasted. We were meant for better things.

There is another and better test of national well-being. However, it is pretty tough to pin down because it has more to do with feelings and senses and intuition than it does facts and figures and material things. It does not easily yield its secrets to the calculator. Yet it is there and I believe we are all aware of it.

Dan Kacsir
Indianapolis, IN

While I thank Cox and Alm for their recog-nition of the efforts put forth by work-at-home women in fulfilling their domestic responsibilities, I cannot help but question their sincerity and their rose-colored analysis of the economic impact women entering the labor market has had.

True, the time necessary to devote to domestic tasks has shrunk due to technology and the market's provision of alternatives to women performing their own household tasks. However, are the authors prepared to say that every family can afford this technology or alternatives and, more importantly, that the market can possibly provide an alternative to the love and caring provided by a mother in the rearing of her own children? Are women as mothers nothing more special than an economic unit? This is the ideology of cultural suicide.