Madmen in Authority

Over at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Cato's Will Wilkinson (an unabashed Gouvernor Morris Groupie, as are all who know of the dancing Founder with the wooden leg) channels John Maynard Keynes to help explain away the "paradox" that we seem to get more depressed as we get richer. His conclusion:

The incentives in favor of continued diagnostic inaccuracy ensure that the real incidence of depression will continue to be overestimated; our real success as a society in pursuit of happiness will continue to get short shrift.

As John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, asserting the relative power of ideas over vested interests, "madmen in authority … distill … their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

So middlebrow best-sellers about the misery of market-based prosperity matter, too. It would be tragically depressing—paradoxical even—if madmen in authority undermined the institutions that have made us wealthy and happy on the false pretext that we are suffering an epidemic of misery.

The whole thing, especially worth reading on a blue Monday, is here.

Former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel took on some of market depressives in a great essay for us titled "Consumer Vertigo."

And I reviewed a couple of happiness books for the NY Sun here.