CHAPTER 17

QUALITY OF LIFE

Though only the callous would deny that the conquests of disease, hunger, and illiteracy are stupendous achievements, one can still wonder whether continuous improvements in the kinds of things that economists measure should count as genuine progress. Once basic needs are satisfied, doesn’t additional affluence just encourage people to indulge in shallow consumerism? And weren’t increases in health and literacy trumpeted by the Five-Year Planners in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, all of which were rather grim places to live? People can be healthy, solvent, and literate and still not lead rich and meaningful lives.

Some of these reservations have already been answered. We’ve seen that totalitarianism, the main impediment to the good life in communist so-called utopias, has been receding. We’ve also seen that a major dimension of flourishing that is not captured by the standard metrics—the rights of women, children, and minorities—is on a steady rise. This chapter is about a broader cultural pessimism: the worry that all that extra healthy life span and income may not have increased human flourishing after all if they just consign people to a rat race of frenzied careerism, hollow consumption, mindless entertainment, and soul-deadening anomie.

To be sure, one can object to the objection, which comes from a long tradition of cultural and religious elites sneering at the supposedly empty lives of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Cultural criticism can be a thinly disguised snobbery that shades into misanthropy. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, the critic John Carey shows how the British literary intelligentsia in the first decades of the 20th century harbored a contempt for the common person which bordered on the genocidal.¹ In practice, “consumerism” often means “consumption by the other guy,” since the elites who condemn it tend themselves to be conspicuous consumers of exorbitant luxuries like hardcover books, good food and wine, live artistic performances, overseas travel, and Ivy-class education for their children. If more people can afford their preferred luxuries, even if they are frivolous by the lights of their cultural betters, that has to be counted as a good thing. In an old joke, a soapbox orator addresses a crowd on the glories of communism: “Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream!” A man at the front whimpers, “But I don’t like strawberries and cream.” The speaker thunders, “Come the revolution, you will like strawberries and cream!”²

In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen sidesteps this trap by proposing that the ultimate goal of development is to enable people to make choices: strawberries and cream for those who want them. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has taken the idea a step further and laid out a set of “fundamental capabilities” that all people should be given the opportunity to exercise.³ One can think of them as the justifiable sources of satisfaction and fulfillment that human nature makes available to us. Her list begins with capabilities that, as we have seen, the modern world increasingly allows people to realize: longevity, health, safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, and political participation. It goes on to include aesthetic experience, recreation and play, enjoyment of nature, emotional attachments, social affiliations, and opportunities to reflect on and engage in one’s own conception of the good life.

In this chapter I’ll show how modernity is increasingly allowing people to exercise these capabilities, too—that life is getting better even beyond the standard economists’ metrics like longevity and wealth. Admittedly, many people still don’t like strawberries and cream, and they may exercise one capability—enjoying their freedom to watch television and play video games—to forgo others, such as aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment of nature. (When Dorothy Parker was challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence, she answered, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”) But an expansive cafeteria of opportunities to enjoy the aesthetic, intellectual, social, cultural, and natural delights of the world, regardless of which ones people put on their trays, is the ultimate form of progress.

Time is what life is made of, and one metric of progress is a reduction in the time people must devote to keeping themselves alive at the expense of the other, more enjoyable things in life. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” said the ever-merciful God as he exiled Adam and Eve from Eden, and for most people throughout history, sweat they did. Farming is a sunup-to-sundown occupation, and though foragers hunt and gather just a few hours a day, they spend many more hours processing the food (for example, smashing rock-hard nuts), in addition to gathering firewood, carrying water, and laboring at other chores. The San of the Kalahari, once called “the original affluent society,” turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone.⁴

The 60-hour workweek of Bob Cratchit, with only one day off a year (Christmas, of course), was in fact lenient by the standards of his era. Figure 17-1 shows that in 1870 Western Europeans worked an average of 66 hours a week (the Belgians worked 72), while Americans worked 62 hours. Over the past century and a half, workers have increasingly been emancipated from their wage slavery, more dramatically in social-democratic Western Europe (where they now work 28 fewer hours a week) than in the go-getter United States (where they work 22 fewer hours).⁵ As late as the 1950s, my paternal grandfather worked behind the cheese counter in an unheated Montreal market day and night, seven days a week, afraid to ask for shorter hours lest he be replaced. When my young parents protested on his behalf, he was given sporadic days off (which the owner no doubt perceived, like Scrooge, as “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket”), until better labor-law enforcement gave him a predictable six-day workweek.

Figure 17-1: Work hours, Western Europe and US, 1870–2000

Source: Roser 2016t, based on data from Huberman & Minns 2007 on full-time production workers (both sexes) in nonagricultural activities.

Though a lucky few of us are paid to exercise our fundamental capabilities and willingly put in Victorian hours, most workers are grateful for the two dozen extra hours a week they have available to fulfill themselves in other ways. (On his hard-won day off, my grandfather would read the Yiddish papers, dress up in a jacket, tie, and fedora, and visit his sisters or my family.)

Likewise, though many of my fellow professors end their careers carried out of their offices feet first, workers in many other jobs are happy to spend their golden years reading, taking courses, seeing the national parks in a Winnebago, or dandling Vera, Chuck, and Dave in a cottage on the Isle of Wight. This, too, is a gift of modernity. As Morgan Housel notes, “We constantly worry about the looming ‘retirement funding crisis’ in America without realizing that the entire concept of retirement is unique to the last five decades. It wasn’t long ago that the average American man had two stages of life: work and death. . . . Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”⁶ Figure 17-2 shows that in 1880, almost 80 percent of American men of what we now consider retirement age were still in the workforce, and that by 1990 the proportion had fallen to less than 20 percent.

Figure 17-2: Retirement, US, 1880–2010

Source: Housel 2013, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Costa 1998.

Rather than looking forward to retirement, people used to dread the injury or frailty that would keep them from work and send them to the almshouse—the “haunting fear in the winter of life,” as it was known.⁷ Even after the Social Security Act of 1935 protected the elderly from utter destitution, poverty was a common end to a working life, and I grew up with the image (possibly an urban legend) of pensioners who subsisted on dog food. But with stronger public and private safety nets in place, senior citizens today are richer than people of working age: the poverty rate for people over 65 plunged from 35 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2011, well below the national rate of 15 percent.⁸

Thanks to the labor movement, legislation, and increased worker productivity, another once-crazy pipe dream has become a reality: paid vacations. Today an average American worker with five years on the job receives 22 days of paid time off a year (compared with 16 days in 1970), and that is miserly by the standards of Western Europe.⁹ The combination of a shorter workweek, more paid time off, and a longer retirement means that the fraction of a person’s life that is taken up by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960.¹⁰ Trends for the developing world vary by country, but as these countries get richer they are likely to follow those of the West.¹¹

There is yet another way in which thick tranches of life have been freed up for people to pursue higher callings. In chapter 9 we saw that appliances such as refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwave ovens have become common or universal, even among the American poor. In 1919, an average American wage earner had to work 1,800 hours to pay for a refrigerator; in 2014, he or she had to work fewer than 24 hours (and the new fridge was frost-free and came with an icemaker).¹² Mindless consumerism? Not when you remember that food, clothing, and shelter are the three necessities of life, that entropy degrades all three, and that the time it takes to keep them usable is time that could be devoted to other pursuits. Electricity, running water, and appliances (or as they used to be called, “labor-saving devices”) give us that time back—the many hours our grandmothers spent pumping, canning, churning, pickling, curing, sweeping, waxing, scrubbing, wringing, sudsing, drying, stitching, mending, knitting, darning, and, as they used to remind us, “slaving over a hot stove, working our fingers to the bone.” Figure 17-3 shows that as utilities and appliances penetrated American households during the 20th century, the amount of life that people lost to housework—which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time—fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011.¹³ Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.¹⁴ For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.¹⁵

Figure 17-3: Utilities, appliances, and housework, US, 1900–2015

Sources: Before 2005: Greenwood, Seshadri, & Yorukoglu 2005. Appliances, 2005 and 2011: US Census Bureau, Siebens 2013. Housework, 2015: Our World in Data, Roser 2016t, based on the American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016b.

As a feminist-era husband I can truthfully use the first-person plural in celebrating this gain. But in most times and places housework is gendered, so the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general. Arguments for the equality of women go back to Mary Astell’s 1700 treatise and are irrefutable, so why did they take centuries to catch on? In a 1912 interview in Good Housekeeping magazine, Thomas Edison prophesied one of the great social transformations of the 20th century:

The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge. She will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic laborer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman’s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman’s energy will be conserved for use in broader, more constructive fields.¹⁶

Time is not the only life-enriching resource granted to us by technology. Another is light. Light is so empowering that it serves as the metaphor of choice for a superior intellectual and spiritual state: enlightenment. In the natural world we are plunged into darkness for half of our existence, but human-made light allows us to take back the night for reading, moving about, seeing people’s faces, and otherwise engaging with our surroundings. The economist William Nordhaus has cited the plunging price (and hence the soaring availability) of this universally treasured resource as an emblem of progress. Figure 17-4 shows that the inflation-adjusted price of a million lumen-hours of light (about what you would need to read for two and a half hours a day for a year) has fallen twelve thousandfold since the Middle Ages (once called the Dark Ages), from around £35,500 in 1300 to less than £3 today. These days (and nights), if you aren’t reading, conversing, getting out, or otherwise edifying yourself, it’s not because you can’t afford the light.

Figure 17-4: Cost of light, England, 1300–2006

Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016o, based on data from Fouquet & Pearson 2012. Cost of one million lumen-hours (about 833 hours from an 80-watt incandescent bulb), in pounds sterling (inflation-adjusted to the year 2000).

The plunging cash value of artificial light actually understates the progress, because, as Adam Smith pointed out, “The real price of every thing . . . is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”¹⁷ Nordhaus estimated how many hours a person would have to work to earn an hour of light to read by at different times in history.¹⁸ A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in two centuries. And the progress wasn’t finished: Nordhaus published his article before LED bulbs flooded the market. Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage.

The declining proportion of our lives we have to forfeit for light, appliances, and food may be part of a general law. The technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that “over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.”¹⁹ As the necessities of life get cheaper, we waste fewer of our waking hours obtaining them, and have more time and money left over for everything else—and the “everything else” gets cheaper, too, so we can experience more of them. Figure 17-5 shows that in 1929 Americans spent more than 60 percent of their disposable income on necessities; by 2016 that had fallen to a third.

Figure 17-5: Spending on necessities, US, 1929–2016

Source: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/static/1937, adapted from a graph by Mark Perry, using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=9&step=1#reqid=9&step=1&isuri=1. Proportion of disposable income spent on food at home, cars, clothing, household furnishings, housing, utilities, and gasoline. Data from 1941 to 1946 are omitted because they are distorted by rationing and soldiers’ salaries during World War II.

What are people doing with that extra time and money? Are they truly enriching their lives, or are they just buying more golf clubs and designer handbags? Though it’s presumptuous to pass judgment on how people choose to spend their days, we can focus on the pursuits that almost everyone would agree are constituents of a good life: connecting with loved ones and friends, experiencing the richness of the natural and cultural worlds, and having access to the fruits of intellectual and artistic creativity.

With the rise of two-career couples, overscheduled kids, and digital devices, there is a widespread belief (and recurring media panic) that families are caught in a time crunch that’s killing the family dinner. (Both Al Gore and Dan Quayle lamented its demise in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election—and that was before smartphones and social media.) But the new tugs and distractions have to be weighed against the 24 extra hours that modernity has granted to breadwinners every week and the 42 extra hours it has granted to homemakers. Though people increasingly complain about how crazy-busy they are (“yuppie kvetching,” as one team of economists put it), a different picture emerges when they are asked to keep track of their time. In 2015, men reported 42 hours of leisure per week, around 10 more than their counterparts did fifty years earlier, and women reported 36 hours, more than 6 hours more (figure 17-6).²⁰ (To be fair, the yuppies might have something to kvetch about: less-educated people reported having more leisure, and this inequality-in-reverse has grown over these fifty years.) Similar trends have been reported in Western Europe.²¹

Nor are Americans consistently feeling more harried. A review by the sociologist John Robinson shows some ups and downs between 1965 and 2010 in the percentage who say they feel “always rushed” (with a low of 18 percent in 1976 and a high of 35 percent in 1998), but no consistent trend over forty-five years.²² And at the end of the day, the family dinner is alive and well. Several studies and polls agree that the number of dinners families have together changed little from 1960 through 2014, despite the iPhones, PlayStations, and Facebook accounts.²³ Indeed, over the course of the 20th century, typical American parents spent more time, not less, with their children.²⁴ In 1924, only 45 percent of mothers spent two or more hours a day with their children (7 percent spent no time with them), and only 60 percent of fathers spent at least an hour a day with them. By 1999, the proportions had risen to 71 and 83 percent.²⁵ In fact, single and working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home married mothers did in 1965.²⁶ (An increase in hours spent caring for children is the main reason for the dip in leisure time visible in figure 17-6.)²⁷ But time-use studies are no match for Norman Rockwell and Leave It to Beaver, and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness.

Figure 17-6: Leisure time, US, 1965–2015

Sources: 1965–2003: Aguiar & Hurst 2007, table III, Leisure Measure 1. 2015: American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016c, summing Leisure and Sports, Lawn and Garden Care, and Volunteering for commensurability with Aguiar & Hurst’s Measure 1.

Electronic media are commonly cited as a threat to human relationships, and certainly Facebook friends are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact with flesh-and-blood companions.²⁸ Yet overall, electronic technology has been a priceless gift to human closeness. A century ago, if family members moved to a distant city, one might never hear their voices or see their faces again. Grandchildren grew up without their grandparents laying eyes on them. Couples separated by study, work, or war would reread a letter dozens of times and tumble into despair if the next one was late, not knowing whether the postal service had lost it or whether the lover was angry, faithless, or dead (an agony recounted in songs like the Marvelettes’ and Beatles’ “Please Mr. Postman” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Why Don’t You Write Me?”). Even when long-distance telephony allowed people to reach out and touch someone, the exorbitant cost put a strain on intimacy. People of my generation remember the awkwardness of speed-talking on a pay phone while feeding it quarters between bongs, or the breakneck sprint when called to the family phone (“IT’S LONG DISTANCE!!!”), or the sinking feeling of the rent money evaporating as a pleasant conversation unfolded. “Only connect,” advised E. M. Forster, and electronic technology is allowing us to connect as never before. Today, almost half of the world’s population has Internet access, and three-quarters have access to a mobile phone. The marginal cost of a long-distance conversation is essentially zero, and the conversants can now see as well as hear each other.

And speaking of seeing, the plunging cost of photography is another gift to the richness of experience. In past eras people had only a mental image to remind them of a family member, living or dead. Today, like billions of others, I get a wave of gratitude for my blessings several times a day as my eyes alight on a photo of my loved ones. Affordable photography also allows the high points of life to be lived many times, not just once: the precious occasions, the stunning sights, the long-gone cityscapes, the elderly in their prime, the grown-ups as children, the children as babies.

Even in the future, when we have 3-D holographic surround-sound virtual reality with haptic exoskeleton gloves, we will still want to be within touching distance of the people we love, so the shrinking cost of transportation is another boon to humanity. Trains, buses, and cars have multiplied the opportunities for us to get together, and the remarkable democratization of plane travel has removed the barriers of distance and oceans. The term jet set for chic celebrities is an anachronism from the 1960s, when no more than a fifth of Americans had ever flown in a plane. Despite soaring fuel costs, the real price of plane travel in the United States has fallen by more than half since the late 1970s, when the airlines were deregulated (figure 17-7). In 1974, it cost $1,442 (in 2011 dollars) to fly from New York to Los Angeles; today it can be done for less than $300. As prices fell, more people flew: in 2000 more than half of Americans took at least one round-trip flight. You might have to spread-eagle while a guard slides a wand up your crotch, you may have an elbow in your ribs and a seatback in your chin, but long-distance lovers get to see each other, and if your mother gets sick you can be there the next day.

Figure 17-7: Cost of air travel, US, 1979–2015

Source: Thompson 2013, updated with data from Airlines for America, http://airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/. Domestic travel, excluding checked baggage fees (which would raise the average cost for baggage-checking passengers by about a half-cent per mile since 2008).

Affordable transportation does more than reunite people. It also allows them to sample the phantasmagoria of Planet Earth. This is the pastime that we exalt as “travel” when we do it and revile as “tourism” when someone else does it, but it surely has to count as one of the things that make life worth living. To see the Grand Canyon, New York, the Aurora Borealis, Jerusalem—these are not just sensuous pleasures but experiences that widen the scope of our consciousness, allowing us to take in the vastness of space, time, nature, and human initiative. Though we bristle at the motor coaches and tour guides, the selfie-shooting throngs in their tacky shorts, we must concede that life is better when people can expand their awareness of our planet and species rather than being imprisoned within walking distance of their place of birth. With the rise of disposable income and the declining cost of plane travel, more people have been exploring the world, as we see in figure 17-8.

And no, the travelers aren’t just lining up for wax museums and rides at Disney World. The number of areas in the world that are protected from development and economic exploitation exceeds 160,000 and increases daily. As we saw in figure 10-6, far more of the natural world is being set aside in nature preserves.

Figure 17-8: International tourism, 1995–2015

Source: World Bank 2016e, based on data from the World Tourism Organization, Yearbook of Tourism Statistics.

Another way in which the scope of our aesthetic experience has been magnified is food. The late 19th-century American diet consisted mainly of pork and starch.²⁹ Before refrigeration and motorized transport, most fruits and vegetables would have spoiled before they reached a consumer, so farmers grew nonperishables like turnips, beans, and potatoes. Apples were the only fruit, most of which went into cider. (As recently as the 1970s, Florida souvenir shops sold bags of oranges for tourists to take home as gifts.) The American diet was called “white bread” and “meat-and-potatoes” for good reason. Adventurous cooks might whip up some Spam fritters, mock apple pie made from Ritz crackers, or “Perfection Salad” (coleslaw in lemon Jell-O). New cuisines introduced by immigrants were so exotic that they became the butt of jokes, including Italian (“Mamma mia, that’s a spicy meatball!”), Mexican (“Solves the gas shortage”), Chinese (“An hour later and you’re hungry again”), and Japanese (“Bait, not food”). Today, even small towns and shopping mall food courts offer a cosmopolitan menu, sometimes with all these cuisines plus Greek, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern. Grocers have broadened their offerings as well, from a few hundred items in the 1920s to 2,200 in the 1950s, 17,500 in the 1980s, and 39,500 in 2015.³⁰

Last but not least, access to the finest products of the human mind has been fabulously broadened and democratized. It’s hard for us to reconstruct the gnawing boredom of the isolated rural households of yesteryear.³¹ In the late 19th century there was not only no Internet but no radio, television, movies, or musical recordings, and for the majority of households not even a book or newspaper. For entertainment, men would go to the saloon to drink.³² The writer and editor William Dean Howells (1837–1920) entertained himself as a boy by rereading the pages of an old newspaper which his father had used to wallpaper their Ohio cabin.

A country-dweller today can choose from among hundreds of television channels and half a billion Web sites, embracing every newspaper and magazine in the world (including their archives going back more than a century), every great work of literature that is out of copyright, an encyclopedia more than seventy times the size of Britannica with about the same level of accuracy, and every classic work of art and music.³³ He could fact-check rumors on Snopes, teach himself math and science at Khan Academy, build his word power with the American Heritage Dictionary, enlighten himself with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and watch lectures by the world’s great scholars, writers, and critics, many long dead. Today an impoverished Hillel would not have to pass out from cold while eavesdropping on lessons through the skylight of a schoolhouse.

Even for wealthy Western urbanites, who always had the run of the palaces of culture, access to arts and letters has expanded tremendously. When I was a student, a movie buff had to wait years for a classic film to be shown at a local repertory theater or on late-night television, if it was shown at all; today it can be streamed on demand. I can listen to any of thousands of songs while jogging, washing the dishes, or waiting in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. With a few keystrokes, I could lose myself in the complete works of Caravaggio, the original trailer for Rashomon, Dylan Thomas reciting “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” Eleanor Roosevelt reading aloud the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Maria Callas singing “O mio babbino caro,” Billie Holiday singing “My Man Don’t Love Me,” and Solomon Linda singing “Mbube”—experiences I could not have had for love or money just a few years ago. Cheap hi-fi headphones and, soon, cardboard virtual-reality glasses enhance the aesthetic experience well beyond the tinny speakers and muddy black-and-white reproductions of my youth. And those who like paper can buy a used copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, or Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood for a dollar apiece.

A combination of Internet technology and crowdsourcing from thousands of volunteers has led to flabbergasting access to the great works of humankind. There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow. The answer does not depend on invidious comparisons of the quality of the works of today and those of the past (which we are in no position to make, just as many of the great works of the past were not appreciated in their time). It follows from our ceaseless creativity and our fantastically cumulative cultural memory. We have, at our fingertips, virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time, whereas the people who lived before our time had neither. Better still, the world’s cultural patrimony is now available not just to the rich and well-located but to anyone who is connected to the vast web of knowledge, which means most of humanity and soon all of it.