The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook

Author:Gregg Easterbrook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588363268
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

A fundamental reason that acquiring money does not sync with acquiring happiness might be stated in cool economic terms: Most of what people really want in life—love, friendship, respect, family, standing, fun—is not priced and does not pass through the market. If something isn’t priced you can’t buy it, so possessing money may not help much.

True, many have used money in attempts to buy respect, love, or friendship, and you can certainly use money to buy sex. But the kind of sex you get for money isn’t likely to be as good as the unpriced kind—and the same obtains for the kind of respect, love, or friendship you can buy with money. There are ways to make an economic purchase of fun: vacations, amusement parks, movies, sports events. But when it comes to fun, there’s little relationship between price and value, as a simple inexpensive picnic might turn out to be a wonderful time while a cost-is-no-object resort stay might turn out unsatisfying. Even this intangible of life, which the market does attempt to price, doesn’t relate to money in any way that reliably produces the desired result. We’ve all spent money on things that were supposed to be fun, and later wished we hadn’t.

Surely most people would say that the most important commodity that lacks price and thus cannot be bought is love. The human need for love may not just be a matter of sentiment: In their groundbreaking 2000 book A General Theory of Love,10 three academic psychologists, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, proposed that love is actually a physical necessity. “Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, where each person meets the needs of the other because neither can provide for his own,” the authors wrote.

In the clunky theorist’s phrase “simultaneous mutual regulation,” the authors were referring to studies showing that the limbic portion of the brain, from which emotions arise and where dreaming takes place, only functions properly among those with love, family ties, or close friendships in their lives. People who lack for love or close friendship often develop limbic abnormalities; the limbic part of the brain doesn’t keep watch over regulatory chemicals properly. The chance discovery, in the 1950s, that certain drugs intended to treat tuberculosis also palliate depression is considered evidence of this concept, because this demonstrates that the emotional self is at least partly biological in origin. At first glance, the fact that drugs improve mood can sound like depressing determinism—“chemicals make us happy.” But if emotions are biologically seated within the brain, then they are real and central to human life, not just some weepy distraction, and they must have evolved, just as our physical forms evolved.

Enlightenment thinking revered abstract thought, which arises from the neocortex portion of the brain, over all other mental functions; Enlightenment theorists viewed emotional needs as handicaps people must rise above, and many in the West have embraced this view, perhaps to their detriment. A General Theory of Love counters with the contention that the human

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