This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 30th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

An explosion of crippling depression in America may be greatly exaggerated, according to Cato policy analyst Will Wilkinson

says the claims that Americans are more depressed than ever amid

ever expanding material wealth has significant implications for public policy.

He explores much of this in a book review in the December issue of Reason magazine.

The way we measure things like health or like happiness or depression or even something

seemingly technical is measuring real wages is in fact incredibly important. First of all we need to know the facts about how well

we're really doing, how well our economic, social, and political institutions contribute to

aspects of our well-being that we all care about.

Now this shouldn't be a political question, it's just an empirical question about how we're doing,

but unfortunately it is a political question. Most political action is

motivated by fear. We're a lot more motivated to avoid losses than we are to seek gain. So if you can convince voters that there is a crisis

of obesity or an epidemic of depression, it becomes a lot easier to push through some piece of paternalistic legislation or some kind of new entitlement.

Now the opposite error to which libertarians are sometimes prone is simply to deny that there's any problem at all

in advance of the evidence.

But again, though the facts about how we're doing

tend to have a political upshot,

it isn't a political question and we have to be intellectually

honest and aware of our own biases as well. Now in the case of depression in

particular, the reason why this question is so interesting is that the

increase of diagnosed depression over the last 40-50 years, even the last 20, 10 years

...