Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website

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My guest today is Greg Easterbrook, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and

a contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. We're going to talk

today about the ideas in his most recent book, The Progress Paradox, How Life Gets Better

while people feel worse. Greg, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you.

Greg, in the first part of the book, and it's a fascinating book, by the way, it's full

of incredibly interesting data, numbers, insights into those numbers, and speculation

about the world around us in both material and non-material ways. It's really quite

an achievement. In the first part of the book, you talk about how economic life in America

is getting better and better, and that the average person is sharing in that prosperity.

That's a somewhat controversial claim, I wish it weren't, because I agree with you, but

it's a somewhat controversial claim. What's the evidence for that claim?

Well, it's probably easiest to start by telling out why I decided to write this book.

I started working on it in the late 1990s, and originally it was just going to be an

argument that most things were getting better for most people in the United States and

the European Union, the book mainly. Concerns, and there was some day, and about 1997 or

so, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, and Al Gore was Vice President, they

...