America’s Pursuit of Happiness

Jeffrey Sachs’ bestselling book The End of Poverty argued for eradicating extreme poverty in the third world through foreign aid. Previously, the author made his academic reputation as an economic advisor to former Soviet Bloc countries. Thus, it is a gloomy irony that Sachs’ most recent book, The Price of Civilization, is his attempt to halt the decline of the first world’s wealthiest nation.
Sachs, an economist at Columbia University and president of the school’s Earth Institute, is one of many authors who have lately focused on forming an account of America’s problems. His diagnosis largely concerns what he sees as the political transformations aligning American governance with the interests of the elite over the masses. Yet all this is but a symptom of a larger national malaise, one Sachs hopes to address by shifting the public interest from the pursuit of wealth to that of happiness.
In covering controversial issues of such a sweeping character, Sachs occasionally comes off as polemical, and at times loses track of the firm economic basis for his prescriptions. In large, however, The Price of Civilization stands out as an astute overview of America’s contemporary ills—economic, political, and even cultural. Moreover, Sachs uniquely works to broaden the scope of his macroeconomic inquiry, changing the target of his policy proposals from material affluence to a more holistic understanding of public wellbeing.
Patient History
Sachs views his work as “clinical economics,” focused on understanding all the particularities of his patient in order to prescribe an effective cure. The book’s first part documents the deleterious symptoms afflicting America, exhibiting the issues—decreasing infrastructure spending, declines in human capital, abysmal PISA test scores—in literally graphic detail. Sachs does not, however, overuse his reams of data. Instead, he succinctly presents the relevant and alarming evidence with all the panache of a scatter plot, before moving on to his more substantive work of the book.
As a clinician and commentator, Sachs rightly concerns much of his investigation with the patient’s history: in this case, America between the presidencies of Carter and Obama. During this period, the author argues, popular governance gave way to plutocracy. The country ceased to be a “mixed economy,” Sachs believes. In this narration, it was initially Carter who “began the processes of deregulation,” supplying momentum for the looming “Reagan Revolution” of tax cuts for top earners, decreased spending on civilian programs, deregulation (especially in finance), and outsourcing of core government services. “All four of these major policy changes took hold in the 1980s,” Sachs writes, “and are still in place today.”
Undue Infection
The lasting triumph of the Reagan Revolution is due in no small part to Reagan’s successors, Sachs argues, who have been subsumed into what the author derides as a “corporatocracy.” Moneyed interests stifle more populist and progressive public policy in Sachs’ account, infecting even the supposedly left- wing administrations of Clinton and Obama. Ultimately, the undue influence cripples the possibility of solving America’s chronic problems, leaving the country in a “New Gilded Age.” Pressing concerns of the larger public, such as healthcare or outsourcing, seem wholly alien to the powerful elite.
Here Sachs’ writing takes on a vitriolic tone, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. For example, it is certainly true that, like his predecessor, Obama ignored campaign finance reform during his first term as president, leaving the floodgates of corporate electioneering ajar. But when Sachs seriously asks, “What have been the real differences between Bush and Obama?,” one has to wonder if the author is evenhanded about “Obamacare’s” namesake. Passages like these sound more like Paul Krugman than an honest clinician.
Nonetheless, the author’s course of treatment for America’s political paralysis largely makes up for his polemical forays. Though he at first stumbles, hinting at his hopes for a third party under the moniker of “Alliance for the Radical Center” to galvanize the voting populace, Sachs finds firm footing promoting such initiatives as public campaign finance and bans on lobbying. With these in place, the author foresees a Congress that is no longer “a maze of special interests,” and a president who can stand as a real agent of change.
The Pursuit of Happiness
As central as these political concerns appear, though, Sachs sees America’s problems as rooted in a deeper “moral crisis.” Not only are national politics rotten, the constituents are ill informed or misled about its functions—if they even care about them in the first place. Sachs points to more profound failings: Americans watch too much television, buy too much on credit to satisfy ephemeral cravings, and are overall unhappier than their global peers, not only in Sweden and Denmark, but also in countries like Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. America is caught, Sachs writes, on a “Hedonic Treadmill” of sorts, clamoring to get richer and ending up more miserable in the process.
In his freewheeling furor Sachs sometimes manages to stray from his primarily empirical enterprise. Do we really need, as the author suggests, the spiritual teachings of the Dalai Lama to tell us to turn off the TV or reign in our shopping sprees? Fortunately, Sachs returns to his more mundane subject of national welfare in due course. Here the author’s choice of words from the late senator Robert Kennedy ring truer than those of the Buddha: “For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things.” Wealth for Sachs is not an end unto itself; it is a means towards common happiness, broader issues, broader scope
To this more “holistic” end, as he calls it, Sachs proposes establishing “national metrics for life satisfaction,” the goal being to shift the public focus from “How much money are you making?” to “How are you feeling today?” Granted, such an approach is at times more emotional than economical, just as The Price of Civilization more closely resembles a work of public psychology than one of sterile statistics. Yet for Sachs, the quantitative and qualitative poles of his study inform a larger, more accurate macro snapshot of both states of the union—material as well as mental. Adhering to the above dichotomy merely amounts to policy analysis with one eye closed.
The rub, of course, comes down to paying for these pleasing programs. But as Sachs notes, Scandinavian governments maintain national euphoria through prudent practices, without any gaping deficits. While the requisite trade-off is higher taxes, it is a bill that Sachs thinks America can and should foot. This is, perhaps, the price of a civilization worth inhabiting.
Eli Kozminsky ’14 is a Staff Writer.