Indeed, they argue that we are actually experiencing a decrease in well-being.
Lane, and the journalist Gregg Easterbrook - point out how the growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. Three recently published books - by the psychologist David Myers, the political scientist Robert E. This increased affluence contributes to freedom of choice by giving people the means to act on their various goals and desires, whatever they may be.ĭoes increased affluence and increased choice mean we have more happy people? Not at all. And of course, no one had cable TV, home computers, or the Internet in 1964. The proportion of homes with dishwashers has increased from 9 to 50 percent, with clothes dryers from 20 to 70 percent, and with air-conditioning from 15 to 73 percent. In the last 40 years, the inflation-adjusted, per capita income of Americans has more than doubled. Further, freedom of choice is greatly enhanced by increased affluence.
Tyranny in a sentence free#
Increasingly, people are free to choose when and how they will work, how they will worship, where they will live, what they will look like (thanks to liposuction, Botox, and cosmetic surgery of every description), and what kind of romantic relationships they will have. Americans are awash in choice, not only in the courses they take, but also in the products they buy (300 kinds of cereal, 50 different cellphones, thousands of mutual funds) and in virtually all aspects of life. This explosion of choice in the university is a reflection of a pervasive social trend. Students come and go in and out of classes just as browsers go in and out of stores in a mall. They go to a class, stay 10 minutes to see what the professor is like, then walk out, often in the middle of the professor’s sentence, to try another class. In the first few weeks of classes, students sample the merchandise. In some rather prestigious institutions, this shopping-mall view has been carried to an extreme.
Individual customers are free to “purchase” whatever bundles of knowledge they want, and the university provides whatever its customers demand. Universities offer a wide array of different “goods” and allow, even encourage, students - the “customers” - to shop around until they find what they like. The modern university has become a kind of intellectual shopping mall.
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