It's getting so much better. Nobody seems to care.

How are we so rich and so miserable at the same time?

Quick, grab a middle schooler and a map … there’s another Middle East war and I can’t remember which nation goes where. The other party is in power. The other party might come back to power. Old jobs went overseas. The new ones got deleted by AI. We’re absolutely getting another recession, which has been clear as day for many years, now.

Yet almost every single statistic begs to differ.

Lifespan: longest ever. Education levels: higher. Wages: up. Divorce rate: down. Hours worked: less. Gender wage gap: narrowing. Cars: safer. Health insurance: 92%. Kids with health insurance: 94%. Leisure Time: more. Music variety: Spotify. Girls in sports: logo 3.

Even the stats about bad things show they are good. A non-profit reported that 14% of American kids live in “crowded housing.” The definition was “households that have more than 1 person per room.” When did “One person, one bedroom” get promoted to a human right? My mother was raised in a farmhouse proudly featuring a “boys room” and a “girls room” dividing seven children. Before open concept was cool, colonial New Englander Beatrice Plummer¹ slept with her husband in their parlor, but were considered wealthy because they owned a second bed for (all) the children. That second bed stayed in the kitchen, so the Plummer’s made all future children very quietly.

It is well known that rich white men telling everyone else how good things are is a great way to win hearts and minds. So, I’m here to tell you…

I’m so confused.

On the one hand, we’re crying poverty while brushing our hypoallergenic dogs. On the other hand, all this anger didn’t invent itself.

We are in a war of the worldviews. One determined to be discontent no matter what. The other can’t read the room. “Excuse me, Professor. The angry mob outside seems unappeased by your assurances that life is just fine.”

Can anyone explain why the wealthiest large nation in the history of the world feels broke?

There are several ideas:

1) “The Marie Antoinette theory”: Most people tell surveys that they are doing great, but their neighbors’ lives suck. Besides, you can’t make the whole crowd happy. The Economist reasons: “voters want contradictory things: low prices when they shop, high wages for themselves; not many immigrants but lots of cheap labour; rising house prices when they own and lower ones when their children want to buy.” True, but only useful if inflation’s “basket of goods” might include your severed head. The closer you are to an academic job, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

2) The “I thought there’d be servants” theory: The problem is we’re all getting richer, and the richer we get the less rich things we can have. When we celebrated with steak and wine becoming official millionaires, after a long pause my wife said, “I thought there’d be servants.” Welcome to a very not-exclusive club. There are 24 million millionaires in America today, 1 in 5 families. But the number of millionaire-y things didn’t grow. Nick Maggiulli calls it the “Death of the Amex Lounge.” If you’ve ever seen women rush to save an open seat by throwing their Neverfull onto it, trust me, you’re better off at the airport bar. David French reckons this is the youth-travel-sportification of American life: what once was near free (a field, a glove, a ball) is now a fiercely competitive marketplace against other almost-affluent people trying to get the last spot on the softball team/Disney Lighting Lane/Boarding Group 1/insert Your Favorite Baumol’s Cost Disease Illustration Here. The closer you are to Manhattan, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

3) The billionaires took our lunch money theory: This theory comes in several varieties. The starter kit offers Bernie Sanders yelling that the really rich stole from the really poor, the nearly poor, the might-be poor, or the poor adjacent. Then there is the Ro Khanna expansion pack, which comes with a tie, Yale Law degree, and a scratch off sticker to see if you get part of Jeff Bezos’s wealth tax. There is a fixed pie. Someone took more than their fair share. The closer you are to the Pacific Ocean, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

4) The Globalization Theory: all the good jobs went to all the bad places, then all the people from the bad places came to the good place and ruined it. That, as best I can tell, is how people tried to explain Populism 2016. The closer you are to a Dollar General, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

5) The “Wow! Poverty sure is expensive these days!” theory: less known but deserves more attention. It gained traction when Michael Green’s estimated $100,000/year was the new poverty line. Green got the math wrong and the vibes right. The best expositor of this is Kevin Erdmann, who proved that housing inflation ate all the working-class wage growth. Inflation among the travel sports crowd was 2%/year, but for the paid-per-hour people it was 4%. Why? Usually, homes filter down: Professionals’ neighborhoods of 1960 become middle class by 1990, then working class. The housing shortage put the engine in reverse: now houses filter up, so that people who bought pre-2016 could never afford their homes today, and those making under $50k have nothing to trade down to. Half of home value increases was the price of land (since nobody builds anymore). Erdmann calls it the “troll under the bridge,” (homeowners) who demand extra payment to cross into house-land. We’re counting the value of the homes and the income of the troll as wealth, but one of them is taking wealth away. The closer you are to the real estate industry, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

The first theory fiddles while Rome recounts its ballots. The second makes sense to me, but not to the 80% who walk so they don’t pay for parking. The third gets votes, but assumes if one person gets poorer another gets richer (not true). The fourth forgets that China didn’t restrict building permits, nor did Mexico offer you student debt to pay for the 18 Associate Deans in the School of Arts. The fifth is probably most accurate, but doesn’t explain why the moment the White House switches parties, Democrats and Republicans statistically invert, nearly to the exact percentage, from saying the economy is great/sucks to sucks/great.

If you’ve read this far, you probably a) believe things are better than everyone says but don’t want to sound insensitive, or b) are my wife. Hey, Honey!

Maybe we can’t explain all the angst, but we can at least explain what to do with it. History offers lessons about life, just rarely the lessons we think. Here is ours:

There was always something wrong. In every era, something sucked. For them it was debtors’ prison (wife and kids stay free!), slavery, Civil War, grasshoppers in the Dust Bowl, 25% unemployment, Pearl Harbor, nukes in Cuba, double digit inflation, Y2K, or the writers’ strike that ruined “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World.”

For you it is healthcare, housing costs, and everyone’s political opinion being shared in real time.

But this truth confronted every person who wondered if the good times were over in 1820, 1920, and 2020 … I have to try to get ahead, anyway.

The question is not what type of economy you would build, but what you will build in this economy.

I’ll confess to being in awe of modern America. My grandfather, a farmer, possessed a nearly childlike glee showing you any technology, whether on a tractor or a television, because he remembered a world without either. In the past 100-ish years, the typical American went from never dreaming to easily having: indoor plumbing, hot water, electrical lights, refrigerators, freezers, cars, fresh fruit in winter, radios, personal cameras, washing machines, vacuums, dishwashers, ice makers, daily showers, antibiotics, microwaves, televisions of all sizes, computers, internet, GPS, 911 operators, riding lawnmowers, Starbucks, Pell Grants, all recorded music available instantly, video calls with Grandma, overnight delivery, Amazon, Keurig instant coffee, Bluetooth, and remote work. Oh, and apparently one bedroom per kid.

History seems like a lame lion to bring into contemporary woe-is-us debates, but I beg you to take a moment and realize one historical truth: it was never easy, but it has gotten a lot easier.

Sure, the fact that you have air conditioning doesn’t make it less expensive to use. But dear Lord, listen to yourself… and to everyone else bemoaning “late stage capitalism” for a minute.

Whatever your income. Whatever your race. Whatever your starting point. Whatever your politics. Your life is better than the ones that came before, and if you asked your ancestors what was wrong with your world they would slap you all the way from theirs.

You know this, but no one will tell you this. Big Woe, the Despair Industrial Complex, do not want you to think about it too long. There are no clicks for journalists, no votes for politicians, and no tenure for academics telling you the world is getting better. But they can get all those things telling you a) its bad, b) who broke it, and c) their plan to fix it. They are rewarded for telling. You are penalized for listening.

You live in the most amazing time to be alive. Turn off the people telling you that you have so little. Look back. Wonder at everyone who helped get you where you are.

The lesson I take away from the past is how foolish I would have to be to look back at the world before, around the world today, and somehow conclude this moment is anything other than amazing. I refuse to succumb to Big Woe. Optimism, realistic but relentless optimism, is the actual lesson of American history.

Ponder that.

Buy the Book!

Order on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Books A Million

1. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Three Inventories, Three Households,” in Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, Eighth Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 44.