If the Affluence We Pursued Brought Us to This, of What Use Was the Affluence?

A quality-of-life debate at the American Enterprise Institute takes a surprising turn...

Not many debates in Washington bring to mind Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but that’s where I found my thoughts drifting in the middle of last Tuesday’s event at the American Enterprise Institute. I was there with AEI’s Scott Winship to kick off EPPC’s “Crossroads of Conservatism” series, debating the resolution: “Public policy in recent decades has caused economic changes that have worsened the quality of life for most Americans.” You can watch the whole thing here.

The value of debate, over rote presentation of talking points, is in the real-time interplay of conflicting ideas, allowing both participants and audiences to see which ones fit together logically and which ones do not. That in turn requires an effective resolution, and on Tuesday we had a doozy. No set of metrics would conclusively prove anything. Rather, each side had to present a narrative consistent with the available data that explained coherently what has been happening in the country. As I said in my opening statement, I was reminded of torts class in law school, where the claim has its various elements—duty, causation, harm—and the advocates must marshal evidence that persuades a jury, by the preponderance of evidence, who is to blame for what.

Scott was representing the view prominent on the Old Right that the American economy has been delivering well for the American people, but it turns out this position lands the proponent in an impossible spot: blaming rising affluence for a declining quality of life for all Americans, which would seem rather unavoidably to imply that the economic growth and technological progress of recent decades has been bad for us and we should pursue the reverse. I don’t think Scott believes that, but it was where his position led, which teaches something valuable about that position.

As Anton Chigurh asks Carson Wells, in McCarthy’s haunting line: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

My opening statement focused on the questions of what “quality of life” means, how we might measure it and interpret data about trends in its various components, and what those trends in fact show. The trends diverge sharply for the winners versus the losers in the modern economy, which, I argued, was powerful circumstantial evidence that economic changes have driven those trends. And seeing as economists and policymakers had proudly promised to effect such changes, it did seem fair to hold them accountable for the result.

Scott engaged with none of that in his own remarks, choosing instead to focus on various data that showed wages have risen in recent decades. In fact, his only mention of quality of life was an initial comment that, “I'm going to maybe come back to the part about the resolution that is about whether the quality of life has improved over time,” which he did not. In his view:

The social problems that we've experienced, very real problems from the opioids crisis to family breakdown to the teen mental health crisis and the ones that Oren listed in his [remarks], those can't be attributed to economic deterioration. If anything, many of our economic and social challenges today are the result of choices Americans have made as we have become more affluent as a nation.

I was at first rather perplexed by this, perhaps even a bit disgusted. If you watch one part of the debate, my ten-minute rebuttal gets to the heart of my view:

I hear Scott saying this is somehow a kind of curse of affluence. I almost find that a little bit offensive. You know who’s really affluent? Hey, guys, who in this room’s quality of life has gotten worse? Who in this room is suffering the curse of affluence that has worsened their quality of life? Are opioid deaths highest among the richest Americans because it’s a curse of affluence? It’s a facially absurd explanation that fails to grapple with the reality that what we are seeing is a set of outcomes tied directly to the economic experiences of people in this country. …

When we come back and look at what happened as a result and find in one group wonderful data—and if we aggregate it, we can make it look wonderful for everybody. And then we look in the other group, and we find, on every single indicator, decline—so much that we're not even having a debate about whether or not quality of life has declined for most people. And then we say, ‘Well, the real cause is too much affluence.’ It's a dead end for the conservative movement politically. It's a dead end for the nation substantively, and I am very glad to see it going out of style.

Even then, in Scott’s own rebuttal, he declined to take up the question, beyond offering the double negative that, “I didn't argue that the quality of life has not gone down.”

What was going on here? The format offered an opportunity for us to pose questions to each other, so I asked him directly: “Do you think the quality of life for most Americans has gotten better or worse or stayed the same?” Then he did explain, “I think the social quality of life, the sort of non-material aspects of our lives in general, have deteriorated pretty rapidly. … I think in many ways the quality of life is lousy.”

And that invited the obvious follow-up: “Would you apply that assessment to the high-income educated professional, such as you or me; or, [put another way,] do you think our quality of life is worse than it would've been 40 years ago?”

Scott said the one thing he could, which was also the one thing he couldn’t. “For sure. Absolutely.”

Why would he say that? The idea that quality of life has declined for all classes of Americans in the past 40 years, including those who have benefited most from our economic and social changes, is completely antithetical to everything the American Enterprise Institute stands for. And it’s inconsistent with Scott’s own prescriptions, which generally involve trying to provide greater opportunity to disadvantaged youth in hopes that they can grow up to enjoy the life available to more affluent members of society, which would be rather futile if affluence is itself a curse and provides no insulation from declining quality of life. If rising material affluence leads to declining quality of life, then rising material affluence would itself be an undesirable objective or end of public policy.

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

But the alternative response, that of course quality of life has improved for those who can take advantage of our economy’s changes, would collapse the effort to absolve economic conditions for what has happened to everyone else. It makes no sense to argue that the economy’s biggest winners are experiencing improved quality of life while everyone else is experiencing a decline, but this has nothing to do with the economy. Likewise, it’s impossible to construct a narrative that blames “affluence, except for the affluent.”

The dynamic here represents a fascinating inversion of the positions generally adopted by the Old Right (celebrating our purported prosperity, and thus poo-pooing the “grievance-onomics” of the “populists”) and the New Right (concerned about American decline, and thus criticized as “declensionist”). Scott and I actually agree about many of the concerning social trends on measures of community, mental health, and so on that do seem to afflict Americans up and down the income scale, and I think we’d also agree that they tend to afflict those further down more severely. But starting from a position recognizing wildly divergent economic outcomes across classes, and the way those differences affect the choices available to people and their capacity to flourish, the New Right can at least celebrate that where the economy does serve people well, things go pretty well. Not perfectly, of course—tradeoffs abound. But I see progress worth pursuing for everyone.

Starting from a position that we already have an economy that serves the vast majority of people well, and then also witnessing the social decay, the Old Right is left to conclude that everyone must be suffering together. Either the effect is pervasive, indicting our entire conception of economic growth and progress, or it is concentrated amongst those not benefiting from economic growth and progress, indicting the type of economic growth and progress we have pursued and achieved. Scott chose the right answer for purposes of defending his side of his debate. That the answer is so obviously wrong in reality helps bring us all meaningfully closer to the truth.

Debates are valuable not because the participants persuade each other, but because the process of argument itself exposes the strengths and weaknesses, coherence and contradiction, in the positions. We pursue economic growth and progress because, for those whom the prosperity reaches, quality of life does indeed improve. For most of the last century, Americans at every socioeconomic level experienced just that. The decline in quality of life for most Americans in recent decades is the result of an economy that has stopped spreading prosperity as it once did.

To believe otherwise is to believe, ultimately, that growth and “affluence” are harmful and presumably should be resisted. But that’s going full Unabomber, man. Never go full Unabomber.

Oren