March 22, 2010 Issue

I’m a sucker for demolition descriptions; there’s a dandy in this week’s issue: “The section, nine tons of steel and concrete, suddenly tilted forward and sank through the air, a giant concrete berg calving from the Yankee glacier. It thundered on impact, and the subway platform quaked. The field, excavators and all, disappeared in a cloud of dust. After a couple of minutes, the dust gave way to the sight of a dead upper deck on the ground; a rack of girders poked out of the concrete like the ribs of an animal carcass” (Nick Paumgarten, “The Pull”). Other highlights in the magazine this week: Sasha Frere-Jones’s “one of those glorious splinter-thin moments”; Ben McGrath’s “pillow in the shape of the S.S. Normandie”; Jeffrey Toobin’s “great swaths of Supreme Court precedent”; Lawrence Wright’s “proletarian informality.” And then we come to Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Everybody Have Fun” – a review of several books on the societal implications of happiness research – my Pick of the Week. I related to Kolbert’s piece; it touched on something a friend and I had argued about when we were in Cuba a couple of weeks ago. She’d commented that Communism seemed to be working for the Cubans because, as a people, “they appear to be happy.” I found myself snapping back: “What choice do they have? Would you choose to give up all your comforts of home and come live here?” She replied that she found the absence of consumerism in Cuba refreshing and that maybe we could learn from Cubans. At that point, I accused her of having a double standard: the Cuban way of life was okay for Cubans, but not for her. We ended up agreeing that neither of us had a sufficient understanding of how things really worked in Cuba. Little did I know (until I read Kolbert’s piece) that what we’d been arguing about has a name: “the paradox of the happy peasant.” Kolbert explains the phrase by quoting Carol Graham: “Higher per capita income levels do not translate directly into higher happiness levels.” In other words, as Kolbert notes, “the relationship between money and well-being turns out to be a lot less straightforward than is generally assumed.” So maybe my friend is right? Maybe Cubans should be left to enjoy their relative contentment? I’m still not convinced, because as Amartya Sen, an economist quoted by Kolbert, points out, “The grumbling rich man may well be less happy than the content peasant, but he does have a higher standard of living.” I recall pointing out to my friend the higher standard of living we enjoy in Canada. And I recall her chilling rejoinder: “At what cost?” In the end, this is Kolbert’s point, too. She concludes her stimulating review with some environmental logic that I find irrefutable: even if escalating consumption leads to increased happiness – a big “if,” as Kolbert’s piece makes clear - trashing the planet is still wrong.