What is the good life? – Digby's Hullabaloo

It’s not this:

That’s the question Paul Krugman asks in today’s newsletter. Hint: it’s not about money:

“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor,” said Mae West. “Believe me, rich is better.” Words of wisdom. But getting richer doesn’t necessarily improve your life as much as you’d expect, and what goes for individuals goes double for societies.

Today’s column was about what’s happening now, with the economy partially recovering from the coronavirus recession but the lives of millions getting sharply worse. Blame for the extreme current disconnect rests squarely with Donald Trump and his party, who have yanked away the safety net that helped many people cope with bad times. But in fairness, this kind of disconnect isn’t new; it has been an increasingly glaring feature of American society for decades.
By the usual measures, the U.S. economy is highly successful. We have the highest GDP per capita of any major nation. Before the coronavirus hit, we had low unemployment. Our tech companies alone are worth more than the entire European stock market. We clearly have the means to live la dolce vita.
But do we actually manage to live good lives? Some of us do. Overall, though, America seems to get much less satisfaction out of its wealth than one might have expected.
People who make this point often compare us to the Nordic countries, which are success stories by any standard. For today’s newsletter, however, I thought it might be worth comparing us to a country that is widely regarded — indeed, in some respects really is — a failure: Italy.
A few weeks ago our own Roger Cohen wrote about Italy’s remarkable cohesiveness in the face of the coronavirus: after a terrible start, the famously fractious nation pulled itself together, and has done a vastly better job of containing the pandemic than we have. (Soon after writing that column, Roger himself was diagnosed with Covid-19: let’s all wish him the best.)
The thing is, among those who study international economics, Italy is best known as a cautionary tale of economic failure. For reasons that are endlessly debated, it somehow seems to have missed out on the information technology revolution. Its economy has stagnated for decades. Incredibly, Italy’s real GDP per capita on the eve of the pandemic was lower than it had been in 2000, even as the same measure rose 25 percent in the U.S.:

But there’s more to life than money. To take just one crude example, one thing you surely have to do in order to live a good life is, well, not die. And that’s one area in which Italians have been outperforming Americans by an ever-widening margin. In the mid-1980s, the two nations had roughly the same life expectancy. These days Italians can expect to live around 4 ½ years longer:

OK, I don’t want to speculate on the hidden strengths of Italian society. But the weaknesses of American society, despite our national wealth, are obvious: Extreme inequality, including racial inequality on a scale whites can find hard to comprehend. A weak social safety net, including a unique failure among advanced countries to guarantee universal health care. Terrible work-life balance, with far less vacation and family time than a wealthy nation should have.
And a personal, informal observation: Trump is an extreme case, but we are a nation obsessed with the notion of winners and losers. The nature of my various careers has brought me into contact with a number of extremely successful people, in various walks in life, and what always strikes me is how insecure many of them are, because there’s always another money manager who makes even more billions or another professor who’s won even more prizes.
Imagine what this kind of competitive mentality does to people who aren’t objectively successful, who — usually through no fault of their own — have been stranded by economic or social change.
Of course, I’m far from the first person to make observations like this. Still, maybe this strange, ugly time in America will help teach us some lessons about building a better society once the pandemic is over.

This is a subject that interests me intensely and I wonder if the pandemic has made some people take a reappraisal of their lives and recognize that this experience has shown the benefits of some of the simpler things in life. Whatever happens, I think we will see some cultural shifts that change us in ways that last a very long time.