• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 457 0

cynicism about the nature and role of government. Americans are deeply estranged from Washington. A large majority, 71 percent to 15 percent, describes the federal government as “a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests,” a startling commentary on the miserable state of American democracy. A similarly overwhelming majority, 70 percent to 12 percent, agrees that “government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.”3 The U.S. government has lost the confidence of the American people in a way that has not previously occurred in modern American history or probably elsewhere in the high-income world. Americans harbor fundamental doubts about the motivations, ethics, and competency of their federal government.

This lack of confidence extends to most of America’s major institutions. As we see in the data from a recent opinion survey (see Table 2.1), the public deeply distrusts banks, large corporations, news media, the entertainment industry, and unions, in addition to their distrust of the federal government and its agencies. Americans are especially skeptical of the overarching institutions at the national and global level—Congress, banks, the federal government, and big business—and more comfortable with the institutions closer to home, including small churches, colleges, and universities.

Table 2.1: The Public’s Negative Views of Institutions Are Not Limited to Government

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, April 2010.

Americans’ loss of confidence in its institutions is matched by a loss of confidence in one another. Sociologists, led by Robert Putnam, have shown the decline of civic-mindedness in American society. Americans participate less in social affairs (“bowling alone” in Putnam’s now-famous phrase) and have much less trust in one another. They have retreated from the public square to the home, spending their nonwork time in front of the computer, TV, or other electronic media. The loss of trust is especially high in ethnically diverse communities, where the population is “hunkering down,” in Putnam’s words.4

The two main political parties are not showing a way out of the crisis. Even when the fights between them are vicious—on taxes, spending, war and peace, and other issues—they actually hew to a fairly narrow range of policies, and not ones that are solving America’s problems. We are paralyzed, but not mainly by disagreements between the two parties, as is commonly supposed. We are paralyzed, rather, by a shared lack of serious attention to our future. We increasingly drift between elections without serious resolution of a long list of deep problems, whether it’s the gargantuan budget deficit, wars, health care, education, energy policy, immigration reform, campaign finance reform, and much more. Each election is an occasion to promise to reverse whatever small steps the preceding government has taken.

The general deterioration of conditions is taking its toll on life satisfaction in the country. Americans have long been a satisfied population. Why shouldn’t they be, living in one of the world’s richest, freest, and safest places? Yet we should listen more closely to the message over recent decades when Americans have been asked about their life satisfaction or happiness. As the economist Richard Easterlin discovered many years ago, America hit a kind of ceiling on self-reported happiness (sometimes called subjective well-being, or SWB) several decades back.5 The trend line of happiness between 1972 and 2006 is flat, varying between 2.1 and 2.3 on a scale from 1 (not happy) to 3 (happy), even as per capita GDP doubled from $22,000 to $43,000, as we see in Figure 2.1.

Even as the GDP per person has risen, the happiness of Americans has not changed and perhaps has even declined among women, at least according to a recent careful study.6 The citizens of many other countries now report a higher level of life satisfaction, putting the United States no higher than nineteenth in a recent international comparison by Gallup