October 2004

Do you long for the good old days, when life was simpler, people were healthier, air was cleaner, people were more prosperous on one income than they are now on two, morality was stronger, the world was more civilized, our country was freer, and there was greater opportunity for the innovative mind?

If you are longing for these things as though they existed in a more idyllic past, you are mistaken. Every one of these qualities of life has not just improved, but has improved dramatically over the past 50 years. I recommend to you Gregg Easterbrook’s book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.

I want to recommend book to you, Aging Well, by George Vaillant. Vaillant is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study that has followed a group of men in great detail from their time as Harvard undergraduates throughout their lives into old age. In this book he draws upon this study and two other longitudinal studies, one of gifted women, and one of inner city men, and finds that much of what we have heard about growing old well is not exactly true.