There’s a café near me in Paris called Le Progrès. I imagine its pavement tables a century ago, populated by French socialists in hats and elaborate moustaches — men (yes, almost all were men) who believed in progress, arguing about how to uplift the poor.
When I wrote about Le Progrès a decade ago, I said that the idea of progress had been privatised. Most people in 2012 no longer believed that societies progressed, but they still thought individuals like themselves could. The café’s toned patrons, whose very bodies advertised the notion of personal progress through ceaseless labour, intended to make sure their own children would be better off even if humanity wasn’t.
But that was then. A decade on, even family progress seems improbable. Look at the news: levels of CO? in the atmosphere are setting new records and rising faster than ever. The cost of living crisis risks teetering over into the second recession in two years.
The average Briton, to cite just one example, is projected to earn less in real terms in 2026 than in 2008. Oh, and Russia is threatening nuclear war. We’ve quietly ditched the idea of progress. Perhaps high-income countries don’t need it any more. The new human mission, both global and personal, is avoiding disaster.
Economic progress may have been just a historical blip. Oded Galor’s The Journey of Humanity shows that for nearly 300,000 years until about 1800, societies didn’t get richer. They occasionally invented new tools, but soon dissipated the proceeds by having more kids who ate the surplus. The average worker’s daily wage bought about 7kg of wheat grains in Babylon more than 3,000 years ago, 4kg in Egypt under the Roman empire and 5kg in Paris just before the industrial revolution, writes Galor.
Only in the past two centuries did humanity get richer, chiefly by burning fossil fuels. The suburbs, postwar locus of the American dream, were predicated on endless resources and cheap oil. But now politicians are shifting from promising an “energy transition” to talking about energy reduction. Westerners may revert to our grandparents’ era of less stuff, smaller homes and bikes instead of cars.
Nostalgia is usually misplaced, and our post-progress existence might prove pleasant. After all, the main problem of life today has become achieving a happy relationship with the online world. People used to talk about breaking their addiction to the internet but now it’s where we live.
The average person is online for six hours 58 minutes a day, or 40 per cent of their waking time, estimates a report by GWI, Hootsuite and We Are Social. You can do your job, conduct relationships and entertain yourself online, all for the cost of a phone. And that’s before virtual reality takes off. Beat that, so-called “real” life.
Especially in the internet era, once average incomes reach a certain level, happiness may no longer require economic growth. The economist Richard Easterlin posited the Easterlin paradox, which states that self-reported “life satisfaction” in developed countries barely budges over time despite growing wealth. Many scholars dispute his numbers.
But Britons have kept getting happier even as their incomes stagnated. Across Europe, 27 of 31 countries with Eurobarometer data covering more than a decade through to 2016, an era that spanned the financial crisis, reported increased subjective wellbeing. That’s probably because people gradually became healthier, safer, more likely to be in work, encountered more understanding of mental illnesses such as depression and gained more control over their time (something that working from home will enhance). Above all, women and LGBTQ+ people in particular have become freer to make their own life decisions.
Despite these trends, self-reported happiness slid for decades in the US. This suggests the Easterlin paradox applies at least sometimes. The most appealing global ideal may now be the European dream, a lower-income version of the American one but with added free time and free healthcare.
Even if our grandchildren aren’t richer than we are, they could live more happily, and longer, presuming they follow the Spanish rather than the US path of life expectancy. Their challenge won’t be maximising incomes but spreading wealth and, above all, dodging Armageddon.
In John le Carré’s novel A Small Town in Germany, a British diplomat calls this his lifetime mission. “Every night,” he says, “as I go to sleep, I say to myself: another day achieved. Another day added to the unnatural life of a world on its deathbed. And if I never relax, if I never lift my eye, we may run on for another hundred years.” That wouldn’t be a bad global project.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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