Horn of plenty.

The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, by Gregg Easterbrook (Random House, 400 pp., $24.95)

GREGG EASTERBROOK has written a book with one major flaw: What's right in the book isn't new and what's new isn't right.

The first half of the book is what's right. Here Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic, chronicles in entertaining detail the multitude of ways in which life in America gets better all the time. Americans today have better health, more wealth, greater safety (even in the new age of terrorism), better nutrition (in fact, too much nutrition), more leisure time, cleaner air and water, and just more stuff to play with and keep them entertained than any earlier generation. In fact, there are an estimated 80 billion people who have ever lived on this earth, and Easterbrook calculates that even poor Americans have a better material living standard than 99.4 percent of them. To have been born here and now is to have truly won the lottery of life.

There's no getting around it: We're a spoiled society. We have access to treasures and opulence that were far out of the reach of our ancestors: fresh strawberries in March, toys for our pets, limousine service for our teenagers going to the prom, and Kenmore dishwashers with 16 settings. Most vitally, Americans now can purchase modern antibiotics and vaccines--costing just a few dollars--for asthma, smallpox, polio, arthritis, and tuberculosis: diseases that once relegated millions of people to misery, wheelchairs, and premature death. According to Easterbrook, Americans now spend more money on Jet Skis, yachts, and other recreational watercraft than the entire GDP of North Korea. "Gas-station minimarts now sell cabernets and chardonnays far superior to the wines drunk by the King of France"--now that's opulence. We have become such an affluent society that the new definition of a "need" in America is, in the words of George Will, "something we have wanted for 48 hours and still don't have." There's an old saying that if you must be poor, the United States is a good country to be poor in. Thank you, capitalism.

Easterbrook rightly sneers at the crass and preposterous things our consumer-driven society sometimes spends money on, but he has more contempt for the crisis-mongers in media, academia, and government who chronically complain about American life. He ridicules the daily, sensationalized news reports of "poison in the water," lost forests, the health crisis, or whatever the calamity du jour happens to be. Our latest societal affliction is "choice anxiety": so many things to choose from and so little time.

Conservatives won't be shocked to learn in this book that much of the negative information the press spoon-feeds us about America is not true. Indeed, most of the trends and data Easterbrook puts forward come from the work of the great Julian Simon--who made all these points throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when almost every "expert" really believed the scaremongers. So it's highly disappointing to find in this book exactly one minor reference to Julian Simon. When a writer stands on the shoulders of a giant, he really ought to acknowledge his presence more forth-rightly.

In the book's second half, Easterbrook discusses the economists' conundrum of whether getting richer makes us happier. There isn't much evidence that Americans are more satisfied with their lives today than in the 1950s, an era when our parents didn't have VCRs, $800 designer teapots, treatments for cancer and heart disease, cleaner air to breathe, and so on. (Although our parents and grandparents may have been just as happy as we are, the evidence does show they were more bored. Our ancestors slept a lot more than we did, because there was nothing else to do at night.) To defend this idea that money doesn't buy happiness, Easterbrook points to data showing that chronic depression is a bigger problem in our society than ever before. Count me a skeptic on these data: First, you've got a reporting bias. Nowadays, it's almost chic to be depressed. In any case, as with almost every disease, if you have to be depressed, much better to be living today than 50 or 100 years ago, before modern chemical treatments for depression made the condition much more bearable.

Also, as an economist, I'm a bit of a skeptic on Easterbrook's "paradox of progress" argument. We economists believe in "revealed preferences": If you choose something voluntarily, then--we assume--you are better off. If getting richer and having more and more things doesn't make us happier, why do we spend so much of our lives trying to get more money?

Finally, Easterbrook's last two chapters are seriously wrongheaded. After devoting 200 pages to the proposition that our system of free-market capitalism has created a life for most Americans that is better in almost every qualitative way than that of our parents, and even better for today's poor than the lifestyle of the kings and queens of Europe in bygone eras, Easterbrook suggests "reforms" that would ... move us away from the policies that laid the foundation for this prosperity in the first place. Easterbrook's grand solution to eliminating poverty in America is to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour. How eliminating several million low-income jobs in America will help the poor is never explained. Then, to solve the problem of poverty worldwide, Easterbrook advocates a massive increase in foreign aid. This is an even bigger letdown: Not only has foreign aid been a colossal failure in promoting development everywhere it has ever been tried, it misses the whole point of what this book should be telling us, but never really does. It's not by chance that America has become the most prosperous place anywhere at any time in human history. The free-enterprise system is the answer, the goose that lays the golden eggs. The way to bring prosperity to even the poorest nations on earth is not to give them more handouts so that corrupt despots like Imelda Marcos can buy more shoes, but for these nations to--simply--be more like us. That is not the Progress Paradox, it is the Progress Paradigm.

Mr. Moore is president of the Club for Growth.