Abstract
In A Brighter Future: Improving the Standard of Living Now and for the Next Generation, editors Richard Holt and Daphne Greenwood present nontraditional ideas on alternative measures of the standard of living and ways to improve it from diverse perspectives. The authors engage recent American history and comparisons with the experiences of other nations to illustrate their points and support their arguments. This eleven-chapter edited volume is divided into three parts. The first examines recent history and prospects for the American standard of living. The second addresses lagging incomes and the middle-class dream, and the third considers policies to improve quality of life and sustainability. The authors approach improving the standard of living from a variety of angles, including raising the minimum wage, implementing paid family leave, investing in alternative energy, increasing spending on early childhood education, promoting unionization and social entrepreneurship, and providing incentives for healthy food production and access.
In the Introduction, Greenwood and Holt argue that traditional measures of quality of life employed by economists focus too much on improvements in material welfare and not enough on other important aspects of a high standard of living. They suggest that there should be a more comprehensive definition that includes lower income inequality, a protected environment, development of social and human capital, and other aspects of personal and social welfare.
In the first chapter (“Improving the Standard of Living: Income, Quality of Life, and Sustainability”), Greenwood and Holt provide a theoretical justification for a multifaceted concept of the standard of living, reviewing the literature to develop a more comprehensive definition. In chapter 2 (“Economic Well-being in the United States: A Historical and Comparative Perspective”), Zacharias, Wolff, Masterson, and Eren use the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being to compare economic well-being in the United States to that of Canada, France, and Great Britain through the mid-2000s. They find that the standard of living gap with these nations is quickly closing, with US growth recently stalled from sluggish income growth and increased income inequality. Chapter 3 (“Measuring the Standard of Living: Quality of Life and Income Difference in the United States”) by Power examines the reasons for economic migration within the United States, arguing that the natural amenities of the West cause mass migration from historically troubled areas of the country. Power points out the challenges from abandoning places with chronic problems, embodied in the flight from large urban centers to the suburbs, smaller cities, and rural areas. As a solution, he calls for renewed efforts to support a higher quality of life in such urban centers. Chapter 4 (“Achieving a Brighter Future from the Bottom Up: Activist Laissez-Faire Social Policy”) argues for a structural solution to quality of life problems, with social entrepreneurship filling the gap posed by failures or inadequacies of the public and nonprofit sectors. Unlike the other authors, Colander argues against centrally imposed solutions in favor of locally developed ones. Colander calls for a government role to create a supportive framework for private and nonprofit sector action to tackle social problems.
Starting off part 2, chapter 5 (“The Future of Middle Class Jobs: Macroeconomic Effects and Shrinking Unions”) attempts to tie the decline of US union membership to the decline of the middle class and middle-class living standards. Kozlowski and Spirn stress the need for macroeconomic policies to stimulate job creation and for union power to negotiate higher wages and benefits as a means of boosting the standard of living. Chapter 6 (“Low-Paid Workers: The Minimum Wage and Employment in the United States and France”) compares minimum wages in the United States and France, suggesting that France’s high minimum wage does not have large adverse effects on employment, particularly for young workers. Howell, Azizoglu, and Okatenko argue for a substantial increase in the federal minimum wage to boost pay for low-wage workers. Chapter 7 (“Opportunity and Mobility: The American Dream and the Standard of Living”) by Greenwood and Holt examines opportunity and social mobility in the United States and other developed nations, concluding that programs such as universal state-funded preschool, paid family leave, investments in K–12 and higher education, and universal health coverage can improve mobility in the American context. Chapter 8 (“Reducing Child Poverty in America: The Effects of a Paid Parental Leave Policy”) by Pressman and Scott charts the negative effects of child poverty and proposes paid parental leave as a policy solution.
Part 3 begins with chapter 9 (“Raising US Living Standards by Controlling Climate Change”), making the case for energy efficiency and alternative energy investment as a means of combating climate change and improving the environment. Pollin contends that such investments can improve the quality of life by creating jobs, raising incomes, and producing a better environment. Northrop’s chapter 10 (“Food, the Environment, and a Good Standard of Living”) argues for a revamp of the food system to focus on sustainable agriculture and more inexpensive production of more healthy and nutritious foods. This would essentially produce higher living standards through better personal health. Chapter 11 (“Improving the Standard of Living Through Investments in Intangible Capital”) makes the case for investments in intangible capital, defined as human capacities, both individual and social. Tomer suggests that tackling personal health and poverty challenges can produce substantial gains in the standard of living.
Overall, Greenwood and Holt do an excellent job of framing the theory behind what an alternative, comprehensive definition of the standard of living would look like. Supplementing this definition, the following articles offer an eclectic mix of perspectives on how the standard of living should be properly measured and how it might be improved. Thorough engagement of both historical and comparative analysis also lends both credibility and robustness to the findings.
Although the book does a fine job critiquing existing definitions and proposing new ones, what is lacking is a good theoretical discussion of why these new definitions are universally applicable. Missing from the volume is a consideration that a high standard of living may mean different things to different people. For example, a pristine natural environment as discussed in chapter 10 would likely mean more to a person that lives close to a national or state park or protected federal land than an urban dweller that lives several miles away from any such area. Economic interventions that increase the cost of energy and certain kinds of food, as are proposed in chapter 10, might have adverse effects on the quality of life for those more sensitive to the cost of these items.
Moreover, the specific effects on local communities, of particular importance to planners, remain ambiguous. Some of the proposals would only seem to raise living standards for a limited group of people, with gains distributed narrowly by region and demographic group. For example, a higher federal minimum wage proposed in chapter 6 is unlikely to substantially improve outcomes in high-cost-of-living regions where wages are well above national norms and for which there are few workers paid at or close to the federal minimum wage. Chapter 8’s proposed paid parental leave policy is unlikely to do much for poor families without wage earners or young children. Given the close connection between unemployment and poverty, the poverty-reducing impact of such an intervention may well be limited. In the discussions of policy benefits, it is not always clear for whom the interventions would improve the standard of living.
The volume would also benefit from more careful attention to the distributional effects of such interventions across communities. There very well could be some tension between quality of life and sustainability, particularly where policies aimed at promoting sustainability may reduce the quality of life in some communities. For example, a rapid shift away from fossil fuels to alternative energy would undoubtedly have severe effects on communities with local economies dependent on fossil-fuel extraction. There is curiously very little discussion of how the standard of living for such communities could be maintained or improved. Also missing is a quantitative measure of how much each of the proposed measures would improve the quality of life. The reader might thus be able to gauge the order of magnitude and efficacy of each proposed solution in improving living standards, with at least some comparison to its social and economic cost.
In addition, the scale of the cited problems is enormous, yet the proposed interventions, with the notable exception of those described in chapter 4, seem focused on implementing more enlightened public policy rather than addressing the institutional arrangements and incentives that produce such problems. Emphasis is consistently placed on public investment and regulation rather than on direct action and change within the vast for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Building on what was outlined in chapter 4, the book might have also more deeply examined ways public–private partnerships and nonprofit/for-profit linkages could promote the living standard ideals outlined in each chapter.
Despite these weaknesses, Greenwood and Holt’s volume is an excellent introduction to alternative ways of thinking about defining and improving the standard of living. The book serves as a fine and noteworthy contribution to the debate on how best to improve living standards within the United States.