Lurching toward happiness in America

148 Pages·2014·1.355 MB·English

by  Fischer, Claude S

Lurching Toward
Happiness in America

Lurching
Toward Happiness
In America
Claude S. Fischer
A Boston Review Book
the mit press Cambridge, Mass. London, England
Copyright © 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-0-262-02824-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Ralph Fischer

Contents
Introduction ix
Part I: Plumbing Unhappiness
1 Happiness Policy 3
2 E-Disharmony? 13
3 The Loneliness Scare 19
4 Is the Gender Revolution Over? 29
5 The Leisure Gap 39
6 How to Be Poor 49
7 Extremely Local 59
Part II: Policy for a Happier America
8 The Good Life 71
9 Accidental Billionaire 89
10 Mind the Gap 109
Acknowledgments 131
About the Author 133

introduction
What are we to make of the striking
second sentence of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence—that the new nation would be dedicated to
defending not only a citizen’s life and liberty, but
also “the pursuit of happiness”? The phrase replaced
“property” in the trio of “unalienable rights” that had
been circulating among insurrectionists in the colo-
nies. Whatever the thinking that led to that change,
it exemplified the egalitarianism of the nation-in-
process: each person, propertied or not, ought to be
sufficiently unencumbered to run after his own happi-
ness, whatever doing so entailed. “Person,” of course,
was implicitly qualified to exclude slaves and women,
but the egalitarian creed had been endorsed—even