Rating: 
Summary: A Nice Dose of Reality
Review: A lot of people will look at this book, and start making outrageous statements like, "the government is responsible for alot of this." Hate to break it to you, but these trends have been happening long before government started robbing people and businesses blind. Government is like the local homeless drunk, give him a nickel, he'll ask for a quarter the next day. People need to have a little faith in themselves, the human condition is understanding the world around us and doing more for ourselves with less from the world. Its called productivity, and it is expandable. Increases in productivity have been making all of us wealthier, and allowing us to work less at the same time. Thank god for capitalism.
Rating:
Summary: A Nice Dose of Reality
Review: A lot of people will look at this book, and start making outrageous statements like, "the government is responsible for alot of this." Hate to break it to you, but these trends have been happening long before government started robbing people and businesses blind. Government is like the local homeless drunk, give him a nickel, he'll ask for a quarter the next day. People need to have a little faith in themselves, the human condition is understanding the world around us and doing more for ourselves with less from the world. Its called productivity, and it is expandable. Increases in productivity have been making all of us wealthier, and allowing us to work less at the same time. Thank god for capitalism.
Rating: 
Summary: Smaller, richer families
Review: A reader from Great Falls is off base on "family income" as a measure of prosperity. "Household income" is another dubious measure. Over the last several decades, the average size of a family, and of a household, has steadily decreased. Several factors contribute to this decline, more frequent divorce, more independent elderly and children, etc. This decline makes average "family income" and "household income" very misleading measures of changing wealth, because these statistics measure the income of fewer and fewer people as time passes. "Household income" rose little between the seventies and mid-nineties for example, according to the Census Bureau's annual household survey, but individual income (per capita income) rose steadily in the same period. Not surprisingly, as people become wealthier, they choose to live more independently, in smaller groups. If we accept "family income" or "household income" as a measure of wealth, rather than per capita income, we're assuming that six people living in one house with an income of $50k are richer than six people living in two houses, each with three people earning $40k. Of course, this assumption is absurd.
Rating:
Summary: Things are better know then ever?!
Review: Allot of people have in recent years become domsayers and negativists. They claim that life is not as good or leisure filled now as compared to in the olden days. I for one had been tricked into this thinking. However, after having had the privelage and opportunity of reading this book in question, i.e., It's Getting Better All the Time : 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years by Stephen Moore, Julian Lincoln Simon; I realize that this was a erronous assumption on my behalf. For instance, I wrote about leisure time in 1870 was that of 18 hours a week. Compare this with the 35 hours the common person can spend now at their volition and one will realize that this time, i.e., the leisure time has doubled. Other stunning and remarkable facts is that the workweek is 30 percent shorter, four times as many adults are getting their highschool degrees, manufacturing wages are four times higher, househould assets are seven times greater and finally air polution emmisions fell by at least 50 percent relative to economic output. So, I guess things are a whole lot better now then a 100 years ago. Yes ask the person working in the manufacturing industry. Highly Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: This book is the antidote to so much pessimism
Review: Every four years we're told how civilization has fallen into ill-rebuke. The chattering classes continue to repeat the Marxist slogan that the poor have fallen behind while the idle rich have gotten richer by stealing from the poor. But this rare optimistic book knocks those arguments cold. As a civilization, Americans are healthier, smarter, wealthier, happier, than at any time in America or the world at any point in civilization. There is not such a thing as the so-called "good old days." Today is the good old days, as is the future. In this book, you will see that by any measurement, the American people have continued to make lasting and important changes. From inventions to wealth to health and education, we have made remarkable progress and should be proud that we have a civilization that has encouraged us to do so. And this book will provide the evidence needed to rebuke the annoying liberal noisemakers such as Michael Moore who continue to look to the welfare-states of Europe as the utopian view of the future. Michael Gordon
Rating:
Summary: This book is the antidote to so much pessimism
Review: Every four years we're told how civilization has fallen into ill-rebuke. The chattering classes continue to repeat the Marxist slogan that the poor have fallen behind while the idle rich have gotten richer by stealing from the poor. But this rare optimistic book knocks those arguments cold. As a civilization, Americans are healthier, smarter, wealthier, happier, than at any time in America or the world at any point in civilization. There is not such a thing as the so-called "good old days." Today is the good old days, as is the future. In this book, you will see that by any measurement, the American people have continued to make lasting and important changes. From inventions to wealth to health and education, we have made remarkable progress and should be proud that we have a civilization that has encouraged us to do so. And this book will provide the evidence needed to rebuke the annoying liberal noisemakers such as Michael Moore who continue to look to the welfare-states of Europe as the utopian view of the future. Michael Gordon
Rating: 
Summary: A not entirely forthright look at the subject
Review: I am a great Julian Simon / Björn Lomborg fan, but this book has a limited number of mostly useless diagrams, especially from non-US perspective. But any other Simon book.
Rating:
Summary: Truth is Stranger than Fiction
Review: It is fashionable to bemoan the state of the world. The conventional wisdom is that global warming, Terrorism, drug abuse, crime, AIDS and all the rest of the crises threatening humanity lead us to the conclusion that the "good old days" were somehow better, safer and saner than today. But, if things are so bad why is infant mortality going down around the world? If things are on the edge of anarchy why are proportionately fewer of us hungry, or sick today than one hundred years ago. If things are going to hell in a handbasket why is our life expectancy steadily improving? These are inconvenient questions. The answers are tough on the prophets of doom. Luckily, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Stephen Moore and Julian Simon prove this convincingly. Facts are often inconvenient. But, if you want to know the facts, this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Great Resource
Review: It's Getting Better all the Time is an upbeat statistical reference consisting of factual text and colorful graphs. Fascinating and fun, the book is an essential reference for authors and speakers. It is a treasury of statistics. And the book has a great title. As a publisher, author of 28 Books, 109 revised editions, six translations and over 500 magazine articles as well as a consultant to the book publishing industry, I spend much of my time doing research. I will refer to this book again and again.
Dan Poynter, Para Publishing.
Rating: 
Summary: Egregious Examples of 'Progress' And 'Improvement'
Review: Potential readers of this book have a right to know that this book was not authored by Julian Lincoln Simon, as the title indicates. Rather, the book was authorized, or commissioned, by the late Professor Simon shortly before his lamentable death. Although Professor Simon did agree to collaborate with Mr. Moore on a book, and fully intended to write a book along these lines, and prepared some material for a possible use in a manuscript (and we have no way of knowing if any of this material was indeed used, and in what form), the final text is most likely not what Mr. Simon had in mind. After receiving permission from the Simon estate to go ahead with the project, Mr. Moore freely chose to engage in a comical sort of economic, environmental and social axe-grinding, as opposed to a balanced, well-reasoned exposition on some of the more remarkable trends in human history. A comparison of this text to any other book written by Dr. Simon while he was alive would demonstrate a difference as clear as night and day.
Now, let me be clear on what this book really is. The book's introduction, written by Mrs. Simon, contains the greatest amount of useful and objective information in the book, and it is where the truth about the contents of the book are told. As for the rest of the book, the motivation for and the assummptions underlying the text are explicitly stated and are as follows: big (and thus bad) government is bad and unnecessary, America's founding fathers are right about everything and are Great Thinkers, (high) taxes should be lowered (even if they are already low by comparison), all government regulation interferes unnecessarily with free enterprise, and freedom and democracy are things that everyone can take for granted. Therefore, in the service of these assumptions and motivations, the book suffers from a glaringly selective presentation of the 'facts'.
The text has many problems from the standpoints of content, presentation and point of view, and these problems are too numerous to fully explore here. Although Mr. Moore talks much about exploring the improvement of humanity's lot, virtually every single example of 'improvement' or 'progress' is from the American context, and from this, Mr. Moore would like us to believe that, via extrapolation, the improvements seen in America have also occurred, at about the same level, everywhere else in the world. This alone reveals a level of myopia and intellectual naivete that quite frankly is very unhealthy and dangerous. Mr. Moore would like us to believe that everyone lives like Americans do (or at least yearns to), even when overwhelming evidence shows this clearly not to be the case.
The text also employs some very bad intellectual sleights of hand, making the information in the text fall below that of even the minimum academic ethical standard. For example, in each of his 100 trends, operational definitions are not clearly and specifically established, and in some rather disturbing cases, only the data which will establish a clear upward or downward trend is presented, but the full range of data somehow do not find its way into the graph. Undergraduate-level mistakes in statistical analysis, such as presenting data in terms of number of incidences as opposed to rates (per capita) of incidences, comparing one snapshot under one condition in time to another snapshot under completely different conditions, and most important, the failure to adequately disclose underlying causes of phenomena before jumping to conclusions, abound in the text. Finally, if one merely played with the definitions, or simply played with the calculations for the statistics cited, as Mr. Moore has done, one could make the very same conclusions that Mr. Moore makes.
In particular, one blurb on Page 2 of the book brings home the misguided message and deeply malicious intellectual trickery of the book. Here, the author notes that according to an article in the Associated Press, which noted that one of the hottest selling grocery items in the year 2000 was gourmet pet food, and that one of the most challenging nutritional problems in America is obesity- not in people but in pets. The author uses this to demonstrate how affluent we Americans have become, and as a proxy, albeit a comical one, of (American) socio-economic improvement. Yet it also hammers home two disturbing and depressing points- a greater concern, matched with an extensive outlay, for pet health in America (even as one in three Americans go without adequate health coverage), and the truly depressing fact that pets in America receive better health care as a group than most human inhabitants of the planet- especially those of the third world. Examples like this do not adequately show 'progress' or 'improvement', and the author uses these and other equally egregious socio-economic snapshots and trends to pooh-pooh the notion that the situation in the world is very bad. Perversely, they demonstrate how grossly out of touch the author and many Americans have become with the state of most non-American humanity.
I believe the real title of this book should be: It's Getting Better FOR AMERICANS All The Time, as the biased examples of this book clearly demonstrate. Furthermore, as long as no one asks thorny questions such as: Which Americans? or Is it getting better for Americans on an equal basis? or It Is Getting For Americans, But At Whose Expense?, I expect the author to encounter few if any problems. For those readers having little or no background in basic statistics and no prior knowledge of the various topics in the book, I recommend that they read Damned Lies and Statistics by Joel Best for both clarification and enlightenment. Otherwise, given Mr. Moore's clear intention to distort issues, I fear that many gullible but inquisitive readers will be harmfully misled.
In sum, this book will appeal to those who would greatly prefer to have others do their thinking for them, and who need reassurance of their belief that everything is just fine in their little corner of the world. Given that we live in what one man called a Global Village, and given the inter-connectedness of political, social and economic activity in the modern Global Village, that a book like this of such dubious intellectual merit can be taken literally and seriously by many Americans truly boggles the mind.
God Help America.
|
