The economy really is great. So what’s the problem?

On Tuesday I wrote about my hundredth post on how America is much better off than we think. You know the drill: incomes are high, crime is low, drug use is down, etc., etc.

This produced some of the usual pushback: I'm a retired, upper-middle-class guy living in Irvine who just doesn't get how badly people are struggling. There's some obvious truth to that, but it's ironically due more to my personality than my income. There's just flatly no evidence that Americans are struggling financially more than in the past. By every possible measure for every possible demographic we're struggling less. You can look at rich or poor; income or consumption; assets or debt; homeownership or retirement. No matter what you look at, there are fewer people doing badly and more people doing well than 20 years ago.

In other words, just give it up on the economic front. America is the world's supreme powerhouse on practically every economic measure and looks set to stay that way for some time. Our problem is not prosperity. It's the price we've paid for prosperity.

This is hardly a new insight, and the examples I'm about to list have mostly been well chewed over. But I want to collect them all in one place anyway. Some are unique to the US and some aren't. But they're all things that have made American life more of a grind over the past 20-50 years.

1. We have an increasingly workaholic culture in America. Since 1976, the number of people who work more than 50 hours a week has doubled to about 25%, compared to 7% in Europe. On average we work nearly 300 more hours per year than Europeans and are allowed less vacation time, less sick time, and less maternity leave.
2. We are more obese than any other advanced country by a lot. This makes life wearier, illnesses more common, life expectancies shorter, and time spent in the health care system higher.
3. Life, obviously, is way more complicated than it used to be. Computers and cell phones do a lot of great stuff, but they're intensely frustrating too. Especially for the working class, which doesn't work with computers on the job all day long, it's exhausting to be forced into battles with confusing web pages for so many routine daily tasks.
4. Health care denials are in the news, and they can be drainers of the soul. Most people don't know this, but it's a fact of life for the 15-20% of us who have serious illnesses and therefore have heavy exposure to the medical system. Needless to say, this wasn't an issue 50 years ago because there were hardly any medical procedures expensive enough for claims adjusters to care about.
5. Commuting in rush hour traffic is more stressful than it was 50 years ago because freeways are more jammed—and certainly more stressful than a hundred years ago when you mostly walked or took a trolley to work. More generally, as cities become more crowded they also become more stressful. This is well known, but not something the YIMBY crowd likes to acknowledge.
6. Fox News and its companions have spent the past three decades hellbent on making us livid with anger over everything. They do this solely because it makes them money.
7. Dealing with with large businesses—cable companies, phone companies, electric companies, credit card companies, you name it—has become maddening. Telephone support is often an hours long marathon that's frequently incomprehensible because the call center is located in Bangalore or Manila and staffed with low-paid, poorly trained workers. And you're completely at their mercy. It's just a faceless voice reeling off rules you have no say over, and eventually it brings even the meek and mild to temper tantrums. Is it this bad elsewhere? I don't know, but I'd bet the American obsession with squeezing every possible penny out of corporate expenses puts us near the worst.
8. Everywhere is private property these days, patrolled by private security guards watching to make sure you don't break any rules. Does this make you feel you safer? Probably. Does it also induce low-level stress every time they tell you, sorry but you can't take a picture of that? You can't walk back there? This is a no-smoking area? Probably.
9. Fear of mass shooting events seems to be far more prevalent among teens than I would have guessed. The constant drills, the TV coverage, the transparent backpacks—all of that conspires to induce a persistent low-level fear that something terrible could happen at any moment. This is very definitely a problem unique to America.

So why is my (possible) indifference to this stuff related more to my circumstances and personality than my income? Two reasons. First, most of these things don't affect me: I'm retired; I'm not obese; I like computers; my HMO never denies care; I don't commute; I don't watch Fox News (or MSNBC); and mass shootings are just distant newspaper headlines. That leaves only 7 and 8. Not much, really.

Second, I happen to have a fairly non-fearful personality and I benefit from being a large, not-old looking, man. I'm genuinely never worried about low probability stuff like terrorist attacks, my house being broken into, bird flu killing me, or whatever the latest food scare is. Lots and lots of people fret about this stuff all the time. I understand it, but it's still kind of alien to me. You're really afraid that you might be killed in a terrorist attack?

All of this might help explain why people seem to feel generally more stressed and anxious than their objective financial condition can explain. Or maybe not. This is all off the top of my head, and I'm not super invested in it.

Except for #6, of course. That one is truly an American catastrophe.