Bright-Sided (24 page)

In fact, the publicity received by positive psychology in the preceding year had been less than 100 percent positive. The 2007
New York Times Magazine
article on Happiness 101 courses had complained about “the sect-like feel of positive psychology” and suggested that “the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway.” The article went on to report that “the idea that whatever science there is may not yet be first-class troubles Seligman, too. ‘I have the same worry they do. That’s what I do at 4 in the morning,’ he says.”
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These worries finally surfaced at a late afternoon plenary session on “The Future of Positive Psychology,” featuring the patriarchs
of the discipline, Martin Seligman and Ed Diener. Seligman got the audience’s attention by starting off with the statement “I’ve decided my theory of positive psychology is completely wrong.” Why? Because it’s about happiness, which is “scientifically unwieldy.” Somehow, this problem could be corrected by throwing in the notions of “success” and “accomplishment”—which I couldn’t help noting would put the positive psychologists on the same terrain as Norman Vincent Peale and any number of success gurus. With the addition of success, Seligman went on, one was talking no longer about positive
psychology
but about a “plural theory” embracing anthropology, political science, and economics, and this is what he would be moving on to—“positive social science.”

Seligman’s statement created understandable consternation within the audience of several hundred positive psychologists, graduate students, and coaches. It must have felt a bit like having one’s father announce that he found his current family too narrow and limiting and would be moving on to a new one. In the Q&A session, some picked up on Seligman’s admission that the scientific basis of positive psychology is all too thin, with one asking, “How do we balance the empirical side of positive psychology with the applied stuff,” like coaching? Diener responded, in part, that “people doing things that there isn’t good evidence for” are at least “meeting a need.” Seligman agreed, saying that positive psychology was under pressure to produce practical results because “people want happiness.” If that sometimes means that the applications, like coaching, get ahead of the science—well, “science follows from practice,” he said, invoking the Wright brothers, “who flew when scientists didn’t know how birds fly.”

The idea of moving on to “positive social science” provoked even more anxiety. Diener defended the phrase “positive psychology,” saying, “It’s a brand.” Besides, he said, he “hates” the idea of positive social science, since social science includes sociology and
sociology is “weak” and notoriously underfunded. The subject seemed to have veered away from science to naked opportunism. When one audience member proposed renaming positive psychology “applied behavioral economics,” because “it’s popular in business schools and goes with high salaries,” nobody laughed.

SEVEN

I
n the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, positive thoughts were flowing out into the universe in unprecedented volumes, escaping the solar system, rippling through vast bodies of interstellar gas, dodging black holes, messing with the tides of distant planets. If anyone—deity or alien being—possessed the means of transforming these emanations into comprehensible form, they would have been overwhelmed by images of slimmer bodies, larger homes, quick promotions, and sudden acquisitions of great wealth.

But the universe refused to play its assigned role as a “big mail order department.” In complete defiance of the “law of attraction,” long propounded by the gurus of positive thinking, things were getting worse for most Americans, not better. The poor, including those who sought spiritual leadership from prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, remained poor and even increased in numbers. Between 2002 and 2006, as the economy grew
briskly, the number of officially “low-wage” families shot up to 25 percent of all families with children.
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The traditional working class, which had once overlapped with the middle class, saw its wages decline and decent-paying jobs—in manufacturing, for example—disappear. For many, the operative word seemed to be “squeezed,” as illustrated by books like Jared Bernstein’s
Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?
and Steven Green house’s
The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.

The white-collar middle class—prime market for self-help books, motivational products, and coaching services—found itself subject to the same forces of compression. Companies were cutting back or eliminating employee pensions and health benefits, a trend documented by Jacob Hacker in
The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement.
Unemployment was low in the middle of the decade, but jobs were becoming increasingly short-lived as employers downsized, reorganized, outsourced, and otherwise sought to tweak their quarterly profits. In
High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
, Peter Gosselin described how the once-secure middle class was now being tossed about by “income volatility”—sudden downturns occasioned by layoffs, leaving families without health insurance or the means to continue their home payments. I reported on this stomach-churning situation in a 2006 book,
Bait and Switch: On the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
, finding educated and experienced white-collar workers adrift in joblessness and short-term contract jobs and likely to end up in the same low-wage service jobs occupied by the chronically poor.

Not everyone was seeing their prospects diminish and lifestyle crimped. The flip side of all this poverty and insecurity was an unimaginably huge buildup of wealth at the upper extreme of the economic spectrum. In terms of wealth and income, America became the most polarized of the First World societies and even
more deeply divided than it had been in the 1920s. The share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American house holds rose by 7 percentage points from 1979 to 2007, to 16 percent, while the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent fell by 7 percentage points. As David Leonhardt put it in the
New York Times
: “It’s as if every house hold in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent.”
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How did the top 1 percent use their ballooning wealth? On high-yield investments, of course, but also on a level of consumption that might have stunned even the robber barons of old. They traveled by Lear jet, maintained multiple homes, and hired whole staffs of personal employees, including people whose job it was to advise them on the best wines and art to invest in. Looking back from 2008, a writer in the business magazine
Portfolio
marveled at

the $34,000-a-night hotel rooms, the $175 gold-dusted Richard Nouveau hamburger at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe, the Algonquin Hotel’s $10,000 martini on the rock (the rock in question: a jeweler-selected diamond): Conspicuous consumption didn’t even begin to describe the you’re-not-going-to-believe-this lifestyle and work habits of the rapacious übercapitalists who were replicating all over the world.
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On the eve of the Great Depression, in the highly polarized 1920s, there had been plenty of labor organizers and radical activists around to rail about the excesses of the rich and the misery of the poor. In the twenty-first century, a very different and more numerous breed of ideologues promulgated the opposite message—that all was well with our deeply unequal society and, for those willing to make the effort, about to get much, much better. The motivators and other purveyors of positive thinking had good
news for people facing economic ruin from the constant churning of the job market: embrace “change,” no matter how terrifying; grasp it as an opportunity. A 2004 business self-help book by Harvey Mackay bore the defiant title
We Got Fired! . . . And It’s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us.
As we saw in chapter 4, employers relied on positive thinking to soothe the victims of downsizings and extract ever more heroic efforts from the survivors.

Nor was economic inequality a concern to positive thinkers, since anyone, anyone at all, could be catapulted into wealth at any time simply by focusing their thoughts. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Wurzelbach, an Ohio man nicknamed “Joe the Plumber,” achieved a moment of fame for challenging Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes for people earning over $250,000 a year. He was planning to buy the plumbing business he worked for, he asserted, and would soon be in that enviable category himself. As it turned out, he was an unlicensed plumber working in a two-man residential business that was unlikely to ever be vulnerable to the proposed tax increase. But why resent the swelling overclass—the CEOs earning an average of $11 million a year, the owners of islands and yachts—when you are aiming to join their ranks? In reality, Americans are less likely to move upward from their class of origin than are Germans, Canadians, Finns, French people, Swedes, Norwegians, or Danes.
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But the myth, fortified with bracing doses of positive thinking, persists. As two researchers at the Brookings Institution observed, a little wryly, in 2006: “[The] strong belief in opportunity and upward mobility is the explanation that is often given for Americans’ high tolerance for inequality. The majority of Americans surveyed believe that they will be above mean income in the future (even though that is a mathematical impossibility).”
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Hardly anyone—economist or otherwise—predicted the financial meltdown. After all, the American economy had recovered
handily from the traumas of the dot-com bust and 9/11 and was being carried to new heights by soaring housing and stock prices. Professional optimists dominated the world of economic commentary, with James Glassman, for example, a coauthor of the 1999 book
Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market
, winning a job as a
Washington Post
columnist and showing up as a frequent news show guest. Escalating housing prices were pumping up the entire economy by encouraging people to use their homes “like ATMs,” as the commentators always put it—taking out home equity loans to finance surging consumption—and housing prices were believed to be permanently resistant to gravity. David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, published a book in 2006 entitled
Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit from It
and became “the most widely cited housing expert in major media outlets during the peak years of the housing bubble.”
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Frank Nothaft, the chief economist at Freddie Mac, was assuring audiences that nationwide housing prices would never fall significantly. Late in 2008, one of the rare economic pessimists,
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman, asked rhetorically why no one had seen that “the whole thing was, in effect, a giant Ponzi scheme” and offered, as an answer, “that nobody likes to be a party pooper.”
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The near unanimous optimism of the experts certainly contributed to the reckless buildup of bad debt and dodgy loans, but so did the wildly upbeat outlook of many ordinary Americans. Robert Reich once observed, a bit ambivalently, that “American optimism carries over into our economy, which is one reason why we’ve always been a nation of inventors and tinkerers, of innovators and experimenters. . . . Optimism also explains why we spend so much and save so little. . . . Our willingness to go deep into debt and keep spending is intimately related to our optimism.”
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It’s in the spirit of optimism that a person blithely builds up credit card debt on optional expenditures, takes out a second mortgage, or agrees to a mortgage with an interest rate that will escalate over time. And the ideology of positive thinking eagerly fanned this optimism and the sense of entitlement that went with it. A
Los Angeles Times
reporter wrote of the effect of
The Secret
on her sister: “When my sister arrived from New York over the holidays, she plopped a hand-tooled leather satchel on my piano bench and said, ‘See the beautiful bag I manifested for myself?’ ” The DVD of
The Secret
had encouraged her to believe that she deserved this object, that it was hers for the taking, so she had charged it on her Amex card.
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