The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement

A New York Times Business Book Bestseller



Shrewd and optimistic. . . . [The Good Life and Its Discontents] combines first-rate analysis with persuasive historical, political and sociological insights. -The New Republic



Today Americans are wealthier, healthier, and live longer than at any previous time in our history. As a society, we have never had it so good. Yet, paradoxically, many of us have never felt so bad. For, as Robert J. Samuelson observes in this visionary book, our country suffers from a national sense of entitlement-a feeling that someone, whether Big Business or Big Government, should guarantee us secure jobs, rising living standards, social harmony, and personal fulfillment.



In The Good Life and Its Discontents, Samuelson, a national columnist for Newsweek and the Washington Post, links our rising expectations with our belief in a post-Cold War vision of an American utopia. Using history, economics, and psychology, he exposes the hubris of economists and corporate managers and indicts a government that promises too much to too many constituencies. Like David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, the result is a book that defines its time-and that is sure to shape the national debate for years to come.



A smart, balanced epitaph for an era-with a few clues for what's ahead. -Business Week



Lucid [and] nonsectarian . . . Samuelson traces how the reasonable demand for progress has given way to the excessive demand for perfection. -The New York Times

Robert J. Samuelson is a columnist for the Washington Post. He began his journalism career as a reporter for the Post in 1969. He is the author of The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath; The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement; and Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong, a collection of his columns. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Judy Herr. They have three children.

About Robert J. Samuelson