The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950

AVNER Offer's latest sparkling and intellectually pugnacious contribution to his protean bibliography represents a tour de force of scholarship and provocative argument. Extending and deepening his work over the last decade (the richness and detail of his varied historical analyses are invariably based on long periods of careful intellectual gestation), The Challenge of Affluence takes as its theme the crucial relationship between economic growth and well-being or happiness. In this respect, he brings an historian's sense of time and change to a topic that has been an increasing preoccupation of economists in recent years, who have repeatedly reached the disconcerting conclusion that happiness is not at all correlated positively with rising living standards. Indeed, in offering an empirically based and, taken in the round, an original analysis of why this should be so, The Challenge of Affluence rests on a powerful argument in favour of the possibility, even the...