Stearns’s conventional wisdom again: “Other [non-capitalist] cultural activities, including art, the humanities, religion, and the people who specialize in them, tend to lose ground.” No, they do not. In the growing number of affluent countries, the museums and concert halls are packed. High culture has in fact always flourished in eras of lively commerce, from fifth-century Greece through Song China and Renaissance Italy down to the Dutch Golden Age or the flowering of American high culture after World War II, with the additional stimulus then from much extended higher education. Among the 30 democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reporting such statistics today, some 27 percent of the adult population 25 to 64 years old have completed tertiary education, ranging from Turkey’s 11 percent up to Canada’s 48 percent. Such booming cultural activity makes for many lives beyond materialism. The economist of culture Tyler Cowen often observes that more artists are alive today than any time before. During the ’60s, more professors were hired in U.S. post-secondary institutions than all who had gone before. The expansion of higher education yielded, for example, a big audience in the United States and Britain for serious literary fiction.

Terry Eagleton, who is a superb if determinedly left-wing professor of serious literary fiction in English, makes the conventional claim of a “monstrously egoistic civilization [the bourgeois] have created.” Eagleton knows better than such a cliché when he teaches Chaucer and his Pardoner, or Shakespeare and his Iago—representatives of monstrously egoistic civilizations of church or castle. To yearn for a simpler time, when getting and spending was not so much with us, is mostly a version of the pastoral. It has been repeated in every world literature in every age, independently of the sociological evidence. Theocritus and Horace sang a golden age of nymphs and shepherds. In 1767, Adam Ferguson lamented, Eagleton notes, the “detached and solitary” people of Scotland, whose “bands of affection are broken.” By 1800, Wordsworth and Goethe and by 1840 Disraeli and Carlyle and Dickens joined the lamentation, and on and on, to the anti-bourgeois, anti-consumerism critics of our own day. The clerisy’s version of a Norman Rockwell world, whether in the childhood of our parents or in the Golden Age of Kronos, is the time in which we were not so obsessed with consumption.

But it is not so and never has been. Consumption itself is a matter of talk, and modern lives give many more materials with which to talk. “The object,” Sahlins observes, “stands as a human concept outside itself, as man speaking to man through the medium of things.”

And, if seen through history rather than through Hellenistic pastoralism or German Romanticism, the gemeinschaft of olden times looks not so nice. The murder rate in villages in thirteenth-century England was higher than the worst police districts now. Medieval English peasants were in fact mobile geographically, “fragmenting” their lives. The imagined extended family of “traditional” life never existed in England. The Russian mir was not egalitarian, and its ancientness was a figment of the German Romantic imagination. The once-idealized Vietnamese peasants of the ’60s did not live in tranquil, closed corporate communities. The sweet American family of “I Remember Mama” or “Father Knows Best” must have occurred from time to time. But most were more like Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As the feminist economist Nancy Folbre remarks, “We cannot base our critique of impersonal market-based society on some romantic version of a past society as one big happy family. In that family, Big Daddy was usually in control.”

Love, in short, is arguably thicker on the ground in the modern Western capitalist world, or at any rate is not obviously thinner on the ground than in the actual world of olden and allegedly more solidarity-drenched times. There is your happiness.

The descendent in today’s Glasgow of the dairy maid or the cook, in whom the old intelligence shines, is richer because the society in which she lives has moved from $3 to $125 a day. She has hugely greater scope, capabilities, potential, real personal income for what Wilhelm von Humboldt described in 1792 as Bildung, “self-culture,” “self-development,” life plans, the second-order preferences fulfilled that make for inner and outer success in life. She leads a life in full—fuller in work, travel, education, health, acquaintance, imagination.

A well-fed cat sitting in the sun is “happy” in the pot-of-pleasure sense of happiness studies. The pussy is a 3. But what the modern world offers to men and women and children as against cats and other machines for pleasure is not merely such “happiness,” but a uniquely enlarged scope to realize themselves. True, one can turn away from Bildung and read celebrity mags all day. Yet billions are enabled to do more. And they can also have, in proper moderation, more cat-like, materialistic, economist-pleasing “happiness” if they wish. Good for them. These are your sands of better life, though unmeasurable.

One could conclude about the 1-2-3 hedonists what Mill concluded about Bentham: “no one, probably, who, in a highly instructed age, ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set out with a more limited conception either of the agencies by which human conduct is, or of those by which it should be, influenced.” The literature and the philosophy of grown-ups since Mesopotamia provide better concepts. Mill remarked that Bentham was always a boy. We do not need more Benthams, or more boyish games of 1-2-3. We do not need more hedonomics or utilonomics or freakonomics. We need humanomics, which may be not an -omics at all, and a liberal society supported by it, the one that has given us the scope to flourish if we are so inclined.

Deirdre N. McCloskey teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and economic history at the University of Gothenburg. Her latest books are Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World and (with Stephen Ziliak) The Cult of Statistical Significance. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.