Don't worry, be happy … or not (REPRODUCTION)
By Lynda Hurst
"I've been rich and I've been poor. Believe me, rich is better."
– Mae West, Gertrude Stein and sundry others
Yes, well, no argument there. It's better.
But it's not nirvana.
The age-old assumption that when it comes to money, more equals better, is proving to be just that: an assumption.
Turns out that once people have their basic needs covered, more money can buy more things – luxuries that have morphed into essentials – but not more satisfaction.
An explosion in happiness research has consistently shown for some time now that the link between rising income and rising well-being has broken down. In a host of large-scale, global studies that ask hundreds of thousands of people to assess their lives, happiness rankings haven't budged in three decades.
Psychologists and social scientists have studied the subject for years, of course, but only in the past decade or so have some economists, only some, begun to sit up and take notice. Was there something useful in this for them?
Leading British economist Richard Layard is among a fast-proliferating group that thinks there is. How else to understand the "paradox at the heart of our lives?" he asks. We have more money, more food, nicer clothes, faster cars, bigger houses, more gadgets, more holidays and, above all, better health, but "as Western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier."
Conventional economists – practitioners of the so-called "dismal science" – regard economic growth as the ultimate objective of human society. They're interested in what people do, or do without, not what they say. Squishy concepts like happiness don't come into it.
The happiness challengers counter that progress takes place only when material and quality-of-life gains occur side by side. Standard economic indexes routinely mask signs of national ill health, they argue. A high divorce rate, for instance, is good for the GDP because it generates legal bills and second households, but it has massive negative consequences on individuals and society.
What people have to say about their lives is vital for the whole picture to emerge.
Given a chance, the melding of happiness research into economic theory could help governments shape policies and programs that truly benefit their citizens. Well, at least, cheer people up a bit. Or so the thinking goes.
Layard, a policy adviser to U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, is already calling happiness economics a "new science." Others say it's neither new nor a science.
Economist John Crispo groans at the mere mention of it.
"Economics is vague enough as it is," says the former dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business. "How on earth do you measure happiness? What happens if you do? I'm unhappy about taxes – what are you going to do about it?"
Crispo thinks the traditional indicator of rising incomes is still the best way of assessing well-being: "Don't tell me people at the bottom wouldn't feel better if they had a little more income."
Nobody is. But researchers say the feeling doesn't last.
Our wants are relative, not to some absolute measure but to what other people have. "Status anxiety," envy and one-upmanship all run deep in the human psyche, and the bounty of the free market caters to them all. Coveting and acquiring things once seen as frills but now necessities keeps us on an endless treadmill.
But if Western governments ever decide to attempt to maximize citizens' happiness, they'll first have to figure out what, exactly, it is. Good luck, says U of T philosopher Mark Kingwell.
"No economic measures can fully grasp the fullness of what happiness means, because happiness is a contestable concept," he says. "And that contest is philosophical, not economic."
But as Kingwell wryly noted in his 1998 book Better Living, "engaging in arguments about happiness is one of the key forms of human happiness."
Just as well, because there are arguments aplenty. Researchers can't even (yet) explain some of their findings. To wit, the "chicken-and-egg" question: happy people tend to earn higher incomes, but is it because they're better workers or do they work better because they're happy?
"It's unresolved because we'd need to collect data from the same people over a period of time to answer it, and that's expensive," says Carol Graham, co-director of the Centre on Social and Economic Dynamics at Washington's Brookings Institution.
Graham's publisher wanted her to ditch the word "happiness" from the title of her 2002 book, Happiness and Hardship, because it sounded too lightweight. Today, Graham points out with a laugh, books on the topic, and titled as such, are pouring onto the market.
A sampling of what we think we know about happiness, and the pursuit thereof:
It's now accepted that our genes account for roughly 50 per cent of our predisposition to be happy or unhappy. Also, that we all have an emotional "set point" to which we return after life's various highs and lows.
It's called "hedonic adaptation," and is seen as the explanation for a surprising 1970s study of lottery winners and people who had become paraplegics. Researchers reported that a year after their life-changing event, they had returned to their emotional set point. (The finding has since been deemed exaggerated.)
In an echo of Oscar Wilde's famous maxim, "It is not enough that I succeed. Others must fail," research has found that personal gain is far sweeter if it's denied to others. You get a pay raise, good; your peers do not, better.
It's called the economics of position. One study of Harvard students and staff found that, given a choice between earning $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or earning $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000, the majority select the first option.
In other words, many people would welcome $6 if someone else got $5. But they'd be even happier with $5 if the other guy got $1.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says human beings are the only animals that think about the future, and much of our happiness depends on projecting what will make us happy.
"We treat our future selves as though they were our children," Gilbert writes in Stumbling On Happiness, "spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy."
But the kids inevitably turn out to be ingrates, complaining of the course taken, and downward we plunge.
Much of what induces well-being is unsurprising: a good marriage, good health, some sort of religious or spiritual faith, involvement in the community and fulfilling, secure work all have impact. Yes, income does bring satisfaction, but only up to a point. There is diminishing return the higher the salary, especially if sacrifices – time with family, time commuting – must be made.
A curious 1985 survey of respondents from the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and the Masai people of East Africa found almost equal satisfaction reported by both groups, despite the Masai having no electricity or running water and living in dung huts.
"It follows," wrote the researchers, "that economic development and personal income must not account for the happiness they are so often linked to."
It follows, said critics, that some studies are apples-and-oranges ludicrous. Skeptics also sniped at an infamous study that found an increase in the frequency of sex brings as much happiness to people as an extra $50,000 in income.
What is perceived to be poverty in one context may not be in another. People high up on the income ladder can see themselves as poor, while those on ground level do not. Why? Different expectations.
In fact, to put your mind at rest, the secret to happiness, according to researchers, is low expectations. Don't ask for the moon, voyager, when you've got the stars.
Last year, Denmark came first, Canada 10th, and Burundi last in a happiness survey of 178 countries over 10 years. The headlines in Denmark noted: "We're the happiest … lige nu." That translates as "just now, for the time being, but probably not for long."
A British Medical Journal report theorized that this attitude explains Denmark's contentment: "… Danes have consistently low (and indubitably realistic) expectations for the year to come. Year after year, they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark."
The newly independent 13 colonies of America originally declared that "life, liberty and property" were inalienable rights. Thomas Jefferson substituted "the pursuit of happiness" for property. The pursuit.
Since 1972, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying to replace the GDP with the GNH, Gross National Happiness. Material well-being is only one component of well-being, it explained. "That doesn't ensure that you're at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other."
Sounds good. But as public policy, has it created peace and harmony?
In 1990, Bhutan expelled 100,000 people because they weren't ethnically indigenous, a move that would have cut deeply into the traditional GDP. But Bhutan insists the happiness levels of its people haven't been affected. The remaining people, that is.
Should other governments be emulating Bhutan (minus the mass expulsions)?
In Britain, surveys show the proportion of "very happy" people has fallen to 36 per cent in 2006 from 52 per cent in 1957. As a consequence, the Blair government has taken a series of internal runs at the morale issue at the urging of Richard Layard, concluding in an early report that there is "a case for state intervention to boost life satisfaction."
The latest report's lead author, economist Paul Dolan, has warned, however, that extrapolating practical policy from available research could be a dicey proposition. As he said in a recent interview: "It's shown that married people are happier, so what does that mean for politics? Does it follow that we should be encouraging people to marry?"
Dolan's next assignment is to draw up a reliable "happiness unit" to measure SWB, subjective well-being. But he may be having doubts about the implications of it all: "Is this the realm of politics … or something that should be left to individual choice?"
The Economist was ready with its answer: "Capitalism can make a society rich and keep it free. Don't ask it to make you happy as well."
Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, comes squarely down in the leave-people-alone camp. He is concerned about the political uses of happiness research, and thinks it smacks of big-government intrusion on private lives.
He also believes that much of the research is "ideologically driven" by those who are "unfriendly to markets … The data is distorted and has been wildly overplayed. Some even say that economic growth makes people worse off. It's insane to say that."
But don't get him wrong. It's good that number-crunching economists are paying more heed to what people say, not just what they do.
"The problem is that the whole field is in a stage of transition. These economists are interpreting the research in a simplistic way. They don't understand psychology."
But they may be starting to understand how happiness works – by the numbers.
(Toronto Star, April 1, 2007)