Ferraris for all

It is looking increasingly certain that the trend to classify everyday behaviour as abnormal will intensify further. Proposed changes to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) unveiled last month would widen the definition of psychiatric disorders substantially. If the proposals are adopted when the enormously influential reference work is published in 2013 more people than ever will be defined as mentally ill.

According to an article in the Washington Post:

“Children who throw too many tantrums could be diagnosed with ‘temper dysregulation with dysphoria.’ Teenagers who are particularly eccentric might be candidates for treatment for ‘psychosis risk syndrome.’ Men who are just way too interested in sex face being labeled as suffering from ‘hypersexual disorder.’”

It goes on to quote Christopher Lane, the author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, as arguing that "They are close to treating the children like guinea pigs. I think that's appalling and outrageous.”

Meanwhile, an article in Science notes that:

“proposed revisions for the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders include for the first time "behavioural addictions"—a change some say is long overdue and others say is still premature. So far, only one behaviour has made the cut: gambling, which under the new proposal would join substance-use disorders as a full-fledged addiction.”

The new proposals to further pathologise normal behaviour only confirm what already looked likely to be the trend. In my blog post of 26 July 2009 I already cited an article by Christopher Lane warning that this was likely to happen.

Back in 2008 I also reviewed a book for spiked which showed how this trend was already underway. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, by Allan V Horwitz and Jerome C Wakefield is a key book on the subject.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, spiked

Spiked has run a review by me of two books arguing that governments should be guided by research on happiness and well-being. My take on it is apparent from the headline: "It’s better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig".

Labels: book, happiness, review, spiked

An interesting article in the Times (London) on how green ideas are exacerbating rifts within families. For example, whether it is environmentally correct to own a dog or cook using an Aga.

Of course all families have rifts occasionally but it is easy to see why green ideas can make them worse. For a start green thinking embodies an element of austerity. If one person is telling another they cannot or should not have something they value (whether an Aga, a dog or whatever) it can clearly lead to tensions. When it is done with the sanctimonious moral piety embodied in green ideas it makes it even worse. Implicitly what is being said is that “not only can you not have an Aga / dog / etc but wanting one makes you a bad person”. It is the flip side of conspicuous consumption: telling someone they are not ethical because they want to consume something that is deemed bad.

No doubt the immense pressure on children to tell their parents to behave in what is deemed an environmentally correct way must be galling too.

Labels: consumption, ethics, happiness

Anyone who still believes the global elite consists of fire-breathing market fundamentalists should look at the programme for this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. One of the main themes of this year’s event at the exclusive Swiss ski resort was sustainability with other sessions on business ethics, the economics of happiness, rethinking values and the Millennium Development Goals. Among the speakers were staunch critics of growth, including Jim Wallis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, while Stewart Wallis, the executive director of the New Economics Foundation, chaired a session on rethinking economics.

An account of the event by Jeremy Warner of the Daily Telegraph can be found here.

Labels: development, ethics, happiness, sustainability

Julian Baggini had an interesting piece in yesterday’s Independent on how happiness is increasingly becoming a goal of state policy in Britain. Although he makes many valid points his critique is limited. For example, he underestimates the extent to which the term well-being is used in numerous different ways.

Labels: happiness

This week, virtually unnoticed, the British government announced an intervention into the minds of the country’s inhabitants. Although it was pitched as a strategy to deal with mental illness it has implications for the whole of British society although it is particularly aimed at the poor. The official New Horizons website run by the Department of Health quotes Gordon Brown, the prime minister, as saying: “This is about more than preventing mental illness...it is also about helping individuals and communities to bring the best out of themselves”. This trend is also embodied in a recent World Health Organization report on Mental health, resilience, and inequalities (PDF). Catherine Bennett also discusses the broadening of the conception of mental illness in a comment in the Observer but for her the problem is that Brown’s initiative is too timid.

For me this trend represents the redefinition of inequality in therapeutic terms. It gives the government licence to intervene in the most intimate aspects of our lives – even our interior mental world.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, inequality

Geoff Mulgan, the director of the Young Foundation and a former senior adviser to Tony Blair, has a comment piece in the Times (London) arguing that poverty should be redefined in psychological and psychosocial terms. In relation to the former he argues:

“Most of the arguments about poverty in the past have focused on material needs. Today there is still some material poverty, but psychological needs are much more important and much more challenging. Around one in five people in the UK experience mental health problems at some point in their lives. The number of prescriptions for antidepressant drugs increased from 9 million in 1991 to 34 million in 2007.”

In relation to psychosocial needs he points to the problem of loneliness.

How he can claim that his argument challenges the conventional wisdom is a mystery. Amartya Sen won the Nobel prize for economics in 1998 for advocating such a view.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, inequality

SA Aiyar, writing in his Swaminomics blog in the Times of India, argues against romanticising Bhutan as a haven of happiness.

Prominent thinkers such as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz have lauded the Himalayan kingdom for proclaiming happiness as a priority and downplaying economic growth. Yet in reality it has enjoyed rapid growth as a result of heavy investment by India in hydroelectric power projects.

On the other hand, it is far from the happiness idyll it is often portrayed to be:

“A nasty ethnic struggle has led Bhutan to expel 100,000 people of Nepali origin, who now languish in refugee camps in Nepal. Ethnic Bhutias constitute 50% of Bhutan's population, and ethnic Nepalese 35%. Nepalese migrants have swamped original ethnic groups in neighbouring parts of India like Sikkim and Darjeeling. The Bhutias of Bhutan are determined not to be swamped too. Those expelled say they are regular citizens who have been ethnically cleansed, while the government claims they are illegal immigrants. Such ethnic strife does not look like a recipe for happiness.”

Labels: Asia, happiness, india

More on Barbara Ehrenreich’s critique of the happiness obsession (see 7 November post). An extract from her speech on the subject to the Commonwealth Club of California is available on fora.tv.

Some of the points she makes are sensible. For example, the bizarre view that those who have serious diseases, such as cancer, should be positive about their condition. Similarly the argument that those who are unemployed or poor should be positive rather than angry.

However, she is wrong to blame the economic crisis on positive thinking. Essentially this assumes that over-ambition causes the crisis. It easily spills into a critique of ambition and is also incredibly superficial.

She also misses the pervasiveness of social pessimism that exists despite the contemporary emphasis on positive thinking.

Labels: happiness

A blog post by Chris Dillow points to a paper by Luca Stanca arguing that having children makes people miserable. According to Stanca’s study of the statistics on subjective well-being: “On the basis of a purely economic approach, the optimal number of children for a rational agent is zero”.

This raises awkward questions for proponents of happiness as the organising principle for individuals and society. Should people really have no children simply because the data shows that they are unlikely to make people happy overall?

Labels: happiness

When I have time I would like to review Bright-sided by Barbara Ehrenreich as it seems to offer an alternative critique of the happiness debate. Meanwhile, here is a review of the book by Hanna Rosin in the New York Times.

Labels: happiness

Even in these times, when frugality is in fashion, there are some unexpected positive items among the many negative ones on television.

In the first episode of It’s Only A Theory, a new BBC Four panel show, Lucy Beresford defended her proposition that there is nothing inherently wrong with sadness. The two comedians and guest celebrity found it a convincing argument.

In sharp contrast BBC Newsnight, ostensibly a serious news programme, is promoting a make do and mend tour of Britain. It consists of Sarah Jane Baxter, a milliner, travelling from London to Scotland over the month and funding her trip by fixing things. This follows the recent miserable ethical man series in which a Newsnight report spent a year living “ethically”.

(Note: These programmes are probably not available for viewing outside Britain).

Labels: consumption, ethics, happiness, television

The commission of eminent international economists appointed by French President Nicholas Sarkozy to report on measuring economic and social progress (PDF) has published its findings. I have not yet had time to read its 292 pages but, judging from the media coverage, it is broadly in line with what would be expected. Its call for better measures to measure social progress is, in the title of a previous article I have written on the topic, a sneaky attack on prosperity.

To quote the Financial Times’s take on its importance: "It is not the first of its type but it is perhaps the most comprehensive assessment of the limitations of existing data. It also makes clear the scope for improving policy and democratic debate based on good data, well presented, that relate to the issues – such as social cohesion, poverty and the environment – that people find important. It also has some top-level political support."

The commission was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz and included, among others, Amartya Sen, Daniel Kahneman, Andrew Oswald, Robert Putnam, Nicholas Stern and Cass Sunstein.

To coincide with the report Joseph Stiglitz had an article in yesterday’s FT while Richard Layard reiterated his argument on happiness in the Guardian.

Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has officially welcomed the report and is discussing the subject further at its World Forum in Korea at the end of October.

Labels: consumption, economics, Europe, happiness, progress

Yesterday’s Guardian weekend magazine was on the theme of “How to be happy right now” The introductory article by Oliver Burkeman tried to distance itself from the more obviously quackish claims of the more extremist exponents of positive psychology. But this did not stop other parts of the magazine offering instant solutions such as its “7 steps to instant happiness”: be positive, be happy, meditate, be kind to yourself, use your pessimism, find a calling and act happy.

In any case the magazine failed to ask bigger questions such as whether achieving happiness should be a goal either of public policy or individuals. Can it be achieved by being a target itself or, as seems more likely, is its realisation more likely to be the side effect or pursuing other goals? And isn’t the dedicated pursuit of individual happiness a form of narcissism?

Labels: happiness

The way things are going it looks like it will not be long before virtually everyone is defined as mentally ill. If you think this is an exaggeration you should read this article by Christopher Lane in Slate. He points out that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is seriously considering classifying shopping, among other everyday activities, as a sign of mental illness:

“The fifth edition of the association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is expected in 2012. The APA isn't just deciding the fate of shopaholics; it's also debating whether overuse of the Internet, "excessive" sexual activity, apathy, and even prolonged bitterness should be viewed, quite seriously, as brain "disorders." If you spend hours online, have sex more frequently than aging psychiatrists, and moan incessantly that the federal government can't account for all its TARP funds, take heed: You may soon be classed among the 48 million Americans the APA already considers mentally ill.”

Since the diagnostic manual Lane refers to in effect sets the global standard for defining psychiatric disorders the widening of the definition does not just affect Americans.

For more on the broadening of the definition of mental illness see my review of Oliver James on “affluenza” on the left hand side of the homepage. Also read Helene Guldberg’s review in spiked of Christopher Lane’s most recent book (see post of 24 December 2007).

Labels: affluenza, America, consumption, happiness

A wry piss-take of the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index (see posts of 7 and 11 August 2006) by Professor Wilfred Beckerman in a letter in Saturday’s Financial Times:

Sir, Regarding the “Happy Planet Index” that ranks countries according to their happiness and lack of environmental degradation (July 4): it showed that “among the rich countries the highest is the Netherlands – but it manages only 43rd”. The UK is 74th. The highest ranking countries are in Latin America, with Costa Rica top and crisis-ridden Honduras 10th.

Why is it then that millions of people are trying to emigrate from the happy poor countries to the rich countries and there is so little movement in the reverse direction? If, rightly or wrongly, immigration into the rich countries is thought to be excessive, perhaps the solution is to give all would-be immigrants a copy of the Happy Planet report.

I presume that as soon as they reached their conclusions the UK-based authors of the report immediately packed their bags. Personally, I shall stay here.

Wilfred Beckerman,
Emeritus Fellow,
Balliol College, Oxford, UK

Labels: happiness

Whatever happened to the “Labour left”? Answer: it has become just about the most conservative and growth sceptic section of society.

Neal Lawson, the chair of Compass and a former adviser to Gordon Brown, is about to have a book called All Consuming published by Penguin. Its subtitle is “how shopping got us into this mess and how we can find our way out of it”. He has also just set up a website with the same name.

Evidently Lawson is organising a debate on the book on Monday 13 July in the House of Commons. Given that two of the other speakers are Madeleine Bunting and Oliver James, who broadly share Lawson’s outlook, there is unlikely to be much disagreement between them. Lawson also says in an email “I’m hoping to get someone from the advertising industry to come and put the case for more consumption”.

If I was not rushing to finish my book I would put in a bid to put the opposite case - although I suspect they would not have me. It is much easier from their perspective to present the debate as simply for and against mass consumption rather than grappling with the benefits of popular prosperity.

Labels: book, consumption, economics, happiness

Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the RSA, had a comment piece in yesterday’s Times (London) which recycled many key growth sceptic ideas.

He conceded that in many respects we have never had it so good. However, in his view we are plagued by rampant individualism and hyper consumerism.

Taylor bases his argument on the work of Avner Offer (see my review of his book on left hand side of the homepage): “It is the way things have got better that makes us feel worse. Avner Offer, the economic historian, sums up this argument in one line: ‘Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines wellbeing.’ Offer means by this that affluence makes us feel as though we no longer need the social norms, conventions and institutions that encourage us to look to our own and society's long-term interests.”

He then moves on to our poor Stone Age brains (see my review of John Naish’s Enough on the left hand side): “But why have we failed to understand what we were losing in the forward march of individualism? An explanation may lie in the disjuncture between human evolution and history. While evolution is slow and incremental, history is accelerating in leaps and bounds. The brains that did fine for us for the first 200,000 years of our existence find it hard to cope with the revolutionary changes of the past century.”

He also implies that austerity could be a good thing: “Today most of the UK's population have more disposable income than they need, not only to survive, but to enjoy good health and opportunities for leisure and self-development. But we have exhibited a mass version of the decadence that history has taught us to associate with the fall of the Roman Empire.”

For those interested in hearing leading proponents of growth sceptic ideas put their case they often give free lectures at the RSA in London.

Labels: consumption, happiness, science

Today’s New York Times magazine is a special green issue. It includes several interesting – although flawed – articles on the subject including:

•Why isn’t the brain green?. Implying that failure to accept environmental priorities suggests some kind of mental disorder and suggesting people need to be “nudged” in the right direction. This form of insidious authoritarianism is deeply trendy at present (see my post of 21 July 2008). It also links in to the idea that those who “deny” climate change (that is critics either of the mainstream scientific views on the subject or of the idea that it can only be tackled by austerity) must be mentally ill.

•The end is near! (yea!). An article on the “transition movement” – which sounds like a kind of survivalism: “The Transition movement was started four years ago by Rob Hopkins, a young British instructor of ecological design. Transition shares certain principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper — and more radical — than mere greenness or sustainability. “Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely. For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.”

•Natural happiness. Arguing conservation on the basis of the pleasure it gives to humans: “Real natural habitats provide significant sources of pleasure for modern humans. We intuitively grasp this, and this knowledge underlies the anxiety that we feel about nature’s loss. It might be that one day we will be able to replace the experience of nature with “Star Trek” holodecks and robotic animals. But until then, this basic fact about human pleasure is an excellent argument for keeping the real thing.”

It is hard to distinguish such pieces from the kinds of arguments that could be found in such publications as the Ecologist magazine.

Labels: America, consumption, environment, happiness

I have written the following letter to the Financial Times in response to yesterday’s particularly outrageous article by Richard Layard on happiness as a goal of public policy. There is much more I would have liked to have said but space is obviously limited in a letter to a newspaper:

"Sir, Richard Layard is entitled to his views on happiness but his claim to be writing in the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment is astounding (“Now is the time for a less selfish capitalism”, March 12).

"Wealth creation was, contrary to his claim, central to Enlightenment thinking. The idea that human appetites could drive the economic machine and lead to progress more generally was fundamental to Adam’s Smith’s view of the world. His famous example of the pin factory in the Wealth of Nations was all about how to raise productivity for the benefit of society.

"Layard also misrepresents the Enlightenment when he claims it was about the increase of happiness. Perhaps the most famous Enlightenment document, the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, called for “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It posed the pursuit of happiness - rather than happiness - as a right rather than an obligation or goal. It also linked happiness to progress more generally with its commitment to life and liberty."

Labels: affluenza, happiness, progress

Today’s Observer newspaper includes an article on how anxiety about the recession is “forcing the government to offer psychological help to millions of people facing unemployment, debt and relationship breakdown”. Evidently the plan: “will involve training 3,600 more therapists and hundreds more specialist nurses, psychotherapy centres will be established in every primary care trust by the end of next year”.

This is strange because the enlarged network of therapists was first proposed by Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics and government adviser on such things, as a way of dealing with the supposed effect of rising affluence. Now it seems that we need therapists to deal with declining affluence.

A similar reversal is apparent in relation to crime. Not long ago the likes of David Lammy, New Labour’s skills minister, was blaming affluence for rising crime (see 15 August 2008). Now the recession, and therefore declining affluence, is widely seen as threatening an upsurge in crime.

The simplest explanation for such stark contradictions is that our rulers have an exceedingly low opinion of us. Whatever happens in the world around us we are in need of their “help”.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

Kate Pickett, one of the co-authors of Spirit Level, has emailed me to say I misrepresented some of the book’s statistical arguments in my 5 March post. I did point out that the post makes clear it is based on a limited range of sources – I have not read the book yet. However, in the interests of a fair and balanced debate, I have pasted her statistical rebuttal below. I hope to review the book properly before too long:

“First, our Index of Health and Social Problems does not contain happiness, it is based on hard, factual data from reputable sources like the World Bank, OECD, UN, etc. It contains life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, mental illness, imprisonment, homicide, teenage births, educational scores, social mobility (correlation between father's and son's incomes over 30 years) and trust. I think the only one that is arguably a "soft" outcome is trust. This is based on official surveys of random samples of the population who say that other people can be trusted or not. But really, if someone says they don't trust other people, they probably don't. And indeed the causal impact of inequality on trust has been demonstrated by others. We show relationships with income inequality for all of the outcomes in our index separately as well as when combined, and we show the same for the 50 US states, as well as rich market economies.

“Second, although definitions of mental illness do indeed change over time, we use data from the World Health Organization's Consortium on Mental Illness, which used the same psychiatric diagnostic interviews in population samples of several different countries at the same time, so the data are certainly comparable and are not simply measures of how people are feeling.

“Third, we do not, of course, only use evidence from primate studies to help us understand how status insecurities and anxieties can affect our behaviour and biology, but they can be very useful. It would be silly to think that we do NOT have an evolved response to social status and social interactions and anxieties. I imagine while we all sat in the Moral Maze green room, our adrenaline and cortisol were running pretty high, all due to our feelings about whether or not we were going to make a good showing on the programme and how we were going come across and be judged!”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, health, inequality

The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, published today in Britain by Allen Lane, looks set to become an influential addition to the enormous and dubious growth sceptic canon. The two authors are proving popular on the circuit for such things including appearances on the Moral Maze with me yesterday, Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Nightwaves on Radio 3 as well as a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts today. They were also reviewed in the Economist.

The authors present the book as a technical – that is non-political – book on the facts of social inequality. Their central thesis is that what matters in the developed economies is not poverty but inequality. Better to have more equal societies, such as Sweden or Japan, than highly unequal ones, such as America or Britain.

Judging by what I have heard and read so far, it has several weaknesses. These include:

• Lumping together disparate forms of data in dubious composite “indices”. As far as I can gather these include more subjective factors (such as “happiness”) with more objective ones (such as life expectancy).

• They miss the extent to which many factors, such as mental illness, are largely socially defined. So, for example, the definition of mental illness in many western societies have been substantially widened in recent years.

• They seem to rely on primate studies for at least part of their evidence in relation to status. In its review of the book the Economist moves shamelessly from talking about poor Indian children to discussing baboons in the course of one paragraph: “Low-caste Indian children do worse on cognitive tests if they must state their identities beforehand. High-status baboons bred in captivity show elevated levels of stress hormones and become ill more often when they are moved to groups where they no longer dominate.”

In any case they draw sweeping growth sceptic conclusions which are clearly political – despite their protestations – and not justified by the data. The Economist quotes the two authors as arguing that: “We have got close to the end of what economic growth can do for us.”

Much of my work is focused on refuting such ideas. For example, I argue that the challenge of climate change and an ageing population can only be met with substantially more resources – and that means economic growth. That is leaving aside the benefits to individuals being wealthier in the West and the still enormous challenge of development in the third world.

I have also argued the meaning of the demand for equality has been fundamentally transformed with the acceptance of the idea that there is no alternative to the market. It used to be a demand for more – for realising the human potential – whereas it is now typically a demand for less. I have written about this before in a 2006 article for spiked on Polly Toynbee (who has also just had a paperback edition of her latest book on “greed” in Britain published). However, I plan to extend the thesis considerably in my book.

Labels: affluenza, book, consumption, happiness, inequality, radio

While on the subject of anti-consumerism the lyrics of Lily Allen’s song “The Fear” are presumably meant to be knowingly ironic. The opening paragraph of the song starts as follows:

“I want to be rich and I want lots of money
I don’t care about clever I don’t care about funny
I want loads of clothes and f***loads of diamonds
I heard people die while they are trying to find them”

Later on she says:

“And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and it’s not my fault it’s how I’m program to function.”

Sadly it seems there is little original or radical in contemporary popular culture – particularly when it thinks it is being both.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, happiness

I ‘m not a great fan of chick flicks but I had to see Confessions of a Shopaholic – for research purposes, you understand. Some of it was clearly true-to-life: the suave and sophisticated editor of a financial magazine who was the lead male character. But the film had a disappointingly predictable anti-consumerist message. When the debt-ridden female lead of the film finally escaped her fixation with shopping and luxury brands she finally had the time to lead a fulfilling life.

And it wasn’t nearly as funny as Legally Blonde.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, film, happiness

Lee Jones, an academic at Oxford University, has written a critical account of an academic seminar on “well-being” for Culture Wars. He shows, among other things, that the well-being agenda leads to authoritarian conclusions. For example:

• “People convicted of drugs possession who do not see themselves as addicts – or who do not even use drugs themselves – are coerced into rehabilitation programmes which require that they correctly emote their therapeutic journey of facing up to their ‘denial’ and changing themselves. In addition to these serious drawbacks, there is also no evidence that ‘problem-solving courts’ are any more efficacious than standard courts.”

• “The emphasis on ‘child poverty’ as a violation of children’s rights and well-being, for instance, in which children are innocent of guilt for this poverty, but adults are not, implicitly blames parents for failing to realise their children’s rights; ‘bad’ parents are demonised and blamed for all manner of social problems, such as youth delinquency, which are thereby individualised. Increasingly, parents are viewed as ‘functions of their children’, existing only to serve their children’s well being.”

• “Schools today are full of well-meaning teachers trying to re-engage young people on the issues of the day and inspire them to action. The trouble is that the issues of the day are often deeply authoritarian. For instance, children are increasingly being terrorised by tales of environmental apocalypse and recruited to police adults’ behaviour . My six-year-old nephew recently returned home one night and, on the instructions of his teacher, hectored his mother about her smoking habit. These official agendas can be sold as saving the world (or your mum), or as having a whiff of anti-corporate radicalism, but they are official agendas nonetheless.”

Labels: environment, happiness

Belatedly caught up with an article on the likely social impact of the recession by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, in last Sunday’s New York Times. Among other things he predicts:

• A return to less expensive activities: “They may take the form of greater interest in free content on the Internet and the simple pleasures of a daily walk, instead of expensive vacations and NBA [National Basketball Association] box seats.”

• A larger than usual decline in consumption by the wealthy. Although the poor will suffer the most pain the rich have suffered a sharp decline in labour incomes owing to the problems in the financial sector. This is on top of the impact of declining asset prices.

• Popular culture catering to the wealthy, such as fancy restaurants, could decline.

• More mental health problems although paradoxically physical health could, on average, improve. On the latter accidents could decline as people make fewer trips while spending on alcohol and tobacco could also fall.

• Finally, a more “prudent” and risk averse climate could take hold.

I would not concur with all of Cowen’s predictions but the subject is worth considering.

Labels: affluenza, America, Austerity Watch, consumption, economics, happiness, inequality

It looks like the Financial Times is not going to publish my letter in response to its editorial on “de-fetishing GDP” and its earlier feature on the same subject (see 28 January post). For those interested my response is reproduced below. Admittedly it is a bit assertive but that is hard to avoid in such a small amount of words:

Sir, Much of the discussion on the weaknesses of GDP as a measure of social
progress (“De-fetishising GDP”, January 30) misses the point. It is largely
an attack on economic growth masquerading as a technical discussion of
economics.

Whatever the shortcoming of GDP it should not be forgotten that economic
growth is the foundation for our prosperity. It has brought huge benefits to
humanity over the long term including a massive increase in longevity,
spectacular declines in infant mortality, sharp decreases in working hours
and much else besides. No doubt it also has the potential to allow us to see
off future challenges such as the scourge of poverty in the developing world
and climate change.

If anything there is a strong case that GDP underestimates the benefits of
material advance. The most famous example is that of Nathan Rothschild, one
of richest men in the world in the early nineteenth century, who died in
1836 of an infected abscess. Nowadays such a routine infection could easily
be cured by antibiotics. Yet GDP does not measure the huge welfare benefits
of such quality improvements.

Labels: consumption, economics, happiness, progress

Today’s Financial Times has a substantial feature on the debate on the weaknesses of GDP as a measure of human welfare. It has some interesting material although ultimately is a weak piece. It does not appreciate that in many respects GDP underestimates the contribution of growth to human welfare. And it sees the discussion as a technical one rather than as part of a broader attack on economic growth.

Some things to note from the piece: “a 24-member commission of prominent economists led by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, both Nobel prize winners, is due to report in April on ways of improving our economic bookkeeping. The aim is to render economic data more comprehensive, more intelligible to the public and more relevant for policymakers by taking into account such factors as environmental degradation and quality of life.”

Also: “This ambitious initiative was launched last year by Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, who had grown concerned about popular distrust of economic statistics.”

The initiative is in line with France’s official drive for a more moral capitalism (see post of 11 January 2009). But such moves also have supporters in America: In testimony last year to the US Senate, Jonathan Rowe, a Californian writer, highlighted some of the absurdities of mechanically measuring the economy by counting how much it produces. Measuring healthcare by inputs rather than outputs - the sale of medical services and drugs rather than the number of (healthy) people - can lead to particularly perverse perspectives. In this view, the economic "hero" of GDP statistics would be a terminally ill cancer patient going through expensive medication and a costly divorce.”

An extract of Rowe’s testimony can be read here

A webcast of the Senate committee meeting can be viewed here.

For a more extensive critique by me of the attacks on GDP see the article on “A sneaky attack on prosperity” on the left hand side of the homepage.

Labels: America, economics, Europe, happiness

What is a happy chicken?

The question occurred to me while watching the awful television documentary by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a British celebrity chef, on Chickens, Hugh & Tesco Too. I won’t discuss the programme in general except to say it featured the Old Etonian campaigning against supermarkets selling cheap chicken. What struck me most was the several references he made to happy chickens.

You could argue that it was just a figure of speech but I think there is more to it than that. The idea of happiness has been hugely dumbed down in recent years. For Aristotle, writing in the Nicomachean Ethics, it meant an “activity of soul in accordance with virtue”. It meant harnessing the power of reason to attain personal achievements. For the Enlightenment thinkers who drafted the American Declaration of Independence the pursuit of happiness was part of a broader drive towards human progress. Yet the contemporary advocates of happiness seem to see it simply as individual contentment or perhaps a neurological impulse.

Fearnley-Whittingstall seems to have lowered the standard of debate still further by suggesting that chickens can be happy. This was in line with a broader trend in the programme of discussing animals in almost human terms.

I notice that Jamie Oliver, a celebrity chef even more awful than Fearnley-Whittingstall, has his own documentary on Channel 4 on Thursday called Jamie Saves Our Bacon. His goal seems to be to do for pigs what his fellow celebrity did for chickens.

I am not sure what Oliver would make of the famous quote from John Stuart Mill, a nineteenth century philosopher, that: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. Mill’s concern was not animal welfare or even human contentment but the nature of our humanity.

Labels: celebrities, food, happiness, television

Benjamin Barber, an American political theorist writing in the Nation, favours austerity but dresses it up as a cultural renaissance.

On the one hand he says that people must consume less: “The crisis in global capitalism demands a revolution in spirit--fundamental change in attitudes and behavior. Reform cannot merely rush parents and kids back into the mall; it must encourage them to shop less, to save rather than spend.”

In Barber’s romanticised imagination this will lead to a better world: “Imagine all the things we could do without having to shop: play and pray, create and relate, read and walk, listen and procreate--make art, make friends, make homes, make love.”

The reality is likely to be working harder to make the same amount of money as in the past along with enforced leisure for the growing army of unemployed.

Labels: Austerity Watch, consumption, economics, happiness

Neuroskeptic has sent me a link to his incisive critique of Oliver James’s notion of Affluenza. I do not know who Neuroskeptic is but he makes some telling points.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

The New Economics Foundation, a British think tank, has launched a comprehensive report and related website on national accounts of well-being for European countries. It is designed to further the organisation’s case that economic growth should be downplayed in favour of subjective measures of well-being.

Among other things the website features:

• Robert Kennedy’s famous 1968 quote on GDP measuring everything but what is important in life.

• Endorsements from the likes of happiness gurus such as Lord Richard Layard, Ed Diener, Daniel Kahneman and Martin Seligman. Significantly it also has the backing of Enrico Giovannini, the chief statistician of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

• A reference to Easterlin’s paradox – that happiness is not increasing in line with economic growth.

I have already written critiques of these ideas in my articles on the Easterlin paradox (“No ‘paradox of prosperity’”) and on the attack on GDP (“A sneaky attack on prosperity”). They can be accessed from the links on the bar on the left.

For supporters of prosperity it is imperative to take up such arguments promoting “well-being”.

Labels: happiness

The current issue of New Scientist has an interesting article by Jessica Marshall, an American science writer, on “Is it really bad to be sad?”. She draws on the work of Jerome Wakefield, among others, to show that sadness is an important part of the human condition (see posts of 22 December 2007 and 6 February 2008).

Labels: affluenza, happiness

I finally managed to track down the origin of the quote by Oliver James, the clinical psychologist who propagates the idea of “Affluenza”, where he says that: “I absolutely embrace the credit crunch with both arms”. It was in a BBC Radio 4 Book Club programme with James Naughtie that was first broadcast on 7 January. The audience was largely sympathetic to James while Naughtie seemed oblivious to the fact that the Affluenza thesis is not original.

The criticisms I made of the book in my review still remain valid (see the list of links on the left). An additional point that struck me was his insistence that people should watch much less television if they want to protect themselves against Affluenza.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, radio, television

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interview with Bhutan’s first elected prime minister. Inevitably it touches on the Himalayan kingdom’s much lauded emphasis on pursuing Gross National Happiness rather than GDP. What Jigmi Y Thinley says is pretty anodyne. What is more notable is that he became the first democratically elected prime minister only this year. The country so loved by happiness gurus for many years only got the formal trappings of democracy in 2008.

Even now its embrace of democracy is only partial. Like Britain it retains a dubious status as a “constitutional monarchy”.

Labels: Asia, happiness

Even Latin America seems to be getting in on the happiness obsession. A study by the Inter-American Development Bank says - if you can believe the headlines - that fast economic growth damages life satisfaction.

Usually the results of such surveys, once they are subject to close scrutiny, are not as straightforward as they appear.

Labels: happiness, Latin America

A joint study by the National Social Marketing Centre and University College London finds that most Britons are happy but those in higher socio-economic groups are typically higher than those in lower ones. According to Some are more equal than others … (PDF) nine out of 10 people say they are happy. However, those in social groups AB are generally happier than those in DE. Other factors that contribute to happiness include good health, being female, being young or old (but not middle-aged) and having a partner.

Labels: happiness

Yesterday’s New York Times included a useful review of the assaults on the notion of GDP. It reminded readers that as long ago as 40 years ago it was attacked by Robert F Kennedy who said it: “measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” The article also welcomed the review of GDP as a measure of well-being in France and suggested it might apply to America too:

“We may be in the early stages in the United States of recognizing that the gross domestic product is very misleading and something must be done to get better measures of well-being,” said Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics at Harvard. Professor Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate at Columbia, are co-chairmen of a commission recently appointed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, to come up with a better measure for France. While Mr. Sarkozy’s goal is to showcase a ‘quality of life’ at odds with the country’s weak G.D.P., the high-profile effort might yield dividends here as well as abroad.”

Ultimately, as I have previously argued, there is less to these attacks than meets the eye. It would be hard to find someone who argues that GDP is a perfect indicator of well-being. But it does not follow that there is no relationship between rising prosperity and well-being. If there is a problem with GDP in this respect it is that it underestimates the benefits of prosperity to human welfare.

Labels: America, economics, Europe, happiness, progress

Dick Meyer, a veteran American journalist, has written an interesting-sounding book on self-loathing in America with the brilliant title of Why We Hate Us (Crown 2008). To quote the blurb from his publisher:

“Meyer argues—with biting wit and observations that make you want to shout, “Yes! I hate that too!”—that when the social, spiritual, and political turmoil that followed the sixties collided with the technological and media revolution at the turn of the century, something inside us hit overload. American culture no longer reflects our own values. As a result, we are now morally and existentially tired, disoriented, anchorless, and defensive. We hate us and we wonder why.”

No doubt there is much that is wrong with Meyer’s analysis but he raises some important questions. There certainly is a strong element of self-loathing in America and Western culture more generally. This is apparent in many areas including environmentalism, identity politics and the hostility towards Chinese economic development. It is a topic that is worth examining in more detail.

An extract from the book and interview with the author are available here.

Labels: America, book, china, consumption, happiness

Many newspaper articles on happiness economics follow more-or-less the same line (see 27 July 2008 post). A touch of utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill) followed by some quotes from the usual suspects (including Richard Easterlin, Richard Layard, Nic Marks and Andrew Oswald). Today’s Financial Times piece by Jonathan Guthrie on “happynomics” at least has the virtue of mentioning that Nicholas Sarkozy has toyed with the idea of happiness yardsticks. It also points out that some academics argue there is a link between happiness and income: “Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, claims happiness increases steadily with wealth, albeit at a declining rate.”

Labels: economics, Europe, happiness

A recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers suggest that the happiness gap between some sections of the American population (black-white, male-female) seems to have narrowed. This is despite a widening of income inequality. A summary of the paper is below:

“Surveys that have attempted to measure the level of happiness in US citizens by means of a subjective response have unveiled decreases in happiness inequality. These findings come in spite of the long-term trend of increasing income inequality.

“The authors of CEPR DP6929 have used these responses to analyse the level and dispersion of happiness within and between demographic groups over the period of 1972-2006. In particular, they look at changes in the racial, gender and education gaps.

“Whilst they find that overall levels of happiness have remained relatively stable with a slight, but statistically significant decline, the distribution of happiness between and within demographic groups has changed significantly. The black-white gap was found to have narrowed substantially and the gender gap to have almost disappeared. In addition, the education gap was found to have widened.

“In light of increasing income inequality, the authors suggest that these findings may reveal a possible decrease in inequality in the non-pecuniary domain. In particular they highlight changes in the US legal and institutional framework that occurred during the observed time period that may help to explain the changes.”

For a reference to an earlier work by the same authors debunking the “paradox of prosperity” see my post of 16 April 2008.

Labels: America, happiness, inequality

A piece on the happiness debate in the Christian Science Monitor (22 July) is blisteringly one-sided. It quotes many of the most prominent advocates of the view that wealth does not bring happiness but no one to put the alternative perspective. The usual suspects quoted include Bill McKibben (author of Deep Economy) and Nic Marks of the New Economics Foundation among others. There are also the customary references to the World Values Survey, the Happy Planet Index and Bhutan.

The most interesting point is by Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. He divides the pursuit of happiness into three categories: seeking positive emotion, or feeling good; engagement with others; and meaning, or participating in something larger than oneself.

Labels: consumption, environment, happiness

The vast literature on happiness continues to expand rapidly:

* An article in the June issue of the Economic Journal on hedonic adaptation – how we adapt emotionally to both positive and negative events. A summary (PDF) is available here.

* A reference to a study led by Michael Marmot of University College London on the relative happiness of the sexes.

Labels: happiness

The annual World Values Survey by the United States National Science Foundation once again finds that Denmark is the world’s happiest nation. Puerto Rico and Colombia completed the top three while Zimbabwe was the least happy. The study was directed by Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan.

Meanwhile, Alan Wolfe has reviewed books on happiness economics (by Bruno Frey) and behavioural economics (by Dan Ariely) for the New Republic. Wolfe sees the new economics as a revival of utilitarianism. He also cites a paper by Norbert Schwart and Fritz Stark which he says leave the validity of subjective reports of happiness “in tatters” (in a book called Well-Being published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1999).

Labels: economics, happiness

Icfai Books in Hyderabad, India, has published Prosperity Index, a collection of articles including my January 2007 spiked essay arguing “There is no paradox of prosperity”. It is edited by Asha B Joshi, a faculty associate at the Icfai Business School Research Centre in Ahmedabad.

Labels: book, happiness, india, spiked

Arthur Brooks, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Gross National Happiness (Basic Books), argues in an article in the May / June issue of The American that it is success rather than money that brings happiness. For Brooks money is important simply as an indirect measure of success.

For Brooks this explains why entrepreneurs continue to work so hard even after amassing large fortunes. It also shows why “easy money”, such as that gained by winning the lottery, does not bring happiness.

Labels: happiness

I have been sidetracked for the past week so no time for blogging. Hopefully this will now change. However, two things worth catching up on:

- Attended the launch of the Prix Pictet photographic competition last Tuesday (29 April). It is a new photographic awarded focusing on sustainability with Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary general, as its honorary president. It also has the endorsement of Gro Harlem Brundtland, a special envoy to the UN on climate change. This year’s theme is water.

The PR stunt at the start of the event gives some flavour of what it was about. All of those attending were given a clear glass bottle with a little water in it and the name of a country. Mine had a tag on it saying “Ghana” and a note saying the average daily domestic water consumption was 27 litres per head which was equivalent to five minutes in an ordinary shower. What is this bizarre counter-position meant to mean? Perhaps that by having a shower in Britain we are depriving ordinary Ghanaians of water? Or that water is a scarce resource? (see post of 12 March 2008).

- Michael Fitzpatrick wrote a pithy critique of the mainstream happiness discussion in an article (30 April) on spiked on the contemporary obsession with healthy living:

“Having replaced heaven (in either terrestrial or celestial forms) as the goal of human existence, health has been reduced to the anatomical and physiological functions of the human organism. The highest aspiration of the modern individual is biological survival, complemented by the state of bovine contentment celebrated as ‘happiness’ by government advisers, a condition to be achieved by making healthy lifestyle choices, appropriately corrected by short courses of cognitive behaviour therapy.

“For Aristotle a true state of health meant a ‘flourishing life’, not merely in terms of prolonging our bodily existence, but in terms of personal achievement. What matters is not merely feeling good about ourselves, but living and acting well. Happiness is the result of human activity in the world, it is not just a state of mind, and even less mere animal fitness.”

Labels: consumption, development, environment, happiness, sustainability

I am happy to say that the Brighton Salon had already written up the introduction I gave on happiness on Wednesday and the subsequent discussion.

Daniel Ben Ami’s introduction
:

Visualise two kinds of people; the Dalai lama, a smiling happy and spiritual person and a city trader, greedy, driven by money and uncaring about other people. These characters are extremes that illustrate the poles of the discussion of happiness. Money is dirty while the spiritual is positive. But popular prosperity, that most of us have some share in, is a good thing. Society as whole is benefits from being richer.


There have been different concepts of happiness in history and happiness has it historic uses. In the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America the pursuit of happiness was an individual right. Today the concept of happiness has been given a narcissistic edge in discussions about it. Wealth does not in itself bring happiness to people and happiness is seen as a different question from that of wealth. I aim to show that the obsession with happiness is a negative thing in several ways.


There really is a huge amount of literature and media coverage of the discussion of promoting happiness. There are ever expanding studies of happiness and courses on positive psychology. I wanted to attend such a course but found that they were, ironically, very expensive – several hundred pounds for a few sessions!


Study of happiness is a legitimate thing to do. Some of the work is very interesting, particularly the studies that are based on subjective surveys of people that compare modern results to similar studies done in the 1970s (or even as far back as the 1950s). There are very interesting comparisons of people who are religious and those who are not, for example. Richer people generally seem to be happier in a society than poorer people.


One of the conclusions from these studies that have been drawn by some is that people do not appear to have become any happier over time, particularly since the 1970s. This has led to the so-called Prosperity Paradox (or Easterlin’s Paradox, after its originator) which says that after a certain amount of material comfort or wealth has been achieved, you do not become happier by acquiring any more. One way of exampling this is so-called ‘hedonic adaptation’. When you buy a better car it makes you happy for a while but you become used to it – ‘adapted’ – and then it doesn’t make you happy.


Another phrase used is social emulation or comparison. The absolute amount of wealth is not a gauge of happiness but the wealth one has relative to others can be. For example, if you have £10,000 when most people have £5,000, you feel more contented than if you have £20,000 while others generally have £40,000.


These observations raise legitimate psychological concerns but some, particularly Richard Layard, the UK’s leading exponent of happiness public policies, go much farther. They say that these studies prove that wealth is not worth striving for and that being more prosperous can be a bad thing. One may be stuck on a ‘hedonic treadmill’ and becoming more unhappy.


The political conclusions drawn from the happiness studies advanced by those such as Layard are wrong for three reasons.
 First, and least important, the data from the questionnaires is very variable and some may be a bit dodgy. Some surveys had only three choices of answer while some had 10. Some surveys from the 1950s and the 1970s had different questions used than those done today and there are some problems of correlating the results in statistical terms.


Much more importantly, regardless of the amount of happiness, greater affluence, popular prosperity, has had enormous benefits for most people – longer life, lower infant mortality, bigger, healthier people and higher education are just a few examples. The current generation is better off than any previous generation in history. Economic growth, the creation of wealth, has been a key factor in us having more culture, science and arts. The narrow focus on happiness ignores all these benefits.


For example, there is widely considered to be a demographic problem in that there are not enough people working to look after the growing number of elderly. This is nonsense – the richer we all are the more able we are to afford a decent standard of living for the elderly. Any shortfall would be due to insufficient prosperity, not a problem of demographics.


Furthermore, the mainstream response to climate change is to propose limits on economic growth. In so far as there are problems with the climate they would be dealt with better by the allocation of more resources and better technology that suggests a need for greater affluence rather than limits upon it.


The political conclusion drawn from the study of happiness is that happiness can somehow be a policy goal. Many worthwhile things, such as having children, for example, do not necessarily make you happy. Being good at sports may briefly make you happy when you win, but the long hours of training – getting up to run in the early-morning drizzle – don’t make you happy. It’s still worthwhile. It takes a long time to learn a language and it is a struggle but it’s worth it in the end. There’s no happiness there either.


To draw the conclusion that happiness should be the public goal is a bit like saying that, since women have attained a more equal role in society and gone out of the home to work, and they have not become happier, we should take the ludicrous position that they may as well stop working.


Most people are quite happy. About 85% of Americans say they are happy and, if the statistics can be trusted, about 70% of the people in the world say they are happy. Should the number of happy people be increased to include those who are grieving the loss of a loved one, those who have a legitimate reason to be unhappy? It is surely rational not to be happy about four billion people in the world living on less than $2 a day.


To focus on happiness as a political goal is to be happy with what you’ve got, happy with the way things are. Political happiness can seem humanistic but leads to a sort of nasty self-obsession. Happiness should not be a political goal and we should strive to increase popular prosperity.


Chair’s questions
:

Dan Travis, The Brighton Salon’s director, asked if Daniel thought the focus on creating happiness as a public policy somehow promoted vulnerability. Life is complicated and the simplification of it to happiness may have consequences such as discouraging the development of resilience in the individual. Happiness is a serious question. In his job as a tennis coach of children he is supposed to be promoting their happiness and raising their self-esteem. The tendency in policy generally is that we should all be happy in our work and social lives, which would appear to assume we are vulnerable to unhappiness.


Daniel replied that one of the conclusions drawn from the statistics on mental health was that economic growth makes people insane. However, the statistics that show huge increases in mental illness in the last 20 years can partly be explained by an expanded definition of mental illness to include those who are a bit miserable. The government partly encourages vulnerability by questioning self-esteem but it also encourages an inward-looking attitude where other people don’t matter so much.


There is some pressure for the teaching of happiness in schools to be made part of the national curriculum. The Harvard positive psychology course was that college’s most popular course until very recently (and how much does that cost? asked a wag in the audience). Daniel said to teach happiness would degrade education. How could it be taught and how could it be taught without encouraging self-obsession through the focus on self-esteem?


Audience questions and points:


Dave quoted the philosopher who said that life without suffering would be life without meaning and he saw happiness as a neutral qualifier of progress, but surely achievement would not be a much better indicator. Rob asked how new this focus on happiness was. The oldest philosophical question is: What is the good life? There were historic answers to this question that differed and there was a distinct nineteenth century answer: the most happiness for the most number of people. Also, what is behind the drive to use happiness in this way?


Nick asked how happiness was actually measured and how its nature was actually worked out. He had been working all over Africa and on his return found that people did seem less happy than in poorer Africa. There were fewer children than in Africa and fewer happy children everywhere in Europe than in Africa. On public transport, it struck him how detached people seemed from each other as they individualistically sat in their own space, listening to their iPods. Europeans seem to care less about each other than Africans, as one can see by the long greetings that Africans have and enquiries after the health of family, friends and livestock.


Steve felt we needed solutions to the individual infantilism in the west, a way of finding fulfilment in our lives that was independent of the government. Luke pointed out that happiness was now on the under-threes’ curriculum in childcare. Government policy aimed at healthy and happy children seemed to encourage misery. Matt said that as the people achieved some prosperity they did not then associate it with the good life. People saw the good life as doing meaningful work and the government hoped to succeed in giving the illusion that people’s work is meaningful.


Confused, he said, by linguistic relativism, Tudor asked if people were indeed best-placed to judge their own happiness. Could there be an empirical judgment based on cultural expectations of what happiness is? A new face at the salon said Britney Spears has everything and doesn’t seem very happy. Individuals surely have very different choices to make about their happiness, she pointed out.
 Jo said that happiness is something we grow up hoping to achieve although not necessarily experiencing it in immediate existence. You assume your children will make you happy but you don’t perceive having children in those terms, as a kind of balance of happiness that is experienced.


A man near the back (sorry I didn’t catch the name) said that power comes with prosperity and that, once material needs are met, the pursuit of power and its acquisition could make one happier. In this way the Prime Minister should be as happy as the day is long!


Daniel Ben Ami’s responses:


On the technical measures of happiness, Daniel said that happiness was a huge and diverse market with many different kinds of data and scales, much of it difficult to assimilate. The subjective surveys taken do vary a great deal and that was partly the point. But what could be said of the evidence of these surveys is that they seem to indicate that people do not become subjectively happier after they have achieved a certain level of material wealth.


Individualism was certainly seen as a problem in Europe but it is not necessarily related to the affluence of Europeans. There is no cause and effect between the two things. For example, it is assumed by some that we have less time in Europe and we’re always working but, when our long education and retirement are considered, in the long term the statistics show we spend less time at work than people in developing countries and that our work is not of the backbreaking kind.


Happiness is a good thing for psychologists to study and I have no problem with that, Daniel said. I object to happiness as a government policy. Economic indicators are imperfect but they give a good early indication of the nature of social progress. Happiness itself should be an individual decision and the government intervention in people’s minds is an intrusive effort to control people’s moods.


The happiest people surveyed are those in the US who are religious, Republican and bigoted! This sort of research is very interesting in the light it throws on human psychology but it’s not the basis for government policy.


What is new? The declaration of American independence was only a right to pursue happiness – it didn’t make it compulsory. It was created as a basis for governing society whereas now the discussion is about a self-obsessed withdrawal. I was struck by a British student featured in a TV programme who had been sent to India to work in a clothing factory. Scornful of the conditions that she found, she said that she had come to India to find out about herself. Shouldn’t she have gone there to find out about Indians?


Audience responses
:

A young man said that surely the effect of travel was to find out about one’s self and to learn about other people and that the two are the same thing. Steve said that narcissism could be seen every day in Heat magazine and that it was a part of human psychology. Self-awareness was necessary to achieve higher levels of development and if you don’t know yourself you don’t know anything. Individualism is not all negative.


A new face, Sue, said she had grown up in an anti-Thatcher and Reagan household in the 1980s. The Gordon Gecko character from Wall Street, who said ‘greed is good’, seemed to have become a modern icon. The ‘lunch is for wimps’ outlook seems to have been adopted. Nadia asked if Daniel’s objection to striving for happiness was aesthetic or moral. Dave said that concentrating on happiness rejects much of human experience and much of the creativity of humanity. Rob said great art is not about happiness and that suffering and striving are vital things. To try to encourage happiness is to adopt and attitude of patting people on the head.


Ann questioned the assumption that we are better off in Europe. Is prosperity measured properly in terms of economics and would progress, considered as a concept rather than a fact, actually show we were better off? Another man near the back said it was surely possible to pursue one’s own happiness by the helping of others. There was no necessary contradiction between helping others and pursuing happiness individually. Matt said individualism isn’t necessary for prosperity to continue.


Daniel Ben Ami’s final remarks
:

You can measure prosperity in many ways. The gross domestic product has increased dramatically. Since the 1970s many more people have telephones and central heating, for example. If anything, measures such as GDP underestimate the benefits of economic growth, which the new proponents of happiness say make us unhappy.


Individualism is not the problem per se, but a certain kind of individualism, that sees the self as a victim, is not positive. The autonomous individual is good, and a better component part of collective groups. Self-improvement once had a key form that meant striving for prosperity. Happiness as self-improvement has no striving because to be happy one must be happy with what there is.


Thanks to Daniel Ben Ami for an excellent introduction and thoughts were provoked.

Labels: happiness, speeches

A useful reminder in today’s Observer (London) that Bhutan is not the haven of happiness that many of its admirers assume. Bhutan’s Buddhist regime is often lauded for making Gross National Happiness rather than economic growth a national goal. However, the article tells us that:

“behind its facade of otherworldly charm, Bhutan holds a secret. Twenty years ago, its monarchy, threatened by an increase in Bhutan's ethnic Nepalese population, hit on a simple solution: ethnic cleansing. Families who had been living in Bhutan for generations were stripped of their citizenship. One hundred thousand Hindu Bhutanese - around one sixth of the country's entire population - were driven into exile and their land redistributed among the Drukpas, Bhutan's Buddhist elite.”

There are also fears of another wave of expulsions while the ethnic Nepalese within the country suffer systematic discrimination. Non-citizens are denied the right to vote, freedom of movement, the ability to start a business and education.

Labels: happiness

Today’s New York Times has an article calling “Easterlin’s paradox” into question. The paradox is named after Richard Easterlin, then of the University of Pennsylvania, who argued (PDF) in 1974 that economic growth does not necessarily increase happiness. At a Brookings Institution event last week two economists evidently presented a rebuttal (PDF) of the paradox. From their reassessment of the data they conclude that extra wealth does bring greater happiness after all.

To me whether or not economic growth brings individual happiness is not a key question. Growth should be promoted on the grounds of the objective benefits it brings society. It is also perverse to attach too high a value to happiness. There are many activities which are worthwhile that do not bring happiness and there are many reasons not to be happy about contemporary society.

Labels: happiness

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has started producing newsletters to promote its project on “measuring the progress of societies” (see 24 June 2007 post). The welcome note on the first issue discusses the January annoucement by Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, of a commission to investigate alternative measures of economic progress and social progress for France. It will be chaired by Joseph Stiglitz and advised by Amartya Sen.

Labels: economics, happiness, progress

I will be speaking on happiness at the Brighton Salon on the evening of 23 April.

Labels: happiness, speeches

BBC online decided to lead its news coverage of Britain’s latest Social Trends report (PDF) with Easterlin’s paradox: that beyond a certain point happiness does not rise with incomes. Given that Richard Easterlin formulated the paradox in the early 1970s, and it has been repeated many times since, it is hard to see how it qualifies as news. However, there is lots of useful empirical material in the full report.

Labels: affluenza, happiness, progress

A perverse footnote to the recent immigration debate in Britain. Richard Layard, otherwise known as Labour’s “happiness czar”, was a member of the House of Lords committee which produced a report arguing that immigration is of no net economic benefit to Britain. In effect it was supporting the call for tighter immigration controls. No concern for the likely impact of such a move on the happiness of immigrants or potential immigrants.

Labels: economics, happiness

The New York Review of Books (3 April) has an article by Sue Halpern, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, reviewing books on happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, Daniel Gilbert, Jerome Kagan, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Eric Wilson. There is too much to summarise in a short note but points worth noting include the fact that most people around the world are happy:

“When happiness researcher Ed Diener, the past president of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, synthesized 916 surveys of over a million people in forty-five countries, he found that, on average, people placed themselves at seven on the zero-to-ten scale.”

However, despite the fact that we are generally happy we are apparently obsessed with becoming happier still:

“Still, since nearly all of us say we're happy (especially if we live in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, and Switzerland, which are among the happiest of happy places), it is somewhat disconcerting to observe the burgeoning library of "get happy" books.”

Labels: happiness

Spiked has published a review essay by me on books which see affluence and consumerism as leading to mental illness.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, review, spiked

Today’s Something Understood programme on BBC Radio 4, presented by Mark Tully, was unwittingly revealing about the thrust of the happiness discussion. Its main emphasis is that people should be happy with what they have got rather than try to achieve more.

The case was put by the presenter and most articulately by Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington College (a posh “public school”) in an article in the Independent (19 April 2006) quoted in the programme:

“The lessons will, I believe, be highly moral. The pupils will learn how to look after their bodies well and how not to abuse them. A healthy body is far more likely to lead to a happier mind than one which has been abused with bad food, drink, cigarettes and drugs.

“Good relationships, which lie at the heart of anyone's happy life, are based on a strong moral code of caring for the other and being loyal. Abusing others, either with words, physically or by inappropriate sexual relations, does not produce happiness but rather the opposite.

“The pursuit of true happiness is also a deeply spiritual quest: the heart of spirituality is about the transcendence of one's own self and the forming of deeply loving and compassionate relationships with others. Neither do I see these lessons as selfish. Ask any parent. Would they sooner see their children happy and fulfilled, even at the cost of achieving slightly less, or stressed out and vexed in the pursuit of ever-higher goals which always seem to be beyond their reach? Happiness I believe lies in knowing one's own limitations, accepting oneself for what one is, and being proud of what one achieves, at whatever level that might be.”

So for Seldon, as for the other happiness gurus, happiness means acceptance of limits. It is a deeply conservative message.

Meanwhile, I read in the Harvard Crimson that introduction to economics has retaken its position as the most popular course at the university from positive psychology.

Labels: happiness

The backlash against an obsessive attachment to happiness seems to be gaining ground. An article in the December 2007 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science evidently argues that moderate happiness is better than maximising happiness. A press release from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign quotes Ed Diener, one of the authors of the study, explaining:

“Happy people are more likely (than unhappy people) to get married, are more likely to stay married, are more likely to think their marriage is good,” Diener said. “They’re more likely to volunteer. They’re more likely to be rated highly by their supervisor and they’re more likely to make more money.”

Happy people are also, on average, healthier than unhappy people and they live longer, Diener said. And, he said, some research indicates that happiness is a cause of these sources of good fortune, not just a result.

“But there is a caveat, and that is to say: Do you then have to be happier and happier" How happy is happy enough"”

The research team began with the prediction that mildly happy people (those who classify themselves as eights and nines on the 10-point life satisfaction scale) may be more successful in some realms than those who consider themselves 10s. This prediction was based on the idea that profoundly happy people may be less inclined to alter their behavior or adjust to external changes even when such flexibility offers an advantage.

Their analysis of World Values Survey data affirmed that prediction.

“The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale),” the authors wrote, “but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale).”

The 10s earned significantly less money than the eights and nines. Their educational achievements and political engagement were also significantly lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.

In the more social realms, however, the 10s were the most successful, engaging more often in volunteer activities and maintaining more stable relationships.

Labels: affluenza, happiness

Newsweek has a particularly interesting article on the backlash against the obsession with happiness (2 February). This blog has already mentioned some of the key references but it adds more as well as some illuminating details:

* Allan V Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (see 22 December 2007 post). In the foreword Robert Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the psychiatrist who oversaw the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, expresses doubts about the medicalising of sadness: "To be human means to naturally react with feelings of sadness to negative events in one's life".

* Eric Wilson Against Happiness (see 17 January post).

* Also Ed Diener, a veteran happiness researcher, has evidently co-written a book with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, called Rethinking Happiness. It is due for publication later this year.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

Eric G Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, has written a wonderful essay on the value of melancholy as opposed to happiness in the Chronicle Review (18 January). It is adapted from his book Against Happiness which is about to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in America (and is also reviewed in the issue of the Economist that is about to be published).

He starts with the observation that, in recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, almost 85 percent of Americans said they were very happy or at least pretty happy. Then he goes on to argue:

“Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?”

He later goes on:

“Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.”

At the end of the article also reproduces the “Ode on Melancholy” (1919) by John Keats.

Labels: affluenza, apocalyptic, book, happiness

Brendan O’Neill has an article on the BBC online website on Oliver James’s The Selfish Capitalist. After letting James explain his argument it quotes myself and Simon Wessely, professor of epidemiological and liaison psychiatry at King's College, London, giving a contrary view.

I will leave readers to look up my remarks if they want to but Wessely is worth quoting at length:

‘[He] believes that cultural factors, not capitalism itself, have created a situation where more people define themselves as mentally ill.

‘"In this country, rates of actual mental illness are not increasing," he says. "Studies by the Office for National Statistics, repeated over a decade, do not show an increase in all neurotic disorders, depressive disorders or depression."

‘"It is true that rates of self-reported symptoms are on the rise," says Wessely, but that has to be seen in a context where "more human experiences" are seen as illnesses nowadays.

‘"In my trade, for example, states of sadness are now seen as 'depression', shyness has become 'social phobia', and all sorts of variations in childhood temperament, personality, emotions and behaviour have become characterised as diseases that need treatment, be it Asperger's autism or ADHD."

‘Mr Wessely believes that this "therapy culture" means that people now regard as abnormal things that "previous generations regarded as part and parcel of normal variations in personality and emotion". So what earlier generations saw as an everyday struggle to make ends meet might now be referred to as stress or workaholism.

‘"I would lay the blame less at the door of Margaret Thatcher's selfish capitalism, and more at the door of Richard and Judy or Oprah," says Mr Wessely.’

Labels: affluenza, happiness, inequality

A new spin on growth scepticism from John Naish, a health journalist, in an extract from his book Enough in today’s Times (London). He takes two of the usual charges from the growth sceptic litany – humanity is destroying the environment and making it unhappy – and blames them on our primitive human brains.

The opening passage of the extract argues that: “Over the past decade, two facts have become increasingly obvious – that our ever-increasing consumption is wrecking the planet, and that continually chasing more stuff, more food and more entertainment no longer makes us any happier. Instead, levels of stress, obesity and dissatisfaction are spiralling.” Of course these may appear to be obvious “facts” to Naish but they are far from straightforward or beyond dispute.

However, Naish does not waste any time. The next passage gives his explanation for what he sees as our terrible social maladies: “So why is our culture still chasing, consuming, striving ever harder, even though we know in our sophisticated minds that it’s an unrewarding route to eco-geddon? New scientific studies are helping to reveal why. It’s our primitive brains. These marvellous machines got us down from the trees and around the world, through ice ages, famines, plagues and disasters, into our unprecedented era of abundance. But they never had to evolve an instinct that said, ‘enough’.”

By a few paragraphs down it is becoming pretty silly: “The desire-driven wiring of our primitive brains evolved in the Pleistocene era, between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago. It was moulded by half-starved hunter-gatherers and farmers whose crops frequently failed. Those who kept going survived to give us their yearning genes. That wanting instinct gets fixated on material goods. We evolved to desire possessions as no other creature does. Neolithic cave sites may partly explain why. Many contain millions of hand-axes – far more than cave-dwellers ever needed. Anthropologists believe that the best axes were not just prized tools, but precursors of Ferraris and Jimmy Choos. Owning Stone Age bling displayed your high reproductive value.”

So whereas the likes of Oliver James blame “selfish capitalism” for our alleged plight John Naish points to the primitive human brain as the culprit.

Labels: affluenza, book, consumption, environment, happiness

A feature in the January / February issue of Foreign Policy magazine suggests the idea of “affluenza” is pervasive in France rather than confined to America and Britain. Stefan Theil, Newsweek’s European economics editor, bases this claim on a study of official French textbooks:

‘ “Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities." ‘

Labels: affluenza, Europe, happiness

Matthew Taylor, a former senior adviser to Tony Blair and now chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, has an astute although ultimately misplaced article on the happiness debate in the New Statesman (3 January). His starting point is the widening gap between the private and public spheres:

“Pessimism is becoming an impediment to progressive politics. It is 50 years since J K Galbraith coined the phrase ‘private affluence and public squalor’; today, the dichotomy is between private hubris and public pessimism.”

Taylor’s solution to this problem is what he calls a “new collectivism”. However, what he misses is the need to challenge the low horizons of contemporary social debates. Missing out this stage in the process means that any new collective enterprise will simply be one of individuals with an exaggerated sense of vulnerability.

For example, Taylor ends his piece with a call to use the issue of climate change to help build a new collectivism (the first time he mentions global warming in the article):

“Tackling climate change offers a fascinating opportunity to interweave stories of action at the individual, community, national and international levels. This potential will be fulfilled only when we provide spaces for collective decision-making and action that speak to the same vision of collaboration, creativity and human fulfilment that progressives claim to be our destiny.”

Yet the mainstream discussion of climate change if a perfect example of low horizons in relation to what humans can achieve. It assumes we must limit the human impact on the environment and act primarily as individuals to reduce our consumption. The idea of boldly acting to develop technology and increase human control over nature is alien to the mainstream debate.

Labels: happiness, progress

The awful Oliver James has a new book out. The Selfish Capitalist (published by Vermilion) evidently argues that the model of capitalism in the Anglo-American countries has led to an explosion of mental illness. I have already reviewed James’s previous book (see menu bar on left) and will read his new one as soon as I get a chance.

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

The current Economist (19 December) has an article savaging those who romanticise hunter-gatherer societies. It argues against the view put forward by the likes of Jared Diamond that the development of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history.

Evidently in the 1970s some experts began to argue that the advent of agriculture led to a decline in human health – as people were short of protein and caught diseases from domestic animals – and the emergence of significant social inequalities. However, it now seems that hunter-gatherer societies were exceedingly violent:

“Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.” (For another reference to Keeley’s work see post of 30 July 2006. On living conditions before the Industrial Revolution see 14 August 2006 and 7 April 2007 posts).

The Economist also makes an interesting parallel with the Industrial Revolution:

“When rural peasants swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell of their birth.”

Labels: cities, happiness, health, inequality, progress