Ferraris for all

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, 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

By coincidence a review by Helene Guldberg on spiked echoes the points made in my 22 December post. She reviews Shyness by Christopher Lane, a Chicago-based research professor, which evidently shows how the definition of mental illness has widened considerably. Once again this broadening definition is reflected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. According to Guldberg:

“His [Lane’s] painstaking research shows how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of the psychiatric profession worldwide, has been transformed – by a handful of psychiatrists behind closed doors – from the thin handbook it was up until the 1980s into the hefty tome it is today, with hundreds of new, poorly specified and poorly researched syndromes being added.”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness, spiked

Will Wilkinson has reviewed a useful-sounding book in the December issue of Reason which rejects the view that material abundance is causing higher levels of depression. Allan V Horwitz and Jerome C Wakefield’s The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press) is a polemic against the arguments on depression put forward by the likes of Ed Diener and Martin Seligman. (Oliver James and Richard Layard have proposed similar arguments in Britain).

According to the review what has really happened is that the definition of depression has widened enormously to include many who are simply unhappy:

“According to Horwitz and Wakefield, ‘There are no obvious circumstances that would explain a recent upsurge in depressive disorder.’ The ranks of the depressed are bulging, they argue, because the clinical category fails to make the elementary distinction between normal, functional sadness and true mental disorder. The depression data are littered with false positives—jilted lovers, white-collar workers who missed out on a promotion, and kids nobody asked to the prom. People who are suffering but aren’t sick.”

This broadening definition of depression is reflected in the standard reference book on the subject:

“Since its third edition was published in 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the standard handbook used by clinicians to classify mental problems, has defined major depressive disorder with a complex checklist of symptoms. In order to meet the exigencies of 15-minute doctor’s visits and the needs of public health surveys, the few diagnostic qualifications calling for expert judgment were stripped away to produce a simple rule of categorization that family doctors, mental health epidemiologists, and even—or especially—computers can apply. To simplify only slightly, if you meet five of nine mundane requirements over the course of two weeks, you qualify as suffering from major depression. The checklist: a persistently low mood, a diminished interest or pleasure in almost everything, an increase or decrease in appetite leading to a gain or loss in weight, too much or too little sleep, fatigue or low energy, fidgetiness or listlessness, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, difficulty concentrating or indecisiveness, and thoughts of death, suicide, or an attempt of suicide.”

Labels: affluenza, book, happiness

Steve Salerno, the author of SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown, 2005), has an interesting article on the “happiness myth” in today’s Wall Street Journal. It discusses how the “pursuit of happiness” has become an American obsession. He is not talking about the term in the sense used by America’s Founding Fathers as part of a broader struggle for social progress. Instead it has become an expression of narcissism:

“Certain to end up under the trees of at least some Americans who don't already own it is that unparalleled tribute to wishful thinking, "The Secret," by Rhonda Byrne. The year's blockbuster best-seller-cum-cultural phenomenon sold six million books and DVDs on the strength of the belief that you can imagine your way to total fulfillment.

“Some of the season's hottest inspiration books, though not "how-to" in format, sell a similar message. Notable is Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," the story of one woman's (literal) journey to happiness, in which she decided to forsake the comfort of her known life for regions uncharted. "Eat, Pray, Love" reached the top of the best-seller lists after being blessed by Oprah. Self-help guru Tony Robbins, too, has lately been spamming his online community with holiday offers. Various Robbins products, and even tickets to his entry-level seminars on personal reinvention, will likely end up as stocking-stuffers.

“If the quest for joy doesn't take center stage at Christmas, it will surely pop up the following week. Typically, New Year's resolutions that don't involve weight loss have something to do with embracing change, choosing happiness, following your dreams, etc. We are consumed by the pursuit of happiness.”

Labels: America, book, happiness

I have just discovered that the monograph by Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod on Happiness, Economics and Public Policy (Published by the Institute of Economic Affairs) is available to download from the internet. The report is a useful critique of the mainstream happiness discussion from a technical economic perspective. It is also a good source on the key references on the subject. I am sharing a panel with Ormerod at the Royal Society of Arts on Thursday (see 30 November post).

Labels: economics, happiness, speeches

I will be part of a panel discussing happiness at a meeting at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London at lunchtime on 6 December. The other panellists are David Willets (a Conservative MP) and Paul Ormerod (an economist).

Labels: happiness, speeches

The happiness conference circuit is, it seems, incredibly busy. This coming Monday and Tuesday there is a two-day conference in Brussels on “Beyond GDP” hosted by the European Commission, European Parliament, Club of Rome, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and World Wildlife Fund. The conference can be watched by webcast via its website.

This conference follows a similar one organised by the OECD in Istanbul in June (see 24 June post). A glossy brochure (PDF) is now available on that one.

Then from 22-28 November in Thailand there is the third international conference on gross national happiness. It will be opened by the prime ministers of Bhutan and Thailand while partners included the Centre for Bhutan Studies and the Japan Foundation. This is followed from December 6-9 in San Diego by the 2007 conference of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies.

Next year there is an International Sociological Association conference in Barcelona from September 5-8 on the role of social indicators in public policy.

Labels: Asia, happiness, progress

The World Bank has endorsed Bhutan’s goal of pursuing Gross National Happiness rather than economic growth. India’s Economic Times quotes Graeme Wheeler, the World Bank's Managing Director (Operations), on a visit to the Himalayan nation, as saying: "Bhutan has been practising what other countries need to do. We need to extend the concept of gross national happiness to gross international happiness" (“Top World Bank official asks countries to emulate Bhutan”
11 November 2007).

I have previously criticised those who praise Bhutan in an article I wrote for spiked in May 2006. But at some point it deserves a more extensive expose.

Labels: Asia, happiness, spiked

On Monday I will be introducing a discussion of The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz at Nico Madonald’s Innovation Reading Circle. Details along with further readings and links are available at Nico’s website.

Labels: affluenza, consumption, happiness

For anyone who has wondered why Denmark often comes top in happiness league tables a Times (London) article (31 July) by Barry Turner tries to explain it. The key factors he identifies are trust, a celebration of ordinariness and exclusivity. Politicians and employers are trusted to do the best for the country as a whole. Genuine poverty is rare and the super-rich keep a low profile. And, despite appearances, the Danes keep some distance between themselves and others.

The article concludes:

“So there it is. Happiness is having a comfortable lifestyle without being swept up by competitive consumption. It is a feeling of belonging, of knowing and accepting the rules of the club. It is realising that leisure is to be enjoyed and that work is not the sole purpose of life. It is a cold beer on a long, warm summer evening.”

I am not sure how far this goes in explaining the apparent happiness of the Danes but it merits further examination.

Labels: happiness

Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod have written a useful critique of the idea that government policy should be focused on happiness in today’s Financial Times (“Don’t ask the state for happiness”). Their thoughts are based on their Happiness, Economics and Public Policy, which is published this week by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Among the useful points they make:

* Happiness data “show no correlation with a whole range of factors that might reasonably be thought to improve well-being, such as a massive increase in leisure time, a tendency to live longer and a decline in gender inequality.”

* “More sinisterly, the happiness view of the world has tendencies that are inherently anti-democratic. The expert with his or her clipboard and regressions knows better than ordinary people themselves what makes them happy. So local democratic or individual decisions can be overridden with a clean conscience.”

* “GNP is not an all-encompassing measure of welfare; it simply measures the size of the economy.”

However, they do not go as far as Michael Savage in explicitly rejecting happiness as a worthy goal for human action (see 11 July post).

Labels: happiness

I have belatedly discovered a great letter by Michael Savage, an investment banker, criticising the idea that happiness is a desirable goal for humans to pursue. It was published in the Financial Times on 28 June. I have reproduced it in full below.

Sir, Even if "emotional resilience" and "the habits of optimism" can be taught ( "Why it is worthwhile teaching children well-being", Anthony Seldon June 26), I do not want to learn them. I am even more repelled by the freakish idea of being taught how to "run my body optimally". What Dr Seldon takes as pathological symptoms are more commonly and correctly viewed as part of the spice of life, sometimes dragging us down, sometimes pushing us forward. Trying things out and sometimes making "sub-optimal" choices for ourselves is better education than this.

In practice we knowingly devote most of our time to things that we do not expect to bring us happiness. Writing articles on happiness - and letters responding to them - is worthwhile as part of a conversation about the ends we ought to pursue, but does not make us happy. Only the most freakish children find school "fun". And one finding from the research on happiness to which Dr Seldon refers is that raising children makes people unhappy. But raising children, pursuing careers, observing religious strictures and researching happiness are all aspects of life to which we may devote ourselves for rewards other than hedonism.

If happiness really is the chief human good, we should supplement happiness teaching with additional investment in pharmacological research to find the best drugs. But Dr Seldon is wrong. People who are always happy are dull, and the hedonistic life is shallow and unrewarding. Education is partly about training us to see beyond the merely entertaining and consider more inspiring and worthy ends.

Labels: happiness

It is easy to get confused by the publication of two recent books by authors called Robert Frank on the subject of wealth and inequality in America. Robert H Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell in New York state, has written a book called Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (University of California Press). Robert L Frank, a journalist on the Wall Street Journal, has penned Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (Crown).

Robert H Frank is a journalistically sharper version of Britain’s Professor Richard Layard. Like Layard he has impressive academic credentials, including having co-written a book with Ben Bernanke, now chairman of America’s Federal Reserve. And like Layard he prefers happiness to economic growth in the developed world - although he was several years ahead of Layard in writing a book on the subject. He is also a far more engaging writer than his dreary British counterpart.

This week Falling Behind was favourably cited by Madeleine Bunting in a comment article in the Guardian. No doubt it will be mentioned many more times in the coming weeks.

Strangely Bunting refers to the other Robert Frank in the same article without mentioning him by name. But an extract of his book on “Richistan” was published in the Sunday Times while it was also reviewed in today’s Financial Times.

Labels: America, book, happiness, inequality

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is organising a substantial conference in Istanbul this coming week on “measuring and fostering the progress of societies”. It is an important step in a trend to move away from economic indicators such as GDP as measures of progress towards well-being indicators (see, for example, posts of 4 April and 31 May). Among the many subjects being discussed are happiness (Richard Layard will be there), what constitutes progress, biodiversity, climate change, governance and global cities. The conference is being organised in co-operation with the European Commission, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the United Nations and the World Bank. It follows on from an earlier conference in Palermo in 2004. A large amount of useful information, including background papers, (PDF) is available at the OECD website.

Labels: cities, economics, happiness, progress

Professor Richard Layard has elaborated on his views on teaching happiness in schools. Writing (PDF) in the summer 2007 edition of CentrePiece, a magazine from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, he argues that schools should place great emphasis on developing good and happy people (see also 9 May 2007 post). The argument is firmly rooted in his book on happiness. His practical conclusions for schools include:

• It should be an explicit aim of every school to teach character and moral education.
• Each secondary school should have specialists in life skills.
• The movement must be grounded in science – specifically positive psychology.
• The curriculum should include managing feelings; loving and serving others; appreciating beauty; love, sex and parenting; work and money; a critical approach to media; political participation and moral philosophy.

The magazine also includes a link to a recent lecture (PDF) that Layard gave on the teaching of values.

Unfortunately the criticism of Layard has been limited. The Financial Times (FT) published a critical leader on 14 June but it did not go far enough. The FT’s reasons for objecting were mainly practical:

“The first problem is that happiness is not a teachable subject. It is famously elusive and may be unattainable. Pursuing it as an aim is difficult since it is more readily gained as a side-product of some other achievement or condition.

“Happiness is also too varied to teach: a single set of tools will not work for everyone. One pupil may derive great pleasure from being kind to others - another from being the person on the receiving end of that kindness. Where one child may be happily fulfilled taking on a tough challenge, another may find more happiness with a less driven approach.

“There is also the question of finding time. The national curriculum already includes provision for personal, social and health education, up to the age of 16, which takes pupils through issues such as forming relationships, taking part in activities with others and discovering what makes them tick.”

However, this fails to question the desirability of transforming education from imparting knowledge to a therapeutic attempt to manage the emotional life of schoolchildren. It is likely to encourage children to be self-obsessed while lowering educational standards at the same time. Frank Furedi has previously written on this topic for spiked.

Labels: happiness, spiked

My comment in this week’s Fund Strategy looks at the “growth and responsibility” motto of last week’s G8 summit. It is a classic growth sceptic formulation.

The slogan for last week's G8 summit of world leaders in Germany was "growth and responsibility". The more closely it is examined the stranger it sounds.

Economic growth has benefits that should be obvious. It has allowed humanity to lengthen life expectancy considerably, slash infant mortality, dramatically reduce working hours and correspondingly increase leisure time. It is closely related to improvements in science and technology, which can also enhance our lives. In a world where almost half the population still lives on less than $2 a day the benefits to be gained are massive. Even those in the developed world could benefit from more resources.

The difficult bit is the "responsibility" part. What does it mean? A close examination of the discussion shows that it refers to the acceptance of self-imposed limits on growth. In other words growth might be OK in certain restricted circumstances but it is viewed as essential to accept limits on what can be achieved. The language is truly Orwellian.

The reasons given for the need for limits are typically environmental and social. It is argued that too much growth can damage the environment and that a growth-oriented consumer society makes people miserable. Another contention is that growth leads to inequalities, which themselves cause problems.

None of these arguments is particularly convincing. Typically as the economy becomes more developed the resources become available to improve the environment. For example, a noteworthy news story last week was a report from the Environment Agency that showed toxic pollution in Britain was at its lowest level for a century.

The argument about inequality is similarly misplaced. It may be the case that growth can lead to greater inequality - it often depends how you measure it - but the general trend is for absolute living standards to rise. To the extent there is a problem the solution is to work out how to have even more growth rather than holding back on development.

Perhaps the strangest argument of all is on happiness. It should be clear that there is no necessary link between prosperity and subjective well-being. But the argument for mass affluence is based primarily on its objective benefits rather than the separate question of people's feelings.

The "growth and responsibility" motto should be rejected. Adding caveats to the need for growth is a retrograde step.

Labels: environment, Fund Strategy, growth, happiness, inequality

I have come across so much on happiness in the last few days that I will have to resort to relaying it in bullet point form:

* Happiness debate in the Financial Times. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, had a belated review of Richard Layard’s 2005 book on happiness published in Wednesday (“Why progressive taxation is not the route to happiness” 6 June). A particularly interesting point he made was that the attack on happiness can be seen as a challenge to modernity itself. Developments such as improvement in life expectancy, the liberation of women from household drudgery or easier divorce do not increase reported happiness.

Two book hitters in the happiness debate replied to Wolf with letters. Layard says that there are some aspects of modernity that should be ameliorated. He gives levels of trust as an example. Meanwhile, Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick and well-known happiness advocate, makes the familiar point that reported happiness has not increased over time in the rich countries over the last few decades. He goes on to state: “That graph could usefully be pinned up in every minister’s and president’s office”. Why he thinks it should be such a decisive argument is not clear.

* Debating Andrew Oswald at Debating Matters. Talking of Oswald, I will be debating him at the national final of the Debating Matters competition in London on June 29. We will both be “expert witnesses” debating whether happiness should be a goal of national policy. Later on the same motion will be debated by the high school students who are taking part in the competition. In conjunction with the discussion the Debating Matters team has produced a useful topic guide for the debate. (Last year I debated John Hilary of War on Want on globalisation at the same event).

* Quoted in Financieele Dagblad. Yesterday I was also quoted on the happiness debate in a substantial feature in the leading Dutch financial daily newspaper by Esther van Rijswijk. I am hoping to get it translated.

* Paradox of Prosperity essay republished. My spiked essay on the “paradox of prosperity” is to be republished by the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India. The organisation is publishing a book in its professional reference series which is provisionally entitled: Prosperity Index: Assessing Growth Anew. It is due out in November.

* Happiness expert website. Ruud Veenhoven, one of the world’s leading experts on happiness, has a website: here. Evidently he also argues that a “paradox of prosperity” does not exist.

* Parenting-happiness link. A parenting expert made the point to me yesterday that the debates on happiness and parenting are linked. The likes of Oliver James argue there is a clear link between women not looking after children and the outbreak of “affluenza” in society.

Labels: affluenza, growth, happiness, india, media appearances, modernity, speeches, spiked

Deutsche Bank has published a substantial report on happiness. Stefan Bergheim, one of the bank’s economists, uses a statistical “cluster analysis” to identify what he says are 10 “indicators for a happy society”:

1)High degree of trust in fellow citizens

2)Low amount of corruption

3)Low unemployment

4)High level of education

5)High income

6)High employment rate of older people

7)Small shadow economy

8)Extensive economic freedom

9)Low employment protection

10)High birth rate

Strangely, America and Britain are classified by Deutsche Bank as happy societies. This is in contrast to much of the internal debate within these countries which sees them as unhappy.

It is also notable that the paper argues that happiness and life satisfaction should be explicit policy objectives. So now we have a bank saying that governments should concern themselves with making us happy – presumably whether we like it or not.

Labels: corruption, Europe, happiness

A conference is going on in Oxford, apparently unnoticed by the British media, on how to measure happiness. It is not another dusty academic conference but includes Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, and Francois Bourguignon, the World Bank chief economist, as speakers. The event is organised by a new think tank: the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.

It looks like the conference could lead the way for the adoption of well-being indicators worldwide. According to a report in the Times of India (30 May) the event will delve into questions such as meaning of life, autonomy, competence, desire to feel connected with others, overall life satisfaction, domain-specific life satisfaction and happiness.

Labels: development, economics, happiness

The Christian Science Monitor has a review of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (Times Books). McKibben is a prolific writer, climate change campaigner (see 2 April 2007 post), active Methodist and leading growth sceptic.

Judging by the summary of his book it contains little that is new. Environmental limits, happiness and inequality are all there. However, it is likely to be an articulate synthesis:

“McKibben's main thesis: ‘Growth is no longer making most people wealthier, but instead is generating inequality and insecurity.’

“Growth ‘is bumping up against physical limits" [peak oil and global warming] so that continuing to expand the economy may be impossible and possibly even dangerous.’

“Then there's this wild card: ‘New research from many quarters has started to show that even when growth does make us wealthier, the greater wealth no longer makes us happier.’"

The review also puts McKibben in the tradition of other American writers who advocate greater communal living and reducing the human impact on the environment including: Hazel Henderson, Lester Brown, Herman Daly, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Rowe, Sarah van Gelder, Duane Elgin, and Vicki Robin. Arguably Henry David Thoreau and even EF Schumacher (although he was a Briton of German origin) belong there too.

Labels: America, book, growth, happiness, inequality

The debate I took part in on the “Battle for Affluence” at the Battle of Ideas conference on 28 October 2006 can now be viewed on video. It fears me along with Avner Offer of Oxford University, Mark Easton on the BBC, Nicholas Crafts of Warwick University and Jenny Davey of the Sunday Times. More details can be seen at my post of 5 November 2006.

Labels: affluenza, growth, happiness, speeches