OT: Happiness

[Guest guest]

From today's Washington Post:

Financial Hardship and the Happiness Paradox

The unstated assumption is that growth will lift the gloom and, in the long

run, make America happier. If that's true, then it ought to follow that

America should be much happier today than it was a generation ago -- it is

much wealthier.

The question of whether the country is happier today than it was in, say,

1970 turns out to have a surprisingly good empirical answer. For nearly four

decades, researchers have regularly asked a large sample of Americans a

simple question: " Taken all together, how would you say things are these

days -- would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too

happy? "

The results are sobering. Even before the current economic downturn, the

United States, on average, was less happy than it was in 1970, even though

it is vastly richer.

Economist A. Easterlin at the University of Southern California was

among the first to notice the paradoxical disconnect between a nation's

economic growth and the growth of its happiness. The " Easterlin Paradox " was

once thought to be limited to rich, Western countries -- but researcher

Hilke Brockmann and his colleagues at s University in Bremen, Germany,

recently showed that even as China has experienced extraordinary growth

between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Chinese who " described themselves

as very happy plummeted from 28 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2000. "

Recognizing this phenomenon, the mountain kingdom of Bhutan -- which is

being celebrated this week in the sonian's Folklife Festival on the

Mall -- has decided to build its national policies not on improving its

gross national product but rather on a metric called " gross national

happiness. "

Easterlin attributes the phenomenon of happiness levels not keeping pace

with economic gains to the fact that people's desires and expectations

change along with their material fortunes. Where an American in 1970 may

have once dreamed about owning a house, he or she might now dream of owning

two. Where people once dreamed of buying a new car, they now dream of buying

a luxury model.

" People are wedded to the idea that more money will bring them more

happiness, " Easterlin said. " When they think of the effects of more money,

they are failing to factor in the fact that when they get more money they

are going to want even more money. When they get more money, they are going

to want a bigger house. They never have enough money, but what they do is

sacrifice their family life and health to get more money. "

The irony is that health and the quality of personal relationships are among

the most potent predictors of whether people report they are happy -- and

they are often the two things people sacrifice in their pursuit of greater

wealth. Nations, Easterlin argues, make the same mistake as people.

" In each case, the tendency is to think that more money is going to be the

solution to all your problems, " Easterlin said. " The tendency is to allocate

excessive amounts of your resources to getting more money, to pursue

economic growth if you are a country or to increase your income if you are

an individual. . . . The result is you are pursuing a goal that is ever

receding. "

Not everyone agrees with Easterlin and his

economic-growth-is-not-the-way-to-happiness theory. Ruut Veenhoven, a

sociologist in the Netherlands and the director of the World Database of

Happiness, argues that wealth is actually a very reliable predictor of

happiness. If you take a snapshot of people in different countries, he

argues, the data shows that people in Denmark, Switzerland and Austria

report being happier than people in the Philippines, India and Iran, and the

people in those nations report being happier than those in Armenia, Ukraine

and Zimbabwe.

Veenhoven has even come up with a measure similar to one used by public

health officials to measure the burden of disease -- how many years of

happiness a person might enjoy in different countries. The Swiss apparently

have the highest number of " happy life years " -- 63.9 -- while Zimbabweans

have the least -- 11.5. People in the United States have an average

happiness of 57 happy life years.

Some of the difference between Easterlin's and Veenhoven's conclusions has

to do with the difference between taking snapshots of the data vs. taking a

video. In the snapshots, wealth and happiness do seem to go hand in hand.

But over time, in the videos, the connection seems to disintegrate.

Easterlin does not dispute that people in Denmark report being happier than

those in Zimbabwe. But he does dispute the implication -- that the Danes are

happier because they are wealthier.

" The Danes have social welfare policies directed toward some of the most

salient concerns of families -- their health, care for the aged, child

care, " he said. " If you ask why the Danes are happier, an alternative

hypothesis is they have a set of public policies that deal more immediately

with people's fundamental concerns. "