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The
world, despite many setbacks,
is
becoming happier
By JONATHAN
POWER
December 7 2000
LONDON - Al Gore, facing political defeat in an
election that appears to have been stolen, certainly
knows what unhappiness is. George W. Bush and his mother
clearly know the contrary feeling. "Gosh," Barbara Bush
told CBS television, "It was great to be the mother of
the president for 30 minutes". Unlike the rest of her
tough-blooded brood she is known as a modest woman.
Perhaps that was sufficient for her. After all every
sensible person knows that moments of peak happiness
don't last for much longer than half an hour
anyway.
Yet high moments aside do we know what happiness is?
Is the world becoming a happier place? Are we happier
than our parent's or grandparent's generation? What could
give us a little more happiness?
I recall twenty-five years ago an article on the
subject published by Geraldine Norman, the art saleroom
correspondent of the London Times. I haven't seen it
bettered. She had just been to Africa for her honeymoon
and being a rather bookish sort of a girl took with her
the Penguin introduction to psychology and books on
statistical game theory, anthropology, economics and
comparative religion. After all this heavy reading, no
doubt interspersed with long walks up the paths that
stretch aside the Victoria Falls and, I suppose, some
canoodling with her new husband, she came up with six
principal factors that appeared to be universal
requirements for a happy life:
1) Understanding of your environment and how to
control it
2) Social support from family and friends
3) Species drive satisfaction, in particular sex and
parental drive
4) Satisfying of drives contributing to physical
well-being- eating, sleep, exercise etc.
5) Satisfaction of aesthetic and sensory drives
6) Satisfaction of the exploratory drive- creativity,
discovery and, one should add for the likes of Messrs
Bush and Gore, the pursuit of political power
She then weighted these, dividing one hundred points
between them, giving the most points to physical well
being. "Better red than dead", she wrote at the time of
the Vietnam War. Next she looked at individual countries
and, on deciding how much they had of each virtue,
multiplied the total. In this somewhat arbitrary but
engaging way she decided that Botswana, then a
ridiculously poor country, scored higher than
Britain.
Since then there have been numerous attempts to
quantify happiness or, at least, progress. My favourite
for the last decade has been the Human Development Index,
thought up by the Pakistani economist, the late Mahbub ul
Haq and brought up to date every year by the United
Nations Development Programme. Essentially it tries to
measure the rate of progress for countries not, as is
traditional done, by looking at national income but by
substituting the yardstick of quality of life. Thus
momentum in improving life expectancy, infant mortality,
literacy and the status of women become the key criteria.
Not surprisingly, Canada, Japan and the |Scandinavian
countries end up trumping the United States, the richest
country in terms of average incomes.
Now comes a thoughtful analysis in the current issue
of the British journal, Prospect, by an American writer,
Robert Wright. Provocatively, he compares happiness in
the Third World with that of the rich world. "Indonesian
workers want to raise their income by moving from farm
fields to Nike factories. Nike customers want, well, they
want a shoe that has not just a generic "Air Sole"(old
hat) but a "Tuned Air Unit" in the heel and "Zoom Air" in
the forefoot.
His thesis is straightforward: "Once a nation achieves
a fairly comfortable standard of living, more income
brings little, if any, additional happiness." The point
where wealth ceases to imply more happiness is around
$10,000 per caput annually- roughly where Greece,
Portugal and South Korea are today. Therefore, in terms
of psychological pay-off, the benefits of globalisation
go overwhelmingly to the world's lower classes, nations
with a per capita income under $10,000.
Still, he concedes, even in wealthy societies the
really affluent are a bit happier even if there is a per
capita income level beyond which more money brings
"declining utilitarian bang per buck". Even so it raises
the questions if making more money improves happiness
even a bit why doesn't the U.S. collectively get happier
as it gets richer? The answer seems to be that what
gratifies people at this level is not their absolute
income but their ability to point to an improved relative
position- I'm better off than Mr Jones. So in this
situation one man's gain is another man's loss. A
zero-sum game. Compare this with developing countries
where as they become more educated and healthier, have
better nutrition and build, as is usual with economic
progress, a more democratic society more disposed to
respecting human rights, they increase their happiness
without reducing anyone else's.
Of course, in the mad world we live in, fast economic
progress for the poorer nations can at an early stage in
development throw up problems that neutralize some of the
happiness achieved- pollution, crime, abandoned children
and so on. As the already rich nations discovered two
hundred years ago the industrial revolution can be a
cruel business. If societies are sensible -as say South
Korea, Botswana and Taiwan have been and as say Brazil
and Nigeria are not- they will learn some lessons from
the eighteenth century experience of the rich world- most
importantly to favour the development of small farmers,
the education of young girls and the concentration of
resources in the villages not cities.
There is a lot we now know about achieving happiness.
Whether we want to apply it is a political judgement. At
the moment things don't look propitious. George Bush and
his mother might momentarily be about to experience some
brief personal high but neither seems to have a clue
about helping make the world a happier place. Certainly a
tax cut for America's already rich is the wrong place to
start.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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