I have now finished the Layard book, Happiness, Lessons from a New Science. It was a lot less economics-based than I thought it would be. There are some graphs, and a few tables, but no really complicated regression equations, eigen values, r squareds or anything. It's actually very readable - the tone is kindly uncle, somewhere between helpful and patronising (my favourite sentence might well be "The most famous anti depressant is Prozac, which has been taken by millions who suffer from depression, including Princess Diana". No! Actually, I've changed my mind. This is my favourite; "Buddhists, such as the Dalai Lama..". What about Richard Gere?).
The book makes some very imoprtant points, not least that happiness is real and measurable. Scans of the brain show activity in speciific areas (the left hand side in particular) when we are happy. There are reliable questionaires that can help us measure happiness over time and even across countries. The same things - family, finance, community and so on - tend to make people happy. All of which means that happiness cannot be dismissed as an undefinable, wishy washy concept that means unquantifiably many different things to different people. Which is a relief.
A couple of things, then. He frequently repeats two things in the book - firstly, that an additional pound gives more happiness to a poor person than to a rich person. This is fairly standard GCSE economics. Secondly, when it comes to happiness, relative wealth matters more than absolute wealth. If I get a £100 pay rise and you get a £200 pay rise, that makes me unhappy, even though I am by and large quite well adjusted and not running on a cocktail of spite and envy. So, it seems to me that reducing overall inequality via some sort of redistribution would be a valid policy goal. He is never explicit about this, though he does have some kins things to say on redistributive taxation and the potential for taxes to prevent overwork.
Connected but different, is his assertion that money spent on alleviating poverty would be better spent on better mental health. Why should it be one or the other? Poor people are more likely to suffer from mental illness - true across all ages, children , adults and older people - so, wouldn't alleviating poverty reduce the prevalence of mental heatlh problems?
Layard makes a series of policy recommendations (including tackling poverty, though mainly overseas). He steers clear of any redommendations regarding taxes or benefits. I'll do it instead. A more equal society would be a happier one. So we should put up taxes on the highest paid and increase wages and benefits to the poorest. Easy. Next.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
Being Boring
One of the easiest ways to be unhappy is to be bored. I noticed this at the weekend. Overall my interest threshold is very low - it takes very little to get and keep my attention - but when I'm bored I'm miserable. I got bored waiting for people to say goodbye to each other at a gig the other night, and had to leave. So I pulled a proper teen strop and stomped outside by myself, just 'cos I was bored. And if you think about it, a long, dull bus journey is as likely to make you unhappy as, say, dropping your sandwich on the floor or losing a fiver. That unhappy.
Tibor Scitovsky was a Hungarian American economist, and he noticed this in the 1970s. He wrote a book called The Joyless Economy about how people could be rich but not happy. Which kind of means I should just read that book and then we can all go home. Anyway, his argument was that we need interesting, novel experiences to keep us happy. Note: not things, not objects, but times and "pleasures", in his words. The reason for this is that we cannot habituate - get bored with - experiences in the same way as we can, and do, with things.
Which makes me think two things. Firstly, shopping is now double bad. Firstly, it's a boring thing to do, as has been proved decisively in a previous missive, but the end product of shopping is stuff , to which we habituate, and won't ultimately make us any happier.
Secondly, having a hobby would sort all of this out, and there aren't enough hobbies for grown ups. I went to an art gallery at the weekend and looked at a boat that was made of old dressing tables. It was great. Sat around the boat were groups of pre-schoolers, making their own boats from old easter egg and cereal boxes. No way was that boring. But if there's no football on, really, what is there for a grown up to do on Saturday afternoon? It's shopping again, isn't it?
Tibor Scitovsky was a Hungarian American economist, and he noticed this in the 1970s. He wrote a book called The Joyless Economy about how people could be rich but not happy. Which kind of means I should just read that book and then we can all go home. Anyway, his argument was that we need interesting, novel experiences to keep us happy. Note: not things, not objects, but times and "pleasures", in his words. The reason for this is that we cannot habituate - get bored with - experiences in the same way as we can, and do, with things.
Which makes me think two things. Firstly, shopping is now double bad. Firstly, it's a boring thing to do, as has been proved decisively in a previous missive, but the end product of shopping is stuff , to which we habituate, and won't ultimately make us any happier.
Secondly, having a hobby would sort all of this out, and there aren't enough hobbies for grown ups. I went to an art gallery at the weekend and looked at a boat that was made of old dressing tables. It was great. Sat around the boat were groups of pre-schoolers, making their own boats from old easter egg and cereal boxes. No way was that boring. But if there's no football on, really, what is there for a grown up to do on Saturday afternoon? It's shopping again, isn't it?
Monday, April 16, 2007
The Economics of Happiness
Economics is like all social sciences in that it goes through trends and periods of re-evaluation. The current fashion is Happiness economics, where the central question is: how come, if we are so much richer than we were, we are no happier? Well, quite. Seems to me I should really try and find out more about this.
So, I have just ordered a book about the economics of happiness off Amazon. Oh yeah, I really mean this. It's by the esteemed economist Richard Layard, whom I last saw on Newsnight during the hour-long wring of hands that followed the release of the UNICEF report into the wellbeing of children in rich countries, the one that said that children in the UK were the least happy, most distrusting and among the poorest, relatively speaking .
It's always worth knowing a bit more about esteemed economists before reading their books, so I had a look for a biog, trying not to rely on wikipedia. Turns out he's from the LSE, and did a lot of work on things like the New Deal, and other very NewLabour policies. If I was some razor sharp satirist I would insert a joke in here about him directly causing the unhappiness of others, but I'm not so I won't. Instead, it's worth looking at this article , critiquing the whole concept of happiness, by Daniel Ben-Ami, a guy who has a blog with the exceptional title "Ferraris for all". Ferraris for all is his provocative way of saying the only way you can ensure welfare is through economic growth - the only economic aim should be to grow the economy, and this can be counted in percentage increases in GDP, not measures of happiness.
This second blog is interesting because, firstly, he seems to be rather defensive of the fact that he thinks economic growth is the only thing worth aiming for, as if this were a minority view, and not the way the whole capitalist system were set up. Secondly, and this is a bit off topic, he thinks anti corruption is a bad idea . I thought anti-corruption would be one of those causes everyone would agree on, like anti-murder, or pro-a nice sit down. Huh.
So, I have just ordered a book about the economics of happiness off Amazon. Oh yeah, I really mean this. It's by the esteemed economist Richard Layard, whom I last saw on Newsnight during the hour-long wring of hands that followed the release of the UNICEF report into the wellbeing of children in rich countries, the one that said that children in the UK were the least happy, most distrusting and among the poorest, relatively speaking .
It's always worth knowing a bit more about esteemed economists before reading their books, so I had a look for a biog, trying not to rely on wikipedia. Turns out he's from the LSE, and did a lot of work on things like the New Deal, and other very NewLabour policies. If I was some razor sharp satirist I would insert a joke in here about him directly causing the unhappiness of others, but I'm not so I won't. Instead, it's worth looking at this article , critiquing the whole concept of happiness, by Daniel Ben-Ami, a guy who has a blog with the exceptional title "Ferraris for all". Ferraris for all is his provocative way of saying the only way you can ensure welfare is through economic growth - the only economic aim should be to grow the economy, and this can be counted in percentage increases in GDP, not measures of happiness.
This second blog is interesting because, firstly, he seems to be rather defensive of the fact that he thinks economic growth is the only thing worth aiming for, as if this were a minority view, and not the way the whole capitalist system were set up. Secondly, and this is a bit off topic, he thinks anti corruption is a bad idea . I thought anti-corruption would be one of those causes everyone would agree on, like anti-murder, or pro-a nice sit down. Huh.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
For I am not alone
There is a search feature in blogger that lets you look for phrases occuring on anyone's blog anywhere. Unsurprisingly, I used it to look for myself, by typing in the phrase "Why is everyone so unhappy" into the search bar. I was fourth, which was a bit disappointing, seeing as that is the title of my blog. Turns out it searches the text, not the title, so, maybe fourth is decent enough. A Champions' League spot. And I think Number 1 deserves its spot.
Number 1 is an entry from USpolitics.tribe.net , with the intriguing, if not outright hilarious, title "Park Rangers not allowed to state age of Grand Canyon". I think this is funny because Park Rangers make me think of Yogi Bear, and the headline is reminiscent in tone of something the Daily Mail might say ("Now YOU must learn Urdu!", "PC Brigade forces Diwali on our kids", "You can't even call them midgets any more!"), though different in content.
The story itself is one of those you-couldn't-make-it-up-only-in-America ones. The fact that the Grand Canyon has been around for a few million years is problematic to some who believe the earth to only be 12,000 years or so old, people who apparently have enough purchase within the Bush administration to pressure the National Park Service into denying the Canyon's age. And provenance. Apparently it was formed during Noah's flood, not, for instance, by uplift from the Colorado Plateaus, which steepened the gradient of the Colorado River and its tributaries, increasing their speed and ability to erode, further exacerbated by weather conditions during the Ice Age, increasing the amount of water in the drainage system. Two different views. That's all.
So, Why Are People So Unhappy? In this instance, the phrase crops up during the increasingly heated debate below, where an unsuspecting Christian gets a huge heap of opprobrium dumped on him or her in the name of his/ her fellow believers. This poster wonders why "everyone is so unhappy and only happy when bashing someone who is". In this instance, everyone is unhappy because a many-million year long geological process has been rebranded as an act of God by some underling in the pay of the White House. And it is impossible not to notice that there are a lot of unhappy people online....
Number 1 is an entry from USpolitics.tribe.net , with the intriguing, if not outright hilarious, title "Park Rangers not allowed to state age of Grand Canyon". I think this is funny because Park Rangers make me think of Yogi Bear, and the headline is reminiscent in tone of something the Daily Mail might say ("Now YOU must learn Urdu!", "PC Brigade forces Diwali on our kids", "You can't even call them midgets any more!"), though different in content.
The story itself is one of those you-couldn't-make-it-up-only-in-America ones. The fact that the Grand Canyon has been around for a few million years is problematic to some who believe the earth to only be 12,000 years or so old, people who apparently have enough purchase within the Bush administration to pressure the National Park Service into denying the Canyon's age. And provenance. Apparently it was formed during Noah's flood, not, for instance, by uplift from the Colorado Plateaus, which steepened the gradient of the Colorado River and its tributaries, increasing their speed and ability to erode, further exacerbated by weather conditions during the Ice Age, increasing the amount of water in the drainage system. Two different views. That's all.
So, Why Are People So Unhappy? In this instance, the phrase crops up during the increasingly heated debate below, where an unsuspecting Christian gets a huge heap of opprobrium dumped on him or her in the name of his/ her fellow believers. This poster wonders why "everyone is so unhappy and only happy when bashing someone who is". In this instance, everyone is unhappy because a many-million year long geological process has been rebranded as an act of God by some underling in the pay of the White House. And it is impossible not to notice that there are a lot of unhappy people online....
Monday, April 02, 2007
A history lesson
Implied but unspoken in the title to the blog are the words "these days". The central hypothesis is that we are unhappy now, and more unhappy than we used to be. So it was interesting to read this article in the Guardian today.
I'm probably not the only person who looks at the mental health of the nation(s) and looks for a recent cause - post industrial decline, consumerism, collapse of the family etc and so on. This article offers some history, going back to the Enlightenment and even earlier. As with the Adam Curtis doc, I love grand sweeping ideas, so I loved much of this article.
We go back to the 16th and 17th Centuries and "an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous "I", separate from, and largely distrustful of, "them"". With this came the sense of isolation and loneliness, and the realisation that "reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". So we see the seeds of existentialism. This led to an epidemic of depression, then given the somehow more comforting name of melancholy, accounting for "one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England".
I'm always looking for a socio, poliical but especailly economic explanation for these things, and was drawn in particular to the author's observation that this increasing sense of indiviualism came as a result of increasing soical mobility. A person's place in life was no longer ordained from birth, and with this opportunity to advance came the concern of how other people perceived you. Mirrors became popular in the homes of the bourgeosie, books were published on how to behave like someone of a higher stature. There were ways to behave, and anxieties about how to do so.
The whole point of the piece was that, in the middle ages, there were dances, festivities, feast and merry meetings which would leave people "refreshed & comforted" and "gladded with instruments of musick". These rituals were religious in nature, designed to please god, but the spread of Calvinism in the 16th and 17th Century changed their nature and threatened their existence. Calvinism is fundametally depressing in any case, full of references to man as a wretched, fallen creature and the usual stuff about damnation. Po faced and austere, it did not accommodate the kind of drunken, loud and hugely fun celebrations that would glad with instruments of musick, and so they died away. With them, argues the author, died the very thing that would help alleviate the increasing mellancholy of the time. And of course we cannot help but see the echoes today, as people get unhappy when they can't get tickets to Glasonbury .
I'm probably not the only person who looks at the mental health of the nation(s) and looks for a recent cause - post industrial decline, consumerism, collapse of the family etc and so on. This article offers some history, going back to the Enlightenment and even earlier. As with the Adam Curtis doc, I love grand sweeping ideas, so I loved much of this article.
We go back to the 16th and 17th Centuries and "an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous "I", separate from, and largely distrustful of, "them"". With this came the sense of isolation and loneliness, and the realisation that "reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". So we see the seeds of existentialism. This led to an epidemic of depression, then given the somehow more comforting name of melancholy, accounting for "one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England".
I'm always looking for a socio, poliical but especailly economic explanation for these things, and was drawn in particular to the author's observation that this increasing sense of indiviualism came as a result of increasing soical mobility. A person's place in life was no longer ordained from birth, and with this opportunity to advance came the concern of how other people perceived you. Mirrors became popular in the homes of the bourgeosie, books were published on how to behave like someone of a higher stature. There were ways to behave, and anxieties about how to do so.
The whole point of the piece was that, in the middle ages, there were dances, festivities, feast and merry meetings which would leave people "refreshed & comforted" and "gladded with instruments of musick". These rituals were religious in nature, designed to please god, but the spread of Calvinism in the 16th and 17th Century changed their nature and threatened their existence. Calvinism is fundametally depressing in any case, full of references to man as a wretched, fallen creature and the usual stuff about damnation. Po faced and austere, it did not accommodate the kind of drunken, loud and hugely fun celebrations that would glad with instruments of musick, and so they died away. With them, argues the author, died the very thing that would help alleviate the increasing mellancholy of the time. And of course we cannot help but see the echoes today, as people get unhappy when they can't get tickets to Glasonbury .
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