For most people, having more money really does promote well-being - just not the privileged few who go to Yale

Who goes to Yale? I'm sure the official answer will be to say 'anybody' and them bombard you with diversity statistics and explanations as to how, despite sky high fees, America's third oldest college is ticky-boo when it comes to who goes there. The truth is that most of the people at the college are the children of wealthy and successful parents (and all of them pretty much are on track to be wealthy and successful).

Which makes what is dubbed "Yale's most popular course" something of a joke - at least to some kid in a mid-west town doing a minimum wage job:

When I asked Santos what she thought of the studies, she replied, “They’re important, but I don’t think they change the message of the class, which is that high wealth has a teeny effect on happiness. The key is that it’s way less than what we predict, and it’s a lot less effective than the other practices we suggest. ”

Practices like meditation, gratitude and making time for social connections have the biggest effect on our well-being, she says, adding that they’re much easier to attain than trying to bump past the $10 million mark.

Yes folks, Yale's most popular course is one telling rich kids not to be too rich (or rather that being more rich wont make you more happy). Note here how the woman running the course - Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology and cognitive science - frames the discussion: "...trying to bump passed the $10 million mark." If you're sat in a dingy flat wondering how you'll raise the cash to pay the rent and keep yourself fed, this course isn't for you now is it!

This is because the premise of the course is that you'll have plenty of money to spend on those things up near the pointy bit of Maslow's famous triangle - all that lovely mindful self-actualisation and what-have-you. For millions of people, this is pretty much a dream - it's not that they haven't got money, more that there's never a point when "can I pay the mortgage" or "I hope something doesn't break this month" aren't at the back of their mind.

There's nothing new in the idea that money can't buy you happiness (although one wag did say that, if you're going to be unhappy it's better to be unhappy with a million dollars). It's also true that, if meditation, gratitude and social engagement are the route to that happiness, being able to afford the time away from trying to keep body and soul together is pretty useful. What Santos is actually saying to wealthy people is 'invest your time on things that aren't about making money' - great advice so long as you've got the money and can free the time.

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We're all going on a soma holiday. On the teaching of happiness.

"you do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma."

Many years ago I sang in a folk choir at church (I'm guessing that any last vestiges of my street credibility are now gone). One of our standards was a song called "The Happy Song" - it's lyrics were along these lines:

People ask why I sound so happy
And why I always sing a happy tune
It's only happy songs they hear in heaven
I'm singing so that God can hear me too

And so on in that vein all to one of those annoyingly cheery and catchy tunes essential to modern hymns (or 'Praise Songs' as I believe they're known now). The whole message of the song - and I can't vouch for the theology here - is that God wants us to be happy so dammit we're going to be happy by singing this song.

In the years since I was last caught singing "The Happy Song" the world's attitude to happiness has evolved into something of an industry. We have Bhutan's 'gross national happiness' (unless of course you smoke or happen to be from the Nepali minority). We had the flirtation of David Cameron with happiness measures as an alternative to dull old 'gross domestic product'. And we have a whole area of pretty dodgy academic study into 'happiness' led by former New Labour cheerleader, Lord Layard.

Now Lord Layard has teamed up with everyone's favourite health fascist, Lord Darzi to publish a really important study and to call for every child in the world to be taught how to be happy.

Children of all ages should be given an hour’s “happiness lessons” every week to nurture their development and stop schools behaving as “exams factories,” a major report will warn this week.

Indeed the good Lords argue that this sort of teaching must be given "the same attention as reading and writing". Indeed, the Lords say, our schools, far from being the happy and smiling places they should be, have become stress-filled exam factories full of children in need of counselling. So therefore we should teach children a set of approved 'lifeskills' and have counsellors on tap in case little Johnny or Mary get a bit sad.

The problem with this (and the term "well-rounded" is thrown around here) is two-fold. Firstly, we don't send children to school to spend an hour-a-week "discussing their emotions, setting positive life goals, and learning how to cope with everyday pressures and social media". And secondly - as teacher and education writer Tom Bennett has observed - one of the lifeskills that children need to learn is that some stuff is very hard and pretty stressful:

The business of education intrinsically requires many actions that are, dare I breathe it, difficult. Learning is hard work; better learning is often very hard work indeed. Nobody became a Professor of Electronics by playing the Xbox. There are often fun ways of learning, and if you’re good at your job, you’ll be good at implementing them. But there is often the point where you concede, willingly, that in order to get anything done, then elbow grease must be applied. 

Rather than making clear that learning how to do arithmetic and geometry is both essential and hard, we allow children to believe that there's a cop out - "I'm excused your hard maths lesson sir, my counsellor says it's too stressful for me".

Imagine a world where a vaguely defined happiness is deemed to be the primary aim. Not the rollercoaster, football supporter sort of happiness - ecstasy at Adrian's penalty to defeat Everton in the cup is replaced with a deep and abiding gloom at the team's abject surrender to West Brom. Rather it's a soma sort of happiness - a lowest common denominator contentment:

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” 

It is a misplaced idea that human children lack the strength to deal with the stress of taking examinations and the expectations of family, friends and society in general. This is not to say that some children really do struggle with the pressure but to observe that, of the 700,000 or so young people who take GCSEs each year, only a handful really need help.

Instead of focusing on identifying the child with a problem, what Layard and Darzi propose is a vague sort of new age version of sitting in a circle of hands singing Kum Ba Yah.

...schools must address the emotional and spiritual needs of their children, as well as their intellectual development...

The effect of all this isn't to make for stronger adults or a better society but rather is to gentle young people - in one respect in the original meaning of the word:  "touch (a person or animal) gently, typically in order to make them calmer or more docile". But it might also be in the brutal manner of Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time':

When a man is severed it is referred to as gentling. This term came about sometime after the Age of Legends and reflects the view that male channelers are like wild animals (due to their eventual madness) that must be controlled.

The world that Layard and Darzi want is a place where risk is eliminated, where challenge and assertiveness are sins, and where (and I'm grateful to Andy Bower on Twitter for this) narcissism and introspection are seen as essential 'life skills'. This sort of society is one where a benign, motherly state holds contented citizens to her bountiful bosom, where those citizens are discouraged - even forbidden - from doing things that might result in hurt or upset, and where the greatest achievement is a contented nothingness, a sort of perpetual infanthood.

This is the world of prizes for all, of dumbed down exams everyone passes, where games don't have winners and in which people look to the state's supposed bounty before their own enterprise. It's a world of citizen's income where folk can live out their lives as supine drones contributing nothing except the contented humming of "The Happy Song". It is a profoundly depressing prospect, a world where edge, excitement, speed, risk and challenge are frowned on - where they're not actually banned.

The object of government isn't to smooth and still everything so no-one is ever unhappy but rather to create the circumstances where we can, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, engage in the 'pursuit of happiness'. If my happiness and pleasure comes from things that are risky that's my business. If I choose to do something hard, dull and stressful because of the happiness it will bring me in the future, again that is my business. But it is no business of government to, in effect, declare some things too stressful, too hard. Nor is it the business of government to pretend that a successful life can be conducted without risk, stress and difficulty because that is quite simply a lie.

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Jeffrey Sachs' idea of happiness presumably doesn't extend to refugees or smokers

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Jeffrey Sachs, that doyen of slightly pink economists, has been on about happiness and how we shouldn't be using GNP or GDP as our guide. I have two issues with this argument of his - the first is about where he chooses as the guide to 'gross national happiness':

Dozens of experts recently gathered in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, to take stock of the country’s record. I was co-host with Bhutan’s prime minister, Jigme Thinley, a leader in sustainable development and a great champion of the concept of “GNH.” We assembled in the wake of a declaration in July by the United Nations General Assembly calling on countries to examine how national policies can promote happiness in their societies.

Yep folks that's Bhutan that Jeffrey Sachs is promoting. And its a fine place so long as you're not from the country's Nepalese minority:

By the 1980s, Bhutan's minority population of Nepali-speaking people, most of which live in the south, had grown to represent around 45 percent of Bhutan’s 600,000 people, causing then-King Jigme Singye Wangchuck to start a "one nation, one people" policy to evict, deport and strip many of their Bhutanese citizenship.


The campaign ended with the expulsion of more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking people through beatings, torture and murder committed by the Royal Bhutan Army that lasted until the late 1990s, human rights groups and evictees say.

Most of those evicted are now living inside refugee camps in Nepal. For nearly two decades, refugees have lived in huts made from bamboo and plastic. They receive rations, but many are malnourished. Despite repeated appeals for repatriation, these refugees have been denied.

That's right, Mr Sachs - Bhutan is an avowedly racist country.  Where of course, they lock up smokers:

A monk in Bhutan has become the first person jailed under the country's draconian anti-smoking law after a court handed him a three-year prison sentence for smuggling tobacco worth $2.50.

Sonam Tshering was arrested in January carrying 48 packets of chewing tobacco worth 120 Bhutanese ngultrums, which he said he had bought in India before travelling back home to the Himalayan kingdom.

Which of course brings us to advertising and Mr Sachs' ignorance:

Mass advertising is contributing to many other consumer addictions that imply large public-health costs, including excessive TV watching, gambling, drug use, cigarette smoking, and alcoholism.

That's right, dear reader. We are coerced by evil "mass advertisers" into all these sins, we have no choice as their pernicious corporate messages drip into our sub-conscience meaning that when we see the fat-laden food, or the invite to the lottery, or the TV switch, we act as if automatons reaching out and ruining our lives. Mr Sachs, this is utter tripe barely worthy of response and is a conflation - nay, a perfect storm, of New Puritan obsessions.

Advertising simply doesn't do that. As a marketing professional I would love the secret, magical little ingredient that these promoters of sin have available (at least in Mr Sachs' distorted world). it doesn't exist. People smoke, drink and eat calorie-laden snacks because they like them - this consumption makes them happy. When Mr Sachs' pals in Bhutan locked up that monk for having a little chewing tobacco for his personal use, in what precise way did that enhance the nations gross national happiness?

The world Mr Sachs wishes to promote is a judging, controlling, directed world where nanny knows best and where it's OK to take away my pleasures because others might abuse those pleasures. Where it's right to remove free speech from commercial organisations. One that models itself on an obsessive dictatorship in the Himalayas.

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You WILL be happy - we will make you so!

The more I read about this obsession with “happiness” the more it sounds like some sort of hippy cult. Here’s the founder (or one of them) of “Action for Happiness”, which describes itself as a movement of people committed to building a happier society:

Lord Richard Layard, co-founder of Action for Happiness, said: ‘Our movement is based on a simple idea – if we want a happier society, individuals have got to create more happiness in the world around them. We want millions of people around the world to form Action for Happiness groups to do just that – using the tools which we are able to provide. This is a movement for radical cultural change which can provide the basis for a better culture in the 21st century.’

Now I’m in favour of smiles, hugs and cheering each other up – but forming some kind of “movement” to promote happiness is just creepy. And – if the state gets involved – quite scary. Welcome to our nascent Brave new World!

Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get.

Some people seem to want a world with no tears, no anger, no edge, no grit in the shoe. It would be a dead world.

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"Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?"

So we’re back to pursuing happiness – or rather to the government’s appointed counters of stuff asking us questions about our state of happiness.

"Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?" We learned this week that that is one of four new questions being inserted into the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Household Survey as the UK's official number crunchers try to assess the well-being of the nation.

The purpose of this exercise is not to get Britain thinking happy thoughts as the axe falls: the determination to measure well-being pre-dates both the coalition and the age of austerity. The real point is to find a better way of measuring social progress than simply how much stuff we have got.

Or that’s what the BBC says about the measurement of happiness – apparently increased material well-being doesn’t make us any happier. We may be a whole load richer, healthier and less stressed than our forebears. We may have things to make our lives better even than the richest 1950s plutocrat. But, as the song goes:

I can't get no satisfaction,
I can't get no satisfaction.
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
I can't get no, I can't get no.

However, our government wants to know just how dissatisfied – how pissed off and grumpy we are – so as to...well, I guess try to make us happier? And perhaps it will be like this:

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand." (Huxley, ‘Brave New World’ Ch16)

Of course, for Huxley’s dystopic paradise happiness and stability came at a price – liberty. And a dulling of life’s edge:

“You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get."

Get the drift? The Government wishes to measure something called “social progress” – which is measured not through “citius, altius, fortius” but through contentment, mere satisfaction.

...governments could be judged by how happy they make us.

An adviser to the Prime Minister*, David Halpern, told us that within the next 10 years the government would be measured against how happy it made everybody.

*Note this was an advisor to Mr Blair

And how do you make people content? By removing risk, by creating stability and by providing pane et circenses – bread and circuses. Independence of thought, the challenging of norms, questioning life’s sacred cows – these things do not make us happy. And worse, by undermining our neighbour’s contentment they run counter to the cause of well-being.

Government has no responsibility or duty or right to ask me as to my happiness – that is my bother and worry. What is worse though is that Mr Cameron’s happy world contains a brutal attack on my pleasures and the pleasures of my friends:

But he said the government also had to focus on the long-term and he said "the country would be better off if we thought about well-being as well as economic growth".

GDP was too "crude" a measure of progress as it failed to take into account wider social factors - he cited the example of "irresponsible" marketing to children, an immigration "free for all" and a "cheap booze free for all", which had all boosted economic growth at the expense of social problems.

Measuring happiness becomes an instrument of social control – intervening in the choices of parents, ripping cans of lager from the clutches of 19-year-old skinheads and make poorly old women stand out in the rain and cold to have a fag. The message is that clever people with clipboards, spreadsheets and fancy formulae know better how to make us content, how to create the stability of a dead society.

I do not wish for the deadening stability of a content society. A society so content is loses creativity, spark, has all the fight removed – not through aggression but through a hideous, soft blanket of comforting social drugs. A place where nothing’s our fault, where child-rearing is the state’s role, where our governors consider our silence to be satisfaction – and where happiness, the goal of government, is purchased with banal, dumbed-down events and the drug of conformity.

“Overall, yesterday...I was grumpy!”

Happy Days!

Until a couple of days ago I was happy.

Happy in the knowledge that my Government intended to base its policy prescriptions on an objective assessment of the economy, the environment and social circumstances. Assessments that – while open to challenge – have the merit of being about tangible things like money, jobs, pollution and illness.

But now it seems – in a fit of nonsense – my Government has decided that all these carefully set, often sophisticated measures are not the thing. Instead we’re going to base policy decisions on measuring happiness. And we’re going to base that measurement on a clever appraisal of behavioural indicators, psychometric models and statisical analysis?

Er…no. We’re just going to ask people how happy they are. Four times a year.

That’s it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m largely in favour of happiness – or at least its pusuit. But I wonder about the objectivity of happiness measures for a load of different reasons – some philosophical, some moral and some operational.

I guess we should start with the philosophical and moral questions – what is happiness. OK so I know some of those clever psychologists think that happiness is a physiological state and therefore nothing to do with philosophy, let alone metaphysics.

Scientists have observed common physical side effects of happiness. From brain waves, to hormone levels, to heart rate and blood pressure, happiness carries markers in the body.

But note that these are “physical side effects” – all the clever psychologists can tell you is that when you’re happy we can detect these side effects. That doesn’t begin to tell us what we mean by happiness.

The concept of happiness – and its importance can be traced back to Plato:

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself and not upon other men has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderstion, of manly character and of wisdom

Plato saw well-being as a central element in society and more significantly that happiness is a consequence of justice and that it was not the result of hedonistic indulgence. Thus:

The descriptions of the pleasure seeking nature of democratic individuals and the just man, who pursues a balanced and harmonious lifestyle, not surrendering himself to ‘savage and unreasoning pleasure’ show that Plato’s view was that pursuit of happiness and pleasure for its own sake leads only to injustice and enslavement.

It seems to me that this rejection of pleasure as a source of well-being is reflected in the proposals we now see to measure happiness. And therefore, that this happiness cannot be addressed through panem et circenses but must be addressed through the superior class putting in place laws, systems and measures that promote well-being. This might be expressed in the manner of Bentham and Mill:

Yet it may still in the end be the case that his (Bentham’s) most persistent and consistent concerns lay neither in ethics nor in politics but in government. He believed that efficiency, order, rationality, system, when developed and sustained in the business of government, administration and judicature, would produce better societies for human beings to live in.

Thus the pursuit of happiness was, for these utilitarians, a matter for government rather than for the individual. The purpose of government is “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” whether they like it or not. This is the type of government that sees the banning of minority interests to serve a perceived wider interest as just.

The idea of government endorsed happiness is an elitist and deeply reactionary concept that derives from an authoritarian conception of government’s purpose.

Which rather brings us – my apologies for this being at something of a canter – to the modern day idea of ‘well-being’ or happiness. And we find that modern proponents of ‘happiness economics’ remain at heart utilitarian. Here’s Richard Layard:

The need is pretty obvious, but one fact makes it absolutely essential. People in the West have got no happier in the last 50 years. They have become much richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier.

Note that we're not told we are less happy - merely that progress is pointless as it does not make us more happy. Because of this Prof. Layard and others argue that the entire basis of our policy-making must be changed. Away from the enlightenment settlement – the idea of human progress through adventure – to an earlier idea of stabilily. An idea more akin to the work of Hobbes (and indeed back to Plato’s ‘guardians’) where we see that submission to authority is a prerequisite of ‘contentment’. We know our place in the order of things.

So much for the philosophical and moral questions although I find the appeal to authority implicit in Layard’s work somewhat disheartening – even, dare I say it, depressing – we should not be surprised that successive governments under the leadership of Britain’s ‘guardian’ class are attracted by the idea of directing the happiness of hoi poloi. Suffice it to say that the concept derives from authoritarian approaches to rule rather than to the idea of liberty and human progress. A concept I find to be without moral justice.

Indeed, the happiness beloved of the utilitarians, Hobbesians and modern day Platonists isn't the excitement of achivement - the joy of 'Eureka' - but the contentment of a gentle boat ride down the river. The aim is too eliminate stress and promote a form of benign comfort - a slippers and comfy chair kind of world. There is no room for 'grit in the shoe', for the little irritations that drive innovation. We must accept our place, be content with our lot.

These gurus of happiness do not want anger, challenge, debate and annoyance as these things are stressful - they undermine 'well-being'. We are to be gentled - made docile by our masters' policies. Resistance will be punished to serve the 'happiness' of fifty plus one. And it sounds so pleasant, so lulling:

"Wellbeing can't be measured by money or traded in markets. It's about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times."

I think, Mr Cameron, you should have stopped after the first four words in that statement!

Happiness doesn't seem to relate directly to anything that public policy actions address. We could argue just as much that the relentless increase in taxation and state control is driving unhappiness as we can that it is misdirected economic policy. In truth:

"...happiness research cannot be used to justify government intervention in the way its proponents suggest. Those who would wish governments to take into account measures of wellbeing when setting policy often point to the fact that increases in income have not lead to increases in measured happiness, and thus governments should concentrate on redistribution and improving the quality of life, rather than on allowing people to benefit from economic growth. In fact, measured happiness does not appear to be related to public spending, violent crime, property crime, sexual equality, disability, life expectancy or unemployment either. The stark fact is that the difficulties in measuring society's happiness are insurmountable, and policymakers should not claim that they can control and increase happiness through public policy decisions."

My concern, more than anything else, is that 'gross national happiness' will prove to be a justification for more rules, more controls and more intervention in our lives. All for the greater good, you understand. Another excuse for those ever more forceful nudges.

And at the end of it?

We won't be any happier.

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Free beer...(a thought on happiness)

So we are to be measured for happiness! Bring out the glasses. Crack open the bottles. Line up the cigars.

...the government will be giving us free beer!

(well it would make me happy)

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Smiling through gritted teeth....

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Sometimes a piece of writing just catches my personal zeitgeist (if there is such a beast). And this piece from that smiling old grump Phil Kirby does just that - glance at this quick excerpt then go read the whole piece:

Happiness, I want to argue, is not an unalloyed good, a condition we should all naturally wish to aim and aspire towards. No matter what all the self help books would like you to believe, happiness is not all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, happy people are bad, boring and barmy.

Go enjoy but don't smile too much!

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