The Pursuit of Happiness

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Wealth, Health, Peace and Harmony

By Jeffrey S. Young

For most of us, some combination of personal and professional prosperity, the elements of which change over time, is at the heart of the happiness we all seek.

The Greek philosophers were obsessed with trying to understand the nature of happiness. Socrates, his disciple Plato, and Aristotle all tried to make sense of it. Essentially, they concluded that happiness arose from a combination of personal virtue and knowledge directed to the ultimate good for society at large.

Aristotle took the idea further, rejecting wealth, honor or power as the basis for happiness. In his view, character (courage, honesty, pride, friendliness, wittiness), in concert with intellectual strength, friendships and scientific knowledge, created the components of happiness — the highest plane a citizen could reach.

How does that ideal hold up in a world in which an obsession with material goods is urged on by an information culture dedicated to making us desire even more? Is prosperity really all about wealth?

Show Me the Happy??
Almost certainly not, although having enough money is clearly a baseline requirement for prosperity. But something curious has happened in the world’s most advanced economies during the past 50 years. Although standards of living and average incomes have skyrocketed, rough qualitative measurements of happiness haven’t changed.

Each year since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago has asked a cross section of Americans the same 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 result? Scarcely any variation in the distribution of answers (20 percent “very happy,” 50 percent “pretty happy,” 30 percent “not too happy”) even as inflation-adjusted average income has risen by more than 30 percent since 1972. The conclusion? Money alone isn’t the main reason people feel happy.

How about good health? Once upon a time, achieving prosperity arguably could mean simply making it to adulthood. Childhood diseases, hunger or plain bad luck were the elements befalling most of the population at an early age.

Then along came Lister, Pasteur, Salk and Fleming. Smallpox was contained, food was pasteurized, polio was eradicated, and penicillin fought off most bacterial infections. Suddenly, lots of children survived, as did their parents. At the same time, technology transformed American agriculture, and, by the middle of the 20th century, nutritional availability skyrocketed. Life expectancies shot up from under 50 years in the mid-19th century to more than 70 years today.

There is even a happiness-related component to good health. Research studies of subjects exposed to cold viruses show that those who reported being happier were less likely to come down with a cold and recovered faster. In another study, wounds healed faster for those who were more satisfied with their lives.

You would expect people to be much happier absent the need to fight deadly illnesses, the availability of plenty of food, and an avalanche of modern technologies such as cars, air conditioning, cell phones and jet travel. So, in this modern world, we should ?be fighting off colds, healing faster, and getting happier and happier, right?

Wrong. Rising dissatisfaction seems to be part of the human condition. For example, the Gallup Organization annually surveyed 15,000 Chinese between 1994 and 2005 to determine their levels of satisfaction. During a period when income rose by two and a half times, color TV ownership increased from 40 percent of households to 82 percent, and telephone penetration leapt from 10 percent to more than 63 percent of homes, dissatisfaction rose significantly. It nearly doubled in the 10 years of the study; from just over 20 percent of Chinese in 1994 to more than 40 percent reporting being dissatisfied in 2005.

So what is the answer? Where is our Shangri-La, a place akin to that mythic kingdom in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” where all can realize Star Trek’s Mr. Spock’s benediction to “live long, and prosper”?

Between Tibet and India is a tiny country that might be able to lay claim to the title. Bhutan, a mountainous monarchy about half the size of Indiana, is home to 2.5 million people. In 1972, the king decided he was not going to get caught up in the economic woes of other developing countries that he believed were being exacerbated by organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Consumption v. Well-Being
The king opted out of the standard economic yardsticks and developed a measurement that he and his viziers called Gross National Happiness, or GNH, instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Framed by precepts of its national religion, Tibetan Buddhism, GNH measures human well-being in broader terms than material possessions; it also attempts to quantify being at peace with the environment and living in harmony with others, and defines economic well-being in terms of the relative success of all of society, not on an individual’s net worth.

The ideas have taken hold deeply in Bhutan. In a recent New York Times article, a senior official in the Ministry of Education, Thakur S. Powdyel, explained the heart of the philosophy: “The goal of life should not be limited to production, consumption, more production and more consumption. There is no necessary relationship between the level of possession and the level of well-being.”

The empirical evidence supports that view, and on many external measures Bhutan has made significant progress since the 1970s. Universal education and healthcare are available, more than 60 percent of the nation’s land has been set aside as permanent forest, and the average life expectancy has increased by 19 years since 1984, to 66 today. On the other hand, the nation is no pure Shangri-La; a few years ago, it forced tens of thousands of Nepalese to emigrate in a peaceful — but no less disruptive — form of ethnic cleansing. GNH may not guarantee an entirely enlightened culture.

GWB Not GDP
But the Bhutanese are on to something. Recently, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, David Cameron, suggested that General Well-Being (GWB) is a better measure of humankind than GDP. “Well-being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets,” he says. “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 well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.”

So maybe there is something universal about happiness and prosperity in the 21st century. One could do worse than to calibrate a life by everyone’s material well-being, environmental balance and harmony with others. Whether that can be quantified is a matter for the economists to debate.

Or maybe it is all much simpler. In a series of experiments in the 1980s, a social scientist found that when subjects doing a survey on life satisfaction were told to copy the survey form and found a dime on the copier before filling the form out, they reported much higher life satisfaction levels. He also found much higher satisfaction on days when the weather was good.

A sunny day, a coin on the pavement, and my happiness meter pegs. I don’t need Aristotle to explain it to me. I know prosperity when I feel it, and so do all the people in this special issue of Prosper.

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